tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84819938691142115522024-03-08T11:31:14.860-08:00Politics from ElflandChris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-25539478270146777102018-11-04T05:55:00.002-08:002018-11-04T05:55:54.061-08:00Rediscovering MasculinityWe hear so often about toxic masculinity This is a post about things I have learned about being a man as I walk through life. Because I believe that gender roles usually evolve in complementary ways some things may seem misogynistic or misandrist here. However these two go together, tame each other, and in my view masculine and feminine are intertwined and cross-defined. And from our vices are built our virtues.<br />
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So keep in mind nothing here is negative about either gender. The base natures of both are rough, dangerous, corrosive, and vicious, but good people turn vice into virtue. Things may seem negative but in the end what is negative becomes positive over time given the right direction and structure, just as greed can become the basis for either avarice or industriousness.<br />
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I will also say that a lot of masculinity and femininity are cultural constructs that arise through necessity. They are products of history and necessity, due to the fact that men and women are differently situated in relation to having and raising children.<br />
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Historically in agrarian, non-industrialized times, men and women both worked but the work was different. Men's work was far more solitary. Men would be plowing the fields alone. Women would get together to beat flax, spin, weave. Gossip, scheming, and meddling have always been the way women have asserted power. Similarly domestic power meant power over economic production, domestic power was worth a lot more than today.<br />
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<h4>
In Relation to Women</h4>
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In more traditional societies, identity is relational and productive. We are our connections to other people and we are our works and our deeds. Masculinity is thus tied to being a husband, a son, a father, a friend, perhaps a soldier or a craftsman, or a farmer. Femininity is tied to being a mother, a daughter, a wife, also possibly a craftsman (it's worth noting that -man was a gender-neutral suffix in Old English and hence it survives at the end of "woman"). A man might plow the fields, but a woman might make cloth. A man might be a father and a woman a mother. A man might be a tavernkeeper, and a woman might be a beer-brewer. Both might be shopkeepers. However in the interest of family business, both would work together, producing a family business, and having and raising children would be integrated into the family business.<br />
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In this environment, then, most cultures end up with a dichotomy in power and responsibility. Women's power is officially local and private but in practice collectively exercised and orchestrated through social connections, gatherings, and so forth. Women typically controlled power not only over house and home but also, critically, over the space where business was actually carried out. In essence women formed the family and the family business, and effectively ordered it on a day-to-day level. Major personality assets associated to women were sensibility, practicality, industriousness, and so forth.<br />
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On the other hand, men's power was traditionally public and diplomatic. The man was the public face of the household, and the individual responsible for going out into the world and defending the interest of the family and family business. A man had a responsibility to defend the family honor and in particular the honor of his wife, his mother, and his sisters and to conduct business in a way that edified the family. Major personality assets associated with men were constancy, loyalty, steadfastness, and an ability to keep promises.<br />
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A woman forms the family, and a man's honor encapsulated and shields the family from harm, as well as goes out and helps ensure that the family business thrives through conducting public business. A man is his word.<br />
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A simple way to phrase this is that the woman is queen of house, of home, of business, and her husband is her emissary. The business deals then constrain and provide stability around which practicality can take hold.<br />
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<h4>
In Relation to other Men</h4>
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The public, contractual space where men traditionally operated is effectively an interfamily space where deals are formalized or where collective community action took place (for example warfare or public councils). In these areas the man's role is to defend the interests of his family vis a vis other men and other families. Hierarchies are more simple and less fluid, and honor goes a lot further. To a large extent, men's relationships with other men are secondary to their relationships with women.<br />
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<h4>
What We are Losing regarding Identity</h4>
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Where we no longer see identity as relational and productive, identity becomes a purely internal, fluid state with little inherent meaning or stability. The ability of men to stand up, make deals for the family and represent the family in public life is eroded. Much of that erosion is due to women no longer having leading roles in family businesses or collectively working out political issues before men get to it through gossip etc. but much more is due to the loss of the sense of place in relation to other people, to women, and to what we make.</div>
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Recapturing this identity is one of the more important tasks of our time.</div>
Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-42530781377925655772016-09-06T12:36:00.001-07:002016-09-06T12:36:29.952-07:00My view on the AFA/Troth feudBefore I start this piece I have to say I know good people in both organizations. Nothing I say here is a judgement of my friends. I also have friends who are Heathen, liberal and universalist, while I consider myself Folkish.<br />
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Heathens of course have always sought blood feuds to defend their honor. This time is perhaps no difference. I will give the Troth the benefit of the doubt and assume that what really bothers them is that statements by the AFA could be taken out of context by a wider society and bring dishonor on all Heathenry. Maybe the organization is deserving of this and maybe it is not (in which case it is reading another group through a lens of a view of how all groups should act). If the shoe fits wear it, but for the rest of this I will give the Troth every benefit I can including that one.<br />
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However, one serious concern I have is with ideological and political litmus tests for membership in any organization, particularly communities where we should be, in my humble opinion, trying to cultivate shared economic and social interests and a joint search for the past. Ideological and political litmus tests effectively shut down the search and risk libeling the ancestors and the past. In the end, Heathenry is orthoprax, and while it is clearly political in that to some degree it is a revolt against the modern notion of progress, that degree varies quite a bit both by organization and by member. The Troth is, as far as I can tell, committed to being <i>non-radical, non-revolutionary, pro-progressive-Protestant values, and modernist</i> while the AFA is committed to an attempt to cultivating a radical alternative to progressive Protestant values in a relationship with the past. As pioneers, they will make mistakes and it will be up to all of us that believe in that to take it further.<br />
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My wife is not European or white. My kids are of mixed heritage. But my wife is closer to the women of the Sagas in action than most modern Asatruar are (if I ever fail to defend the family honor, the gods themselves will be unable to lend a hand to help), and I have learned a whole lot about our tradition through my marriage. I have known many people in the AFA who know this about me. Not *one* of them has ever issued a harsh or disparaging word or racist comment to me about this or about my Jewish heritage (I cannot say this about a number of other Heathen organizations not in this picture however). Members of the AFA that I have known have been, without fail, unquestionably supportive of my search for the past and the wisdom I have gained. None have been the least bit disrespectful of my family for any reason.<br />
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While members of the Troth have not explicitly been disrespectful, the fact that politically it is centered on a view of social progress and equality that comes out of early modern Europe and which white countries seek to push on the rest of the world is implicitly quite disrespectful. Of course that view of equality is usually a cover for centralized governments and corporate economies, which is lost on most Americans today, so they can be pardoned for not grasping the depths of their paternalistic racism on this regard. Concepts like gender roles, sexuality, and marriage are deeply cultural and any organization which thinks that culture should be abandoned so lightly aids and abets the racist imperialism of the West over the rest of the word.<br />
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<h4>
My view on gender roles</h4>
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Unlike McNallen I think that gender roles are socially constructed. It would be impossible for these to be gifts of our ancestors if they were not. But if we value culture as valuable, then social constructs given by our ancestors are valuable too and we throw them away with great cost. Gender roles are also constructed due to biological and social imperatives and so, although they form a greater part of the warp and weft of society, they are not merely discretionary. Men and women are not situated in the same way regarding reproduction and gender roles arise to address that.<br />
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Whether this can be said to be divinely ordained depends on what one believes the role of the gods in shaping the body and reproduction is. I would just as soon leave that up to the practitioner.<br />
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<h4>
My view on the queer statement</h4>
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I think Flavel's concern about outside agendas being forced on the community is valid, but I think the focus on a specific label is problematic because it closes off things ideologically rather than relationally. The problem is not how a particular person sees himself or herself, or how he or she sees sexuality, but how the individual might insist that the community change to accommodate him or her. That, in my view, is the line that should be drawn, not on the basis of a specific identity or way of making sense of things.<br />
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In every community there is an ideal of the good life. In a traditional family-business economy that includes getting married, having kids who can take over your trade or business, and eventually retiring with those children. That will be the normative (and normal) model.<br />
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But not everyone will follow such a model. And those that don't are in a position to offer critique. That critique is not just when it is a demand that everyone else, say, sacrifice human contact in retirement so nobody gets ahead. But what it is made of is up to the community.<br /><br />This question of how the liminal figures on the margins of the community interact with the rest is an important question. It implicates guests of a kindred (and by extension views on refugees etc in the political realm), those who for whatever reason do not fit into the community's view of best family models, etc.<br />
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<h4>
In summary</h4>
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I find myself far more sympathetic to the AFA than their critics in this regard. I have seen no reason to see the AFA from my experience as a racist organization. I am sure they have their racists, but I would rather tolerate racists than kick out others just for being outside of a political orthodoxy, and the fact is that every organization (heathen or not) has its racists.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-18469074373961471612016-09-04T19:55:00.003-07:002016-09-04T19:55:39.035-07:00A quick response to McNallen's "No More Mutts"Steve McNallen at the AFA has put together a piece where he argues that Americans whose ancestors are mostly from Europe should start seeing themselves as ethnic Europeans instead of Mutts. This view, I think, comes out of his support for a view of metagenetics, the idea that cultural patterns are passed genetically in a similar way to something like hair color.<br />
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I disagree with McNallen for a number of reasons, but there are a number of deeper points where we agree. I agree with him that the national divisions of Europe are somewhat arbitrary. And I agree that seeing oneself as mixed culture just because of where one's ancestors come from has some problems. Asatru includes ancestor worship and this means all ancestors.<br />
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I am Folkish. And I think that membership in the Folk requires shared heritage. But heritage isn't necessarily only biological. Connections by marriage or adoption surely count as well and there may be others -- in the end being a part of the folk requires adopting the same cultural framework and that doesn't happen by accident (or by pure biology either). And I disagree with metagenetics as a hypothesis because I haven't seen any real evidence for it. Cultural patterns shift quite a bit over not too much time. I do think people naturally form hierarchies. Genetics might even play a role in that. But I cannot get very far beyond that.<br />
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Suppose you are full-blooded French. That means your ancestors came from three groups: Roman, Frankish, and Gaulish. The Gaulish ancestors would have been partly Celtic and partly whoever was there first. Gaul, Roman Gaul, and the Frankish kingdom all had very different social and cultural orders, and none of them bear much resemblance to France today.<br />
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Instead of seeing ourselves as mutts, we should see ourselves as a part of groups to which we currently belong and liminally a part of those we strive to join. This is distinct from the sum of our ancestors. We are the sum of our ancestors and we are more than that.<br />
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However, I think the source of my disagreement is that I am, in terms of political theory, to the *right* of McNallen. Over the last few decades there has been an effort to forge a pan-European identity and that hasn't worked so well, nor has it benefited the small businesses and the masses in the ways expected.<br />
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Europeans today tend to identify much more with their home towns than with their nations and that's a good thing. We should, in my view, embrace a local identity, not one even as cosmopolitan as "European." Europe is not a city state but a thriving and very diverse mix of cultures. And a just society in my view starts with the local and builds outward until international space is reached and there groups should deal with eachother as equals.<br />
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But one thing that still binds most of Europe (not the UK or France though) together is the idea that society really should be local and that national units exist to serve local units. The Folk is not a continent. It is not even a modern nation-state. It is a community and a local one at that.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-14440185382772711652016-06-18T07:32:00.001-07:002016-06-18T07:32:03.193-07:00Thoughts on BrexitHowever the vote goes next Friday, it will be historic. The vote is likely to be narrow and currently too close to predict. I hope the initiative passes but perhaps not for the most common reasons. It is true that what is at stake is the future of Europe. I think the UK has a better role to play negotiating the next phase from outside than it does from inside.<br />
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The EU is facing a number of heavy crises, from the Euro public debt crisis to the closely tied immigration crisis. These crises pit member state obligations to the central EU authorities against the obligations to their own citizens in terms of tax money allocation and much more.<br />
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To be sure, the immigrants aren't the problem. Most are fleeing American-sponsored civil wars and have gone from good lives to squalor in search of some minimal security. I see families fleeing Syria and my heart goes out to them. I believe my country, the US, has utterly failed to do what it needs to in order to pay the tab on the human cost of American foreign policy. US foreign policy is thus grossly irresponsible and one reason I cannot vote for Clinton is that she helped this mess forward.<br />
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But what is a problem is that Greece is expected to pay a disproportionate portion of the costs for housing refugees and handling immigration issues (as well as border enforcement) while also living under Troika-imposed austerity. In other words, the problem is an intra-EU power problem over money.<br />
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Faced with these crises, the current EC President (Juncker) has stated (and I believe he is correct here) that the EU, if it survives ten more years, will be very different than it is today. The question is different in what way. There are calls to federalize immigration rules in the EU and for the EU central government to then pay for border enforcement. That would be an unprecedented expansion of EU institutions and nobody but Merkel seems to like that idea. But the Schengen and Dublin agreements are perhaps mortally weakened and something has to replace them.<br />
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But there are other serious problems. The European continent spans three major legal systems and traditions. You have continental civil law, organized around a civil code interpreted by judges. You have English Common Law, organized around a civil code mixed with judge-made precedent. And you have Scandinavian law, where judge-made law is built around skeletal parliamentary acts (Scandinavian law is even more different from Continental civil law than English common law is). Trying to harmonize commercial law where you have three different structural systems of law (and maybe more!) means basically that the most powerful nations (France and Germany) force everyone else to use their system (Continental civil law) as the basic conceptual system. In other words, the social and legal diversity of Europe works heavily against the EU.<br />
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We shouldn't forget that the EU in its current form is a product of the age of neoliberalism that is now coming to a close. People who are afraid of base nationalism should take heart that the EU has been valuable enough that it will not go away, nor will the UK retreat into isolation. Rather people will find ways to keep the relationship alive in the ways that are beneficial.<br />
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But which ever way the UK votes, I think it is almost certain that they will be a part of whatever pan-European international treaty organizations exist in a decade. The question is, to my mind, would leaving help steer that transformation in the right way?<br />
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My hope is that a leave vote (or even a close victory for remain) would mean basically that the UK and other peripheral members (like Sweden, Denmark, and Greece) would get more leverage in negotiating what the next generation of the European Community would look like. If it tips the balance of power in the negotiations towards national governments, then it is a good thing.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-70019578261780505342016-06-17T23:27:00.000-07:002016-06-18T09:51:57.661-07:00Thoughts on the mass murder in OrlandoMy reaction to the Orlando shooting is hard to describe. Many of us understand that American society is deeply ill (the shooter spoke in an earlier interview about problems with people profiting off crises for example) but most of us don't go out and start shooting people. What can convince a husband and father to go and do such great harm not only to other families but to his own as well? For a religion? Out of general frustration with the state of the US? Something else?<br />
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But I have decided I have to write what I can. Since there is some thought that this was an act of international terrorism, it is worth looking at the larger pictures of the intersection of American culture wars and international media, and how this is perceived throughout the world as well. But it is hard. As a husband and father, I cannot imagine what would cause someone to rob his own family not only of his presence but of his memory as well. There is pity, outrage, and much more within myself directed at the shooter and deep sympathy for those who, for whatever reason, have to carry on without family members.<br />
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But there are aspects to this case which need to be discussed and I suppose if I can do so, I have a responsibility to bring them up. I am not advocating changes to policy. I am trying to articulate larger political patterns going on. If this is political violence, then an understanding of other sides is important to preventing further acts in the future.<br />
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But I will say one thing clearly so there is no misunderstanding. Violence like this is one of the worst things a person can do. It is not only a crime against the general public, but even more importantly the shooter deeply betrayed his wife and child in a way that should never be forgotten. What is his child going to think, growing up aware that his father was a mass murderer? In some ways, of those who lost someone important, his young son was the most harmed.<br />
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At the same time, I think it is only through the search for common humanity with the worst of us that we can come to understand how to build a more flourishing society. For in such a search is where we find the worst of the problems.<br />
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The largest problem I see is the faith in individualism and the system in the US, which effectively makes people who don't or cannot fit severely disadvantaged and leaves them no way to carve out a place for themselves. For groups we decide to protect, we push an ideal of equality which somehow is never really equal because of hidden assumptions. For other groups (in particular immigrants and cultural minorities who do not fit the liberal progressive narrative), there is not even that.<br />
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There is a reason why so many heinous crimes in the US are committed by immigrants and children of immigrants, and it is not a condemnation of immigrants as individuals. When we tell people their cultural framework is inferior and bad, when we deny them a real voice in the culture, and deny them any reflection of themselves in the culture around them, we cannot blame them when they become monsters. Here you have the child of an immigrant who was probably bullied, and at the same time his whole family was almost certainly existing outside the major central cultural communities.<br />
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What of international aspects to this? Is it possible that international radicals pushed someone who was vulnerable and unstable to commit this horrible crime?<br />
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There is a fear in much of the world that the US will use global media to proselytize gay rights to the world, and I think this fear underlies much of the recent changes in Indonesian censorship. That fear is reasonable and arguably even correct. But with many of the most populous countries in the world (China, India, Indonesia) lining up to try to put an end to this, it effectively forces film makers to choose between commercial success abroad or currying favor at home. If Disney wants to be able to show Frozen 2 in some of the most important markets internationally, they cannot give Elsa a girlfriend. I expect this to become a very large issue in coming years. But was it an issue here?<br />
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What is at stake is the question of whether a rights-based narrative or whether a community-based narrative is the right one for addressing people who do not (whether by choice or circumstance) follow the accepted normative narratives of the community. The narrative may be that everyone gets married to someone in the community, has kids, and takes over the family business, but for one reason or another not everyone will do all these things. The American approach is to decide that some things are worthy of rhetorical (but probably not substantive) equality, and therefore to say "well, they aren't like us and cannot help it so they need equal rights." But this never covers everyone.<br />
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While "marriage equality" means same-sex couples in the US should have the same legal protections as straight couples, it does not mean, for example, that those who marry non-citizens should be entitled to the same family protection as those who marry citizens. No concern is given to the fact that families with non-citizen spouses (thanks to Clinton-era and Obama-era legislation, and a few more minor contributions by Bush) have more responsibilities and fewer protections than families where both spouses are citizens. So it isn't clear to me that "equality" rhetoric and "rights" are a perfect solution. Surely if there is a right to equality in marriage, then it is a Constitutional violation for the Affordable Care Act to ban my wife from the expanded medicaid for the first 5 years following a possible return to the US and still attach liability for failing to insure.<br />
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A very different approach is the devolutionary approach. In this approach, power and responsibility are highly decentralized and communities are responsible for taking care of their own. This never worked in the Jim Crow South because it requires a degree of economic equality that we have never had in the US as a whole, but it means that if someone is gay in Indonesia (one reason the narrative might not be met, but surely not the only one), it is possible for him or her to navigate society and carve out a place. Indonesia is in fact so decentralized that a lot of things we think of as done by lawyers in the West (drawing up contracts, for example) are done by notaries public instead.<br />
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A community-based approach (rather than a rights/equality rhetoric approach) means that as uncompromising as a society may appear to be, there is always room for human judgement to make things humane, for people to treat eachother with humanity, and so forth. A rights-based narrative is a threat to all that. And so I think it is entirely appropriate that countries protect themselves from what really amounts to foreign propaganda by restricting messages from foreign films and television programs.<br />
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But did that have anything to do with this horrific act? If there is an international dimension then there must be. It may also be that ISIL understands how shocking this would be to Americans and pushed the target for that reason. Or maybe the instructions were more vague and Mr Mateen selected the target himself? I doubt we will ever know.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-33453799687224321162016-06-02T20:01:00.004-07:002016-06-02T20:01:42.949-07:00On Bullying in SchoolsThose who know me particularly well know that for several years in school I was bullied. For three years, I was beat up after school almost every day. For another year it was a periodic occurrence. I don't normally talk about this because we have this narrative in the US that we start out healthy and are damaged by trauma. Instead, I think we learn from our experiences and the end-state of healing is when we are aware of what we have learned and then the trauma becomes a gift rather than a burden. We all go through bad experiences in life. The question is, do we eventually value what they bring us (insight, strength, etc)?<br />
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In discussing the current restroom controversies regarding public schools, showers, and transgender students, someone said something to me that lead me to understand something that had genuinely puzzled me before. This is not about that controversy but the larger issue of bullying. I now have a much greater understanding of why students who are bullied may either commit acts of mass violence (like Columbine) or commit suicide. Before, I never understood that but a missing piece was given to me and I think it is worth sharing.<br />
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<h4>
My Story</h4>
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I was lucky to come from a strong family and attend a school where the administration were more concerned about addressing the issues well than preventing lawsuits. So what I have to say here needs to be taken in a certain spirit.<br />
<br />Anyway.... Usually I was beat up by one person or another. There were a few bullies and usually they took me on, one on one. There were never any demands. Just beatings. I never hated the bullies. There was always something about it that I could never put my finger on that made me pity them. But that was the usual pattern. I got very used to physical pain to the point where physical pain has never really bothered me since.<br />
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Once in a while groups of kids would join in. Once or twice even those I had considered friends did. That hurt in a way that the beatings never did (apologies were given and as far as I am concerned that is water under the bridge, but I mention it for comparison purposes). The sense of betrayal from that sort of event, however, was still minor compared to the sense of betrayal that came from the school's involvement. The school administration, as I mentioned above, tried to address the issues but the problem with bullies is they tend to be very good at manipulating image and more times than not the school would unintentionally take the wrong side.<br />
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Even well-intentioned administrators are particularly bad at connecting the dots here because they are often used by bullies and cannot, by nature, see the whole picture. This, I have come to understand is a fundamental problem of authority and information, and school administrators are simply unable to prevent bullying because of these problems.<br />
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The teachers who could see what was going on also tried, but they had no power and consequently resorted to methods that (when I saw them) greatly offended my sense of justice -- at least one of the bullies (who did back off) was bribed to do so.<br />
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How things have changed since I was in school</h4>
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In the discussion over current bathroom/locker room controversies someone pointed out to me something that struck me as extremely important in understanding the current problems. It was pointed out to me that under zero-tolerance policies, the normal approach is to suspend or expel both the accuser and the accused depending on the severity of the accusations unless one side is independently confirmed. But that is no measure of who is right, and so this confirms to my mind the fact that schools, when they try to address the issue will more often than not unintentionally take the side of bullies. With zero tolerance, this increases the stakes and ensures that when schools are in the wrong, the victims of bullying are even more victimized. I am genuinely thankful that I went through what I did before zero tolerance became a "best" practice.<br />
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Give a bullied kid social support and he or she can live and even thrive despite the bullying. Turn the organs of authority against him or her and that is a recipe for very bad things. Look at how many heinous crimes are committed by people who come from broken homes, who then are bullied in school, and are effectively denied all sorts of support. Such people are pushed outside the system and relentlessly attacked by it without any real support from anyone. Columbine can be understood as an act of rage against a school which not only failed to protect but probably also contributed to the bullying. The suicides that sometimes make headlines are also from people who have insufficient support.<br />
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What We Need to do Differently</h4>
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I am writing this because I think we need a fundamental shift in how we address school bullying in the US today. Currently we expect the schools to shield students, but that puts the school in an impossible situation and ensures that the school's main interest is in avoiding lawsuits rather than helping students thrive. That concern means that schools will err, and when they do, bullied kids will pay a very heavy price. The first priority I think needs to be a commitment to stop the worst of the harm -- the harm done by school authorities when they re wrong, and that means a commitment to erring on the side of doing nothing.<br />
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A second thing is that we need to shift from seeing bullying primarily as a disciplinary issue to one which is primarily a support issue. Bullies themselves may come from bad home environments, and victimizing them again in school doesn't make a lot of sense either. What the school can do is offer counselling and moral support early and often, and then move to disciplinary action only when more serious problems emerge.<br />
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A third thing that schools can do is they can bring the parents and the administration together and insist on joint solutions involving both sides of a conflict.<br />
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But suspending or expelling kids for seeking help regarding bullying? Absolutely not. I don't even think we should expel bullies.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-10195385029641758752016-03-26T03:17:00.000-07:002016-03-26T03:17:01.500-07:00An Alternative to Liberalism part 2 post 3: Partition, Allotment, and Domain in Greek and Norse MythIn Part 2, we discussed efforts at a theory of autonomy built on Aristotelian and ecological sources. In this part, I will tie these together with Norse and Greek myth to flesh them out and develop a fuller theory of freedom.<br />
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The main thesis here is that both mythological systems provide for a view of freedom which is domain rather than rights-based. We are given a lot in life bounded by length and law. Within that lot we have freedom, but if we step outside, we die.<br />
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At one point, I thought that the similarities here were evidence of a common Indo-European framework and while there are some commonalities in the Indo-European world (spinning and fate being closely connected), the overall cosmology is different enough in Indian, Irish, Greek, and Norse systems that these seem not to be genetically related culturally speaking.[1]<br />
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<h4>
Fate in Greek Myth: Partition, Allotment, and Domain</h4>
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In his important book, "From Religion to Philosophy," F. M. Cornford embarked on an ambitious project to show the extent to which early Greek philosophers drew from Greek religious models in their basic cosmology. In order to do so, he embarked on an ambitious analysis of Homer and Hesiod in relation to concepts of fate.<br />
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The Greek word for fate, Cornford points out, simply means partition and it exists in relation to a term lachesis, which besides being the name of one of the Fates, is also referred to as a process by which partitions are distributed in Homeric poetry. Lachesis thus acts as a distributor of pieces of a whole (an example he gives is the use of the term in connection with the domains of the elder gods -- Zeus having domain over the heavens, Poseidon over the seas, and Hades over the underworld). Lachesis is how the gods' kingdoms were distributed.<br />
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When one steps out of the allotted domain, one reaches nemesis (which Cornford suggests may be related to nomos or law, and nemeton). Nemesis thus is the enforcement of the borders of the lot. Cornford also points out that in some regards, the lot is treated as a debt repaid on death.<br />
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The image we get for fate then among the Greeks is not one of predestination but one of a lot in life, loaned by the Fates, and taken back when it is exceeded either in length or limits of action. Freedom of action and fate are thus nicely woven together in a way we have usually tried to separate them in the West.<br />
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<h4>
Fate in Norse Myth: Allotment, Primal Debt, and the Spoken Word</h4>
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The Norse view of fate is often seen as similar enough to the Greek model that people suggest that the Germanic peoples borrowed the idea from the Greeks. In both cases there are strong formal similarities: three mythological women dispensing fate. There are also connections to spinning and weaving via etymology.<br />
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The Coming of the Norns is worth repeating here in its entirely from Voluspa (with my translation below):<br />
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Þaðan koma meyjar,<br />
margs vitandi,<br />
þrjár ór þeim sæ<br />
er und þolli stendr.<br />
Urð hétu eina,<br />
aðra Verðandi,<br />
- skáru á skíði -<br />
Skuld ina þriðju.<br />
Þær lög lögðu,<br />
þær líf kuru<br />
alda börnum,<br />
ørlög seggja. (<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Eysteinn Björnsson's edition)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Then came maidens</span><br />
<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Greatly knowing (i.e. knowing magic)</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Three from the well</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">That under the tree stands<br />Urdh (Fate) is the name of the first<br />The next, Verdhandi (Turning/Transforming)</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">- They carved the staves -</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Skuld ('debt') is the third.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">They lots alloted</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">They lives chose</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">For the sons o men<br />They uttered primal law. (my translation)</span></span><br />
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It is worth remembering that the Norns are sometimes portrayed as sorcerers in Scandinavian folklore, and that this interpretation is backed both by fate (ørlög) as spoken, and by the notion that they have great knowledge (also tied to terms for magic in sources like Hrof Kraki's Saga, which also features a sorceress named Skuld for the moral debt of her father).<br />
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But the magic/fate connections don't really concern us here. What does concern us is the etymology of ørlög and related terms in this stanza (Þær lög lögðu). The word ørlög is a simple compound, ør- meaning primal or primordial and lög meaning lot, law, or layer. In essence here we have gain an allotment process where the primordial lot has an almost legal aspect to it. As in the Greek view, the lot is bounded by length and law, and that stepping outside either of these boundaries results in death, as the debt (Skuld) of this lot is returned to the Norns.<br />
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<h4>
Subsidiarity, Domain, and Partition</h4>
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One key notion in both Greek and Norse notions of life and fate is the concept that one obtains a sort of partition, a lot in which one has domain in one's life. This lot is not one's body. It is not one's choices. Rather it constrains both and it exists in a context of social and primordial law. But this primordial law is not the same for everyone. This is somewhat similar to Plato's discussion of the individual in Timaeus (discussed in a previous post in this series) where we have one band of sameness (the fixed stars) and seven bands of difference (the planets).<br />
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But partition implies something is partitioned, that we take a whole and split it into ever smaller pieces until we get our individual allotments.<br />
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This leads to an alternative to liberalism where freedom emphasizes the -dom suffix, meaning domain or holding. Social roles, functions, jobs, and the like are domains that we should hold and own, having to a large extent autonomy within them (and yet governed by social and primordial law, duty, and debt). We are free within our personal domains, and less than free elsewhere. Moreover in this sense, liberalism, in eroding a place in society for everyone, has eroded real depth of freedom. We have more breadth but less depth.<br />
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End notes:<br />
[1] When we speak of genetic relations between cultural groups we mean that traits were inherited from a common ancestral culture. So for example, Spanish and French are genetically related languages, both being daughters of Latin.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-59219733255586216172016-03-25T00:12:00.002-07:002016-03-25T00:12:36.353-07:00The way we talk about abortion in the US<div data-contents="true">
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<span data-offset-key="c8ihr-0-0">So lets talk about abortion for a moment. This is an area where the more people I talk to with different perspectives from different places, the more challenging perspectives have to be accommodated.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="e54kd-0-0">The US is becoming increasingly polarized between two groups. A significant number of my friends on both sides of this issue don't fall into either group but I am noticing more and more people espousing one of these two extreme, individualist positions and that is a bit scary. Those of you who read below and think one or the other is a straw man don't get the fact that I am discussing how I have seen other discussions I have had, and you are welcome to comment on why the extreme viewpoint portrayed below doesn't apply to you.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="q2u8-0-0">The first position holds that abortion is really no different from murder, that human life begins at conception and therefore a zygote, embryo, or fetus has a right to life that may not be infringed on. But being individualistic, sees abortion as a personal failing, not a social one, and therefore sees no culpability by employer, boyfriend, school administrator, or the like. Thus one can ponder sending abortion providers to jail, or even the women seeking abortions, but one would not ponder changes to make it easier for women to participate in the economy fully after having children. This position ends up being pro-birth into a heartless world and calling it pro-life.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="71dvr-0-0">The second extreme I have seen on the rise is the idea that abortion during any portion of pregnancy is acceptable, and that the government should not put restrict abortion at all In this view, the only question that matters is a woman's right to control her own body, but in many circumstances infants do not stop being dependent on their mother's bodies after birth, so why not allow women to kill breastfeeding infants? Why not trust fathers too and bring back the powers of pater familias under the Twelve Tables? The answer here again is total individualism, and that personhood doesn't apply really until birth.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="5dkj7-0-0">Those two positions are the extremes of a narrow argument that is waged by people who accept Locke's theories of natural rights and his hierarchy of life over liberty, and liberty over property. Any argument on abortion which assumes personhood is the test effectively falls into that trap, and worse it assumes a universal answer to all questions on the topic.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="3dhd6-0-0">I often ask pro-choice people in the US to comment on Scandinavian abortion restrictions (Denmark, having the fewest restrictions, limits elective abortion to 20 weeks gestation, while Iceland requires major health or social justification for all abortions, and Noway limits elective abortion to 12 weeks). One thing I almost never see is a discussion local issues. What I either see are discussions of the fact that they are industrialized so we will give them a pass unlike, say, African nations, or else I see an unyielding adherence to position over an ability to listen to any other perspectives. Ask anti-abortion activists about Singapore (an island country with no room to build new houses) and again, one almost never sees discussion of local issues there either. The local issues don't matter to Americans.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="a71qn-0-0">The problem is made significantly worse by how we look at the question of social progress in the US. The US is the most liberal country in the world and what we have, really, is a choice between left liberalism (liberal democracy governing business and liberalism governing family law) and right liberalism (liberalism governing business, and liberal devotion to religious liberties governing the family). As de Benoist has put it that is the choice (though he was talking about France), and there is no diversity possible in either side.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="u1oj-0-0">So what if we ask about abortion in a functional way instead? That the need for abortion rights in the US comes from the way we effectively foist on women alone the opportunity costs of having and raising children? That for those opposed to abortion the most important thing is to build a more just economic order, and for those who see choice in life path as the more important direction, there is a need to recognize that some trade-offs in this area may be worth it? In other words, with more support for families with children, more restrictions on abortion can be acceptable?
The individualistic view on this issue means among other things that we cannot ask questions of duty. What is the duty society to new parents? How should parenthood fit into the economic order? These are the questions which have to be asked and answered. </span></div>
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Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-61038719032700206432016-03-04T23:41:00.002-08:002016-03-04T23:42:55.851-08:00An Alternative to Liberalism, Part 2, Post 2: An Alternative View of AutonomyIn the previous post, I discussed the rise of autonomy theory in liberal social philosophy in the early Enlightenment. This era also gives us the beginnings of modernism also as we saw. But the Modernist view has proven to have less staaying power than the Aristotelian view before it, or the oral-formulaic view before that.<br />
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One basic concept that has been very universal is what anthropologists call an isomorphism, or a basic homological similarity in how we see different things, between the individual, the society, and the world. This isomorphism is deeply pervasive to the point where it survives, basically, today. If we think of the individual as basically a complicated machine, we can think about governments and bureaucracies as products of high engineering, and the universe as the greatest machine of all. This idea, which rose to prominence also during the Enlightenment, displaced an earlier, more organic view of the individual (the zoodiacal man and other Renaissance ideas).</div>
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The earlier views tended to be similar in some ways to Plato's model in Timaeus. Modern astrologers and skeptics of astrology usually misunderstand the logic that astrology had in such a system. If, as Plato suggested, we are basically the same as the stars, then through this isomorphism we can divine patterns in our own lives by looking at the stars. This same basic view underlies all traditional methods of divination as well. The same model applies to all and the state of one model can infer the state of another model.</div>
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The problem with the machine metaphor is that while it is useful for scientific inquiry, it doesn't actually match our scientific knowledge very well once one gets to systems more complex than organic chemistry. Even in molecular biology, "always" means "most of the time" and "laws" are peppered with exceptions. By the time you get to general biology or ecology things are downright non-mechanistic.</div>
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Anthropology outgrew the mechanistic views in the shift from structuralism to post-structuralism but this is also a shift towards a sort of individualism, recognizing that individuals represent a fluid center and creative force that structuralism cannot well address.</div>
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In this essay I will suggest a shift in view from seeing these things as as machines to seeing them as ecological communities and the implications from a communications theory/computer science perspective on such a shift.</div>
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<h4>
The Rise of Permacuture and an Ecological Archetype</h4>
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Permaculture is a growing movement towards reinventinng food productions by leveraging ecological models in place of our farms and gardens. The basic idea of permaculture is that instead of fighting against ecology when it comes to weeds, insects, and soil nutrition, we can leverage how mature ecosystems work and thus produce a lot more food with a lot fewer chemical and energy inputs. The animals and plans become productive, mutually supporting pieces of the whole. Rather than leveraging machinery, we can leverage even pests to produce more and better food more easily.</div>
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Permaculture takes a fundamental cultural shift to make work. traditionally most of our crops are annuals but permaculture leverages perennials to a much greater extent. Large fields of wheat or tomatoes have to give way to something else (perhaps food forests of fruit and nut trees). Plants are layered in space and time. One must think both diachronically (across time) and in terms of mutually supporting roles.</div>
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As permiculturalists are keen to remind us, all problems can be solved in a garden. The ecology becomes the basic archetype, replacing the great machine, and consequently there is a push for a return to a more organic, less energy-intensive, less socially isolating society.</div>
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But beyond this, an ecological archetype (i.e. seeing the human, the universe, the society as being basically ecological in shape) is applicable in a variety of fields. Instead of seeing bacterial infections as mechanical in nature (the mere introduction of a pathogen) we can see them as ecological in nature (a pathogen population blooming because of other ecological factors). A shift to use of probiotics preventatively is also part of such a shift.</div>
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Similarly, while liberal philosophers tended to reduce society to a machine, an ecological model provides a richer ability to arrange the pieces into mutually supporting roles. Family and organs of local community (religious groups, guilds, and other structures) become fundamental and larger governmental structures become subordinate to these.</div>
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<h4>
The CAP Theorem, Distributed Computing, and Consistency in society</h4>
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One of the major developments in computer science has been the CAP Theorem in the face of the rise of distributed computing (first in scientific computing and later in other disciplines as well).</div>
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The CAP Theorem takes its name from the initials which provide three desirable characteristics of distributed computer networks: Consistency (all network nodes having access to the same information at the same time), Availability (the system responding to all requests), and Partition Tolerance (the ability to successfully respond to requests in the event of some information not being available). The CAP Theorem demonstrates that assuring all three is impossible, and that any two are incompatible with the third.</div>
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While it has its roots in computing, the CAP Theorem is really about communication and information and thus is applicable to human society as well. There are naturally differences, also, that must be taken into account -- the CAP Theorem assumes a sort of communication that is impossible for humans to achieve. While computers communicate precisely and losslessly, humans communicate imprecisely and in a lossy way. We don't encode and decode information. We try to reconstruct what the other will think and then communicate in this way, and then when receive communications we try to reconstruct what the other meant.<br />
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This is largely because human language is bootstrapped on environmental learning. All of our native language is learned through inferring what other people probably mean and this means that no two people speak quite the same language. This process is also responsible for linguistic drift and some other linguistic phenomena.</div>
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The lossy nature of human communications has a number of significant implications for the application of the CAP Theorem to human society. Consistency is fundamentally mechanical and not fundamentally human. We can approach consistency, or the illusion of it, but the only hard consistency controls possible involve centralizing power in the hands of a single individual (because in CAP terms, an individual cannot be inconsistent with him or herself).</div>
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A second point is that human language is a life-long learning process. We learn how to effectively communicate with people we work with over time and therefore consistency is more readily possible on a small scale than a large scale.</div>
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Human civilization thus depends on tolerating inconsistency in CAP terms and this tolerance must increase as the scope of society increases.</div>
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The CAP Theorem, in context with a solid understanding of linguistics, thus provides a solid mathematical proof that individual and local autonomy are necessary for productive ventures in human society. In areas where human society cannot do without (economic production, reproduction, etc) individual and community autonomy are fundamentally needed.</div>
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Of course this autonomy must be balanced with other social concerns, such as the need for mutual support (which we would not survive infancy or into old age without). But we can prove both a need for autonomy and duty and this piece is about the former, which the CAP Theorem gives us. But viewed from this perspective, autonomy is a functional requirement that human society simply cannot exist without.</div>
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<h4>
Subsidiarity and Autonomy</h4>
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The final point to add to the mix is the idea of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity (as Justice Breyer reminds us in many of his interviews) is a European concept, not an American one. It holds that the best level of society to tackle a problem is the smallest one capable of tackling it.. Subsidiarity is in theory a basic part of the European Union (added after Denmark voted not to join to appease their fears), but in practice more a part of Scandinavian society, where it is called the Nearness Principle, than in Continental Europe. While the idea was first formulated in a papal encyclical (Rerum Novarum) in the 19th century, the idea expresses something of a general experience of agrarian, rural countries and even the functional efforts at dual sovereignty in the early US. The idea is more tightly tied to classical philosophy than it is specifically Catholic and this is probably a reason for its general success.<br />
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It's worth noting that even Chairman Mao at one point said that China should see the United States as a model for why decentralization of political power is necessary and should not try to emulate a single strongly centralized government. So the idea of decentralization as good has ranged from early America to Communist China, to Scandinavia, to the Catholic Church. I think this reflects a sense by which the CAP Theorem's limits in fact really do come into play.<br />
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The rationale in Rerum Novarum is probably the place to start in understanding the idea of decentralization as a moral matter however. The basic idea is that theft needs not be material to be damaging. One can rob someone of dignity just as surely as one can rob someone of money. A key aspect of dignity is an ability to accomplish good things for one's family, community, and society. Robbing someone of that ability to accomplish things is thus a very deep and serious form of theft. As anyone who has been told to do a job and then micromanaged in doing it knows, this is a serious problem. Of course the CAP Theorem shows us that micromanagement not only feels insulting but is actually harmful so it is no exaggeration to call it evil, but this is a more recent development.<br />
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The idea then is that it is a serious matter of theft to take a task out of the hands of an individual who is doing the work capably and put it in the hands of another. This is what I call work ownership, the idea that a task and the accomplishment that comes with it, should be treated as property (how fruits of the labor should be divided is separate however, since one never really accomplishes anything entirely alone).<br />
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What applies to an individual also applies to a group. For a larger group to take over a task a smaller group is capable of accomplishing is itself also a theft. Therefore there is a moral necessity in keeping this accomplishment as personal as possible and therefore larger levels of social organization (including government) should work to coordinate and harmonize rather than accomplish on their own what the lower levels are capable of doing.<br />
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This echoes Aristotle's views on the roots of the polis. According to Aristotle, individuals get married and have children thus forming households, and households come together to tackle joint problems and thus form the polis or community. Larger levels of the state exist because smaller levels come together to address joint problems, which is an inversion of the engineered order (where you start with the large and subdivide).<br />
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These all form parts of a more organic, comprehensive view of autonomy which affects both individuals and groups.</div>
Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-71393461780285899452016-03-03T10:14:00.003-08:002016-03-03T10:14:41.863-08:00An Alternative to Liberalism part 2 post 1: Liberalism and Antisocial Autonomy<blockquote>
<i>Man is born free, and yet everywhere he is in chains.</i> -- JJ Roussau "On Social Contract"</blockquote>
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One of the key selling points of Liberalism is the ideology of autonomy, and the view that other ideologies don't share a concept of autonomy. The latter is false (though few others phrase autonomy as specific to the individual), and the former deserves careful understanding before we can see both the problems and opportunities for a replacement. In this post we will take a short journey through the early liberal philosophers, Hobbes, Locke, Roussau, Hume, and Kant and look at the evolving views of autonomy, society, and government that came out of them.<br />
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<h4>
Hobbes and the Need for the State</h4>
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The beginnings of progressive social theory come from Thomas Hobbes and his book "The Leviathan." Hobbes introduces a couple of ideas which become the basis of Western liberalism since. In particular he argues there is no greatest good, that man's behavior can be explained materialistically. This becomes the basis of what we might call psychological and political materialism. Hobbes largely denies the idea that man is by nature a social creature and therefore sees man as at his natural state where there is no society.<br />
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In such a state, Hobbes reasons, people need protection from people engaging in violent theft, and therefore the state arises for joint protection of this sort. In this regard he echoes Cicero's claim that there are certain things, such as private property rights, that must be respected for humans to live together in cities. However where he differs from Cicero, Aristotle, etc is that he saw humanity as by nature isolated, alone, autonomous.<br />
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Hobbes thus lays the framework for progressive views of history. For primitive man, life is nasty, brutish, and short, but with social developments, prosperity is possible. There is no need to look to religion or to a philosophical notion of the greatest good. All we need to do is look to avoiding a violent death.<br />
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From Hobbes then emerges a concept of right to life and a general right to autonomy. These get fleshed out in greater form by later thinkers (Locke, Rousseau, and others).<br />
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<h4>
Locke and Universal Rights</h4>
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The next major thinker in this regard was John Locke, whose works built on Hobbes view of natural rights. While Locke followed Hobbes in a right to be generally free from violence and to follow one's own desires, he added to this a right to property, largely following Cicero. He also formulated a hierarchy of rights, with life above liberty, and liberty above property.<br />
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One of the most enduring aspects of Lockean thought in the US is the abortion debate. Both sides of the debate effectively accept a Lockean outlook, where life is greater than liberty, and therefore the only question to discuss is whether a fetus is a person, worthy of a right to life. This leads to a very narrow abortion debate. We don't get to discuss the questions of the role in an economy which treats men as normal and women as only normal to the extent they are like men. We don't get to discuss the way that the social need to recognize shared humanity between mother and fetus. We don't get to discuss the effects on society or the family. The only question is personhood.<br />
<br />
In my view, this leads to a very impoverished debate. But it is worth noting two things in defense of Locke. First, he notes the importance of property, something Hobbes doesn't formulate as well and secondly he treats property rights as not even close to absolute, being limited by their impact on the liberty of others.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Rousseau and the Liberation of the Individual</h4>
<br />
Rousseau can be seen in "On Social Contract" to be reacting largely to Hobbes. Rousseau effectively follows Hobbes in the natural rights approach but sought to soften Hobbes assertion that humans are not social creatures. Rousseau on one hand acknowledges a social nature to humanity, but on the other hand sees society as deeply corrupting. It is through the influence of society, Rousseau held, that people though by nature good become either evil or enslaved. Rousseau then accepts both a social nature of humanity, but also treats society as fundamentally suspect and damaging.<br />
<br />
Some respects of Rousseau's theories are clearly accurate. Monarchs can be more authoritarian than democracies and, as Rousseau pointed out, democracies become more oppressive as they cover larger numbers of people. Rousseau's theories then seem to suggest that the only guaranteed nonoppressive form of government is the local, participatory democracy, but it isnt clear that Rousseau would have liked these much since they are basic manifestations of the society that chains the individual.<br />
<br />
Rousseau is universally hated by conservatives and for good reason. He follows Locke and Hobbes down an antisocial hole and favors liberating individuals from the fundamental units of society, the family and community. However, he the first of the liberal philosophers to really grapple with humanity as social by nature, and for this reason he cannot be ignored entirely.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Hume and the Nature of Reason</h4>
<br />
Hume noted that reason is not by nature directed and is therefore amoral in nature. Of course he was not the first Aesop's fable of the wolf and the lamb carries with it a similar lesson. But Hume attempted a solution here based solely on individual experience. Where Aristotle, Cicero, and others would look to social duties and function Hume looks to the experience of emotion for guidance. Argument from emotion may be a fallacy, but emotion alone can give reason direction, so reason is always, according to Hume, a slave of the passions, and this is as it should be.<br />
<br />
With this view of reason and emotion comes the basic view of human rights being things which one <i>feels</i> strongly about. Individual emotions thus become seen as the guiding light for society.<br />
<br />
The problem of course is that prejudices steer our reasoning and when we cloak these in universality, we turn them into things which go from being functionally protective of community into things which are oppressive of other communities, and even oppressive of our own.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Conclusion</h4>
<br />
The picture of liberal autonomy that develops is one where society is a corrupting influence on the individual, where the goal is to erode family and community so that chosen relationships are more important than unchosen ones. Parenthood thus is a one-way duty and children need not have duties towards their elders. Communities have duties to their members but the members have no duties to communities they did not choose, and so forth.<br />
<br />
But beyond these are a trust in the combination of reason and emotion leading to the visible cult of the personality. However these are only enabled by worshipping ever more powerful social machines. We factory farm our food and we factory farm our kids. We produce our work in factories. The home becomes nothing more than a place for isolated individuals to hide at night from the inhumanity of the world.<br />
<br />
In the next in this series I will look at an alternative way to look at human autonomy from a social function perspective and how computer science of all fields can provide a far more conservative alternative to this sort of autonomy theory.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-52600139625574492932016-03-01T11:20:00.001-08:002016-03-01T11:20:19.675-08:00Immigration and Europe, Thoughts inspired by ZizekI have been in Sweden now for a year. I have watched the immigration crisis unfold. I have read different viewpoints. I have seen the crisis steal an hour from my day several times a week. Like the election in the US which may spell the end of neoliberalism for better or worse, this is an amazing crisis, and I feel privileged to watch history in the making.<br />
<br />
So Zizek has written <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/02/slavoj-zizek-what-our-fear-refugees-says-about-europe">an interesting piece</a> about the social and political dynamics of the refugee crisis. It is a piece which reaffirms the need of culture and identity, and a piece which confronts obliquely the nature of modernism. It is worth a read. Myself, I am both the first to defend refugees as people, and also to defend the fact that there are real concerns about the demographics of this crisis, and that it is unjust to expect Europe to pick up the tab of the human cost the US has been busy accruing.<br />
<br />
This being said, as a lover of history, there are some things that are left out of the dimensions of his analysis, dimensions which add answers and more questions to the reason Europe tends to be so fixated on the crisis. These problems demand solutions and the questions demand further searches for answers. But Europe's very survival, I think, rests on recognizing two truths, that Europe must embrace far more the refugees Europe does accept, but also that Europe must accept fewer refugees. My grim assessment is that unless Europe does both these things -- seeking to recover from the refugees what Europe has lost and also limit the flow, that the only future Europe can look forward to is one where the refugees have by force of number dramatically reshaped the political and social order. We can decide to learn or we can be schooled. It is our choice.<br />
<br />
The story of the rise of Europe is the story of the rise of poverty. In England, in France, in Germany, as in the US, early industrialization was dependent on the rise of destitution sufficient to get people to give up on anything better than subsistence wages in the factory. The less industrialized portion of Europe, for example in the Balkans and in Scandinavia, tried to industrialize in less unequal ways with only modest success (usually with appropriately proportional rises in poverty and industrialization -- see Scandinavia's efforts to industrialize the fishing industry which caused many small fishermen to lose their businesses in the face of crushing debt).<br />
<br />
The way out of poverty becomes a social safety net, a way of ensuring that people do not fear for security for being out of work, but this too becomes something that one has to work beforehand to qualify for, and often (particularly in Scandinavia) banking policies favor the employed to the self-employed. In this way the chains that bind people to corporate employment in the name of liberating them from family are forged strong. With this employment-centric economy, the family is no longer productive, and so children are no longer the future of one's own economic endeavors. Women have fewer children and the population declines. Capitalism (like state socialism for the same reasons) is cultural suicide. This is something people intrinsically understand which is the answer to why so many Europeans cling to their sense of identity through hostility to the immigrants. They know something is wrong. They know their culture is declining. They know immigration is connected. They know the elites are calling the shots. The hatred and fear they feel regarding immigrants is therefore a proxy for the hatred and fear they feel regarding the bankers, the politicians, the bureaucrats, who claim to do good but instead enslave them. But this is counterproductive.<br />
<br />
When I walk down the street in Landskrona, I see restaurant after restaurant. I see small corner store after small corner store. These all fall into one of two categories: They are either businesses with a few employees (maybe 5-10) or they are very small family businesses run by first-generation immigrants. Those who are self-employed are very usually immigrants. They are not used to the chains that are there to bind them to corporate employment and so they blithely walk around as if those are not there. They are the free smallholders who have more or less vanished elsewhere. So the immigrants come to do the jobs that Swedes won't do: running very small businesses. And yet it is considered a great success that their children will join the corporate work force. That fact alone gives me more reason to be pessimistic about Europe's future than everything else. It is a "victory" for the engines of assimilation to liberate the children of the smallholding class into the corporate workforce.<br />
<br />
I think that the European elites believe that this system can be sustained indefinitely through immigration, that there is nothing inevitably damaging about outsourcing the process of having and raising children. Why not let Africa and the Middle East bear the costs and Europe reap the benefits? Moreover if the masses are divided between nativists and immigrationists, then nobody will challenge the power structures at the top. It is a nearly perfect strategy and one which seems likely to win at least for the short term. But it is becoming more clear that the system cannot sustain itself on immigration, that falling birth rates present a problem for the whole structure and that trying to bring in refugees can be dangerously unpredictable. Sweden promised to welcome all refugees that wanted to come, and quickly found out that there were a lot of refugees in line.... That mistake has lead to the reintroduction of border measures that have cascaded across Europe.<br />
<br />
The problem is not just that immigration is a problem. The problem is that immigration is the solution to an economic problem. If cultural nationalists want to win, they have to help a just economic and social order arise, one which supports families, and leads to a sustainable birth rate. What we have now is not. That means starting with those immigrants who have not yet been assimilated and learning from them. It means learning what economic realities need to change from their point of view. It means making room at least in the short-run for parallel cultural societies. And it means working on building an economic order where family and community once again matter.<br />
<br />
This is the promise of multiculturalism but multiculturalism never lives up to this promise because it is peddled by people openly hostile to culture, who see culture as an obstacle to rights.. Multiculturalism has great promise but it cannot be fulfilled unless culture is seen as innately valuable, as a matter of function and humanity not mere self-esteem in a commodity marketplace. The most multicultural places I have lived have also been the most conservative.<br />
<br />
Of course the right will have trouble doing this. The political right is funded by the same elites that are causing the problem on the left. You won't get careful introspection from any political side because they are not in the business of making policies but selling policies. And that is the real problem.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-54694644718412042752016-02-27T02:19:00.006-08:002016-02-27T02:21:10.688-08:00We Need an Agrarian Party, or Why Not TrumpWatching Trump's election campaign I cannot shake the thought that the Republican party base has as much respect for the GOP elites as the Democratic Party base does. It seems everyone knows the GOP is hopelessly corrupt and the only reason Hillary is doing as well as she is, is because Democratic Party voters aren't quite as convinced that the Democratic Party is hopelessly corrupt as Republican Party voters are regarding the GOP.<br />
<br />
So the GOP has to go and it needs to be replaced by a real alternative to the Democratic Party, ideally based on a real alternative to liberalism (right now they represent a version of liberalism). The Democrats want the GOP as it exists to go. The Republican base wants the same and while the Democrats may want another liberal party, I think the time is long overdue to have a non-liberal party in the mix.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
I hear some people say "At least Trump is not a Liberal" but the problem is that Trump <b>is</b> a Liberal. He is for liberal capitalism. He is for liberal democracy. He is for the myth of the self-made man, for the myth of self-authorship and self-ownership. If Trump seems illiberal, it is only because we have forgotten what liberalism used to mean.<br />
<br />
The alternative to liberalism through the last few centuries has not come from Capitalism -- Capitalism was invented and justified by Liberals long before so-called Conservatives took up that cause. In essence the problem with the Republican Party is that they are liberals when it comes to business, in the same way that Democrats are liberals when it comes to sexuality. The same rhetoric, the same view of humanity basically applies to both. The only difference is that what Protestant social conservatives actually try to conserve is the combination of Liberalism and Calvinism (it is worth noting that Liberalism arose from Calvinism).<br />
<br />
The alternative to liberalism and the most conservative tradition in the US has long been agrarianism. Agrarians tend to vote Republican not because they agree with the party but because the Republicans tend to, on the surface, leave just a little more room for agrarianism in American society than the Democrats do. The Democratic Party prides itself on intellectualism, but it is one which systematically devalues rural America as poorly educated. In this regard Trump's comments following his win in Nevada were brilliant -- a way to bait Democrats and at the same time mobilize his base.<br />
<br />
But Trump is no agrarian. Trump is a capitalist of the worst kind and no different, really, than Hillary. While he has proven quite politically adept, it is clear his heart isn't in the right place. Sanders is perhaps a little closer but he too is basically a conservative liberal.<br />
<br />
Major (illiberal) premises of agrarianism would be:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Growing food should no be an industrial-scale endeavor but the activity of small family farms</li>
<li>The family is the basis of society and the rest of the levels exist to serve the family. The family should be restored to its rightful place as the seat of economic production, not relegated to consumption alone.</li>
<li>Laws should favor small businesses over large ones.</li>
<li>Free trade is bad, and self-employment is good.</li>
<li>Employers have an obligation to ensure that capital is widely spread. The emphasis on a living wage is misguided.</li>
<li>Culture and community matter and are not things to liberate people from.</li>
<li>Marriage exists to protect and cultivate the next generation, not for the mere temporary fulfillment of the spouses. Decisions such as what forms of marriage are acceptable need to be subservient to that question.</li>
<li>Participatory democracy is better than representative democracy</li>
<li>Economic commons are more important than welfare payments.</li>
</ol>
<div>
Now this is by and large a platform that cuts across boundaries of right and left in this country, but it operates from a point of view that rejects liberalism. Many left-wingers in California, right wingers in Utah, and "liberals" in the NE may in fact be able to get behind much more than they do either main political party today. The only problem is funding....</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Our political conversation in the US today is warped by our choices being limited to a party which believes liberalism is for business and religion is for the family, and the party that believes that liberalism is for the family and the state is for business. If we get a real alternative, we can better discuss and tackle our problems.</div>
<br />
<br />Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-40868061972094727792016-02-26T03:20:00.001-08:002016-02-26T03:28:28.825-08:00Liberalism Considered HarmfulI decided to open this new chapter in this blog's history with two provocative points:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Our country is governed by a general "liberal consensus" even, and perhaps especially, on the right, and</li>
<li>I do not accept that consensus.</li>
</ol>
<br />
<h4>
Defining "Liberal"</h4>
Contrary to most political voices today, I do not see the distinction between "liberal" and "conservative" to be that useful. The distinction is a narrow one, what sort of liberalism to push, and not one that involves actually questioning the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism itself.<br />
<br />
The tradition of liberal thought arises out of the so-called "enlightenment" which was a reaction to the perception that the European Renaissance was on one hand two Catholic and on the other hand too cozy with Islamic thinkers. However, the Renaissance was at its roots a Classicist movement, filtered merging Catholic and Islamic developments largely on Greek thought. Liberalism, as found in thinkers like Locke and Hume posits that the primary relationship in politics is between the individual and the state.<br />
<br />
From this approach arise the ideas of individual rights and social contracts as we know them. The old order, which still exists in atrophied form, and which I will discuss more below, is to be subsumed within this framework, where individual investors and capitalists morally deserve to be rewarded off the backs of the workers, and that jobs and employment, in the good Protestant Industrial Revolution work ethic, combined with appropriate government machinery, will solve all our social problems.<br />
<br />
From this perspective, the difference between the parties is that the Democrats would like the State to be the Mother writ large, and business to be the father, while Republicans would like to reverse these gender roles. Our choices are thus between what Dorothy Day called "The Holy Mother State" and what I would call "The Holy Mother, Inc."<br />
<br />
The basic consensus is that the modern state consists of individuals and a government, where the government's goal is to insist on ordered liberty for individuals, and the individuals who must respect the social contract. Individuals band together into corporations which are given a sort of artificial personhood, and the rights of an individual, as a passthrough vehicle to protect the rights of the investors.<br />
<br />
<br />
Liberalism itself, as Hilaire Belloc <a href="http://archive.org/details/servilestate00belluoft">pointed out</a>, depends for its success on the poor and disadvantaged, and the forces of the reformation were necessary to create the displaced workforce that would allow the industrial revolution to succeed. Belloc was not the only one to make this assessment. Many of the early Capitalist theorists including Adam Smith's contemporaries, <a href="http://exiledonline.com/recovered-economic-history-everyone-but-an-idiot-knows-that-the-lower-classes-must-be-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious/">believed that the poor must be kept both poor and disadvantaged so that they would be willing to work</a>. Thus both classical liberalism and neoliberalism require poor people to be disempowered so that corporations can work as efficient social machines. In future posts I will critique the role of social welfare in modern American society, and other aspects by which the upper classes continue to ensure that the poor must be kept poor.<br />
<br />
This consensus also borrows the ideological internationalism of Christian thought. The idea is that there is one social truth, one set of human rights, etc. that is applicable to all people in all cultures, even when that is obviously false. A right to private property cannot apply to the hunter-gatherer in the same way it applies to the city dweller. It is a great irony that our discussions and frameworks of human rights are built on a system dependent upon injustice in order to function.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Liberal Cosmology</h4>
<br />
The basis of liberal cosmology is the analogy of everything to machinery. Workers are but cogs in the corporate machine. The body <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Birth-American-Rite-Passage-Preface/dp/0520229320">is but a machine</a>, capable of being altered, fixed, and improved. Our <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Sacred-Profane-Nature-Religion/dp/015679201X">homes</a> are machines. The universe is a great machine (see the previous two books as references). Today we take this even further, with many believing that neuroscience can explain all of human behavior despite of course the obvious evidence to the contrary: <a href="http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf">chemistry cannot be reduced to applied quantum physics</a> (pdf alert).<br />
<br />
The cosmology of liberalism then is fundamentally reductionist, and based on the idea that as we gain experience, we can build ever more complex social machinery in the name of social progress. The only real disagreements left are what sort of social machinery to build and which direction we want to progress. Do we put our faith in government or private industry? Do we want the government to be a moral authority, or a system of social nourishment (Day's "Holy Mother State")? Nobody dares challenge the basic framework though. Even the socialists and communists largely accept it.<br />
<h4>
</h4>
<h4>
Towards Alternatives</h4>
<div>
<br /></div>
First, we must recognize that a lot of deep thought regarding society was wrongly discarded in the enlightenment, and also that liberalism is not as scientific as it appears. In particular liberal social thinkers tend to be quick to dismiss anthropological assessments if they are opposed to the favored policies. Science itself on both sides is a tool for furthering a priori political agendas, not for measuring success or failure. This is human nature. When science challenges us and counsels us against arrogance, we (as arrogant humans) ignore it, having faith that any limits now present will be overcome.<br />
If you look at the current race, the argument is about job creation and who got us into this mess, and both sides blame the wrong Presidents. The Presidents both sides idolize (Reagan and Clinton) are the very ones whose policies set up this mess through financial deregulation and encouragement of lax lending policies, see Hyman Minsky's theories of economic instability. But both sides ignore models that work and predict the current crisis and finger point at the other in order to protect the image that the policies that got us here are what we need to do to get out of this hole.<br />
<br />
So what is the alternative? It is to look to twin sources of anthropology and more traditional models. One model, suggested by Aristotle in Politics, consists not of individuals and states but rather of individuals coming together into households, and those households forming communities. The state can be seen as a layer on top of this. Corporations can be seen as another form of community, one dedicated to producing and distributing goods and services. Profit then becomes important but only one goal, subservient to the greater mission (which arguably is the case for most successful businesses at least in their initial stage).<br />
<br />
This model is fundamentally pluralistic. The structure of the household may vary from society to society, and the collective interests of the community may be different as well. There may be commonalities that we can explore but we can agree that control should be at the most local level possible. It is not internationalist like liberalism is. We don't have to push the "economic development" religion on foreign cultures. They can join us or not if they want.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-68511357156225608242016-02-25T12:35:00.000-08:002016-02-25T12:35:05.399-08:00An alternative to Liberalism, Part 1, Post 2: A Conflict of MoralitiesAfter a long hiatus, I have decided to begin this anew.<br /><br />In this piece I want to discuss universalism and relativism in so-called "conservative" and "liberal" views, and I want to offer a significantly different alternative to either of these universalist systems (relativism is a sort of universalism which is even more authoritarian than the conservative counterpart in part because it pretends to be anti-authoritarian). The alternative I will offer is structuralism, which holds that actions are only moral or immoral in the context of cultural constructs and social imperatives. Structuralism is not moral relativism because it provides an avenue for moral critique, which relativism attempts actively to forestall, but it is not universalism either because it admits that for any social problem there may be many valid solutions. The solutions are, however, constrained by other factors, including other solutions. I will look specifically at the issue of murder below.<br />
<br />
Summing up the three basic positions:<br />
<ul>
<li>Universalism says, "What is True for Me is True for Thee"</li>
<li>Relativism says, "What is true for me need not be true for thee"</li>
<li>Structuralism says, "What is true for me is true for thee, to the extent thee is in a social place comparable to me." </li>
</ul>
<div>
Post-structuralism will be discussed a little bit below. Post-structuralism for the most part looks less at questions of truth and more about how structures affect people and how they navigate those. When we get to discussing the role of stigma in a just society, the analysis offered will be very post-structuralist.</div>
<br />
Like it or not, most of the actual judgements that both liberals and conservatives make are at least latently structuralist in nature. Very rarely do people say "we criminalize theft because stealing is wrong." Instead we look at specific harms caused by theft and conclude that we must punish thieves. What is not structuralist, however is the way that these judgements are applied to others, particularly in other places and times. This is true on the left and the right, but particularly on the left. The left tends to be more universalist than the right which is rather amusing given that the common accusation is that the right is out to "impose their beliefs" on the left.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Universalism and Relativism in Liberalism</h4>
<br />
Liberalism, as Oz Conservative points out, is a social philosophy which holds that autonomy is the greatest good, that we should all be full authors of our lives, unbound by ties we do not choose, and that the ideal of the state is to ensure "ordered liberty" (as if we wouldn't have to choose between order and liberty).<br />
<br />
In pursuit of this goal, three seemingly incompatible tools are used, moral relativism regarding personal choices, universalism regarding cultural constructs, in the form of discourse on human rights, and an isomorphism between technological progress and social progress. People are not seen as having a right to culture, but rather as being victims of culture. Just as throughout history technology has been advancing, the argument goes, so too has society been advancing towards greater true knowledge and towards greater freedom.<br />
<br />
All history mythologizes the past to some degree (history being an argument using the past as a basis), and liberal history sees the past as a progressive march towards greater knowledge and freedom. In doing so they must skip over important details, like how much informal autonomy women in ancient Athens could actually get away with, and treat internationalism in history with so much convoluted justifications as to make it hard to understand what the perspective on internationalism actually is. It's hard, for example, to justify the idea that we should see a single global authority and at the same time argue that the Reformation was good because it broke the stranglehold of the Roman Catholic Church on European continent. Catholicism was <i>the</i> main internationalist movement regarding authority at the time (and unlike Islam there actually is a central authority) and so it is hard to square the reality of the reformation with the liberal aspect as it is taught in history.<br />
<br />
In the area of human rights, such rights are not seen to include a right to culture. Human rights are also believed to be self-evident, and they provide a framework for universalist imposition of culture across barriers of space and language. It is in essence a form of cultural imperialism.<br />
<br />
But human rights cannot be readily defined in such a way. We may think to ourselves that private property rights are human rights, but there are cultures, particularly foraging cultures whose view of property rights is both functionally viable within the scope of such a culture and at the same time entirely incompatible with any human right we could define for a modern society.<br />
<br />
Similarly there are many who believe there is a right not to have culturally mandated ritual surgeries generally, such as circumcision among the Jews. The idea here is that such surgeries are only appropriate for consenting adults, and since children have not consented to be a part of their culture, it is inappropriate to permanently engrave culture on the body. This is, in essence, the basis of the outrage against female genital cutting as well. To be sure, such practices may be critiqued on other grounds, namely health impacts of the practices but to be sure, human rights to the liberal mindset is simply the right to be free from coercive constraints imposed by culture. A right to culture is thus impossible to see as a human right in the liberal mindset. Liberalism thus both undermines and denies a "right to culture." It is therefore entirely incompatible with indigenous rights and autonomy, just as it is incompatible with household rights and autonomy.<br />
<br />
At the same time, the emphasis on individual autonomy suggests that we can't judge others for their choices. This is a reaction to stigmatizing people for certain poor choices, but it leads to relativism in the sense that we can't judge others. Judgement is, however, not just about right or wrong, but about insight, understanding, compassion, and empathy. One cannot determine whether something is right or wrong without insight, understanding, and (I believe) context, and one cannot arrive at these in a just way without compassion and empathy. Relativism thus leads paradoxically to a world without compassion or empathy, without insight into the nature of the problems of the present and hence without an ability to differentiate right from wrong in context. One need not hold that all morals are objective to see that the idea that we cannot judge to be a dangerous one. For if we cannot judge for others, we cannot judge for ourselves. Worse, if we cannot judge for others, we cannot learn from their mistakes.<br />
<br />
I see this approach of relativism and human rights to be illnesses of the modern world, an effort to corrode the very cultural aspects of ourselves that make us human. Culture makes us human, and by denying a right to culture, liberalism reduces us to machines or pieces of social machines (nations, corporations) while denying us basic humanity.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Universalism and relativism in Christian Social Conservatism</h4>
<br />
On the surface, Christian Social Conservatism offers an alternative to liberalism, and I would suggest it is a step in the right direction. However, this movement has been heavily liberalized to the point where it isn't really an alternative at all. I see this movement as grasping for some way out of the modern world's great illnesses, but not quite getting there. Christian Social Conservatives are thus, in essence, conservative liberals (as opposed to the liberal liberals of the Democratic Party and the radical liberals of the Tea Party).<br />
<br />
Christian Social Conservatism is based on the idea that Christian tradition offers the best way out of the problems of the present. It is backwards-looking, conservative, and holds important aspects of liberalism to be wrong, but in the end, many of the thinkers in this movement are torn between theocracy and technocracy, and this shows in public health statistics.<br />
<br />
Additionally foundational values of Christian Social Conservatism include the same values as Liberalism. This movement merely tacks on additional ones. Radical individualism is still there. Innovationism and technocracy are still there. In fact in some areas these are heightened.<br />
<br />
One major difference is that Christian Social Conservatives tend to see Christianity as faith and tradition replacing the "human rights" discourse of the liberals. Additionally the basic liberal narrative of self-authored lives is used to justify plutocracy in some corners of the movement.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Relativism is a bit harder to pin down in Christian Social Conservatism</h4>
<br />
However if you look at Protestants, one tends to see a view that belief is more important than action. You will be forgiven. Just believe and ask for forgiveness. This allows a certain degree of relativism in through the back door.<br />
<br />
More functionally, the Catholic social conservative traditions have placed a great deal of emphasis on subsidiarity, the idea that it is spiritual or moral theft to userp the role of a piece of society and hand it to a larger one. This encourages experimentation and a degree of relativism as well (though with boundaries). Catholic thought, being primarily Aristotelian, tends to be much more functionalist and structuralist than Protestant thinking.<br />
<br />
<h4>
The Structuralist Alternative for Heathen Conservatives: Background</h4>
<br />
Modern Heathenry has been based to a large extent on the idea that structuralism can bring back (in a modern form perhaps) the ways of our ancestors. Structuralism is the predominant way we tend to look at the historical and modern world as heathens (in this way we are about half a century out of date regarding anthropology).<br />
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Part of the lure of structuralism is that it provides powerful tools of looking at social patterns. We can look at hos social patterns interact with other social patterns, how they functioned, what the results were, and so forth.<br />
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Structuralism itself came into the fore in the early years of the 20th century, with the linguistic discovery that "primitive" languages uses imitation less than modern languages (before it had been hypothesized that languages evolved from imitation). The result of this discovery lead linguists to posit that there were no innate words for things, that meaning emerged not from the atoms of language (words and grammar) but from the interactions between different words. Language was seen as a system of difference and meaning arising from that system as a whole (briefly paraphrasing De Saussure).<br />
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Structuralism was later applied to literary critique, sociology, anthropology, comparative religion, and many other fields. It developed into a complex set of tools for addressing questions of social systems generally, well beyond language.<br />
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Post-structuralism emerged with thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and anthropologists such as Victor Turner who noted that structuralism could never, really, capture the individual human angle. As Derrida pointed out, structuralism could not accommodate a fluid center. Moreover Turner's field research (along with that of Albert Lord) showed that previous efforts had tended to discount the role of human creativity in ritual, epic poetry recitals, and the like. Post-structuralism tends to add back to structuralism the perspective of the individual navigating the structures.<br />
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<h4>
The Structuralist/Post-Structuralist Alternative for Heathen Conservatives: Morality as Contextual and Socially Constructed but Necessary and "Real"</h4>
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A structuralist perspective on morality would start (largely following Claude Levy-Strauss) that morality is a functional part of society, that things which are bad to think are bad to do, and cause harm. Therefore one would look at modern and historical stigmas, crimes, and other things socially condemned and see what functions those judgments have.<br />
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A key caution here is that evolved systems (and this includes culture) tend to have multiple functions on any part, and have many parts for one function. Thus a stigma against premarital sex may help preserve the parents' interests in choice of marriage for their children, but it may also ensure that children can threaten the family honor in order to challenge parents who may be too strict in such a matter. These concerns may cut opposite directions but they work together for social justice and harmony.<br />
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This brings me to an important point about stigma in an honor-bound society. In our, largely honorless society, we tend to think about stigma as largely a bad thing. But in an honor-bound society, stigma works in part by giving many people an incentive to make sure that shameful acts are forgotten or hidden. In an honor-bound society, shame is public and contagious, while we are used to thinking of it being individual and isolating.<br />
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This view of morality is that morality arises from social realities and is shaped by how we use the structures. Morality is a tool for an effective society, but it is socially constructed based on context. Nonetheless it is real and necessary.<br />
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<h4>
Structuralism and the Problem of Murder</h4>
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Usually at some point people ask "what about murder?" Murder is, everywhere immoral and illegal. Therefore it must be universally such.<br />
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However when one digs deeper one finds that different societies have very different views of what is murder. In medieval Iceland it was not so bad to kill a person but it was really bad to pretend you didn't do it. Some other societies have blood feuds today. And so it turns out that the definition of murder is, well, socially condemned killing.<br />
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Societies have to, in order to function, curtail some degree of violence. People need some assurance that they will not be killed in their sleep by rivals, ambushed on the trail, etc. Murder definitions themselves tend to provide two functions, first to protect people from at least some forms of violence, and secondly to demarcate behavior so dangerous to society that it can justify a fight to the death. Thus the issue is not that murder is wrong (that is assuming the conclusion at best and a tautology at worst), but rather that the lines drawn regarding where and when killing becomes murder are drawn in a way to generally protect people.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-57721279035213728822013-05-03T03:51:00.000-07:002013-05-03T04:06:51.252-07:00Education, Sustainability, and Social ComplexityHaving spent a fair bit of time around the sustainability movement, one thing I notice is a sharp divide between two basic groups which map somewhat to a left and right wing of the movement. I will call them "technocrats" and "localists." The basic distinction is that technocrats believe that we can innovate our way to sustainability, while localists tend to think that sustainability lies in a more intimate, local, and spartan lifestyle, and that if we are honest with ourselves, we must do without many modern conveniences to achieve it. I tend to fall much more in the latter camp, but I also think that there are huge differences underlying the division.<br />
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Recently this came up on a <a href="http://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/821/what-are-the-sustainability-impacts-of-requiring-more-and-more-years-of-educatio">question</a> that had been bothering me for a while, regarding the interaction between unsustainable consumption and the levels of education that society requires from workers.<br />
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Rather than address this today, I want to offer some thoughts based on my study of history. These are dark thoughts but at some point they must be said. My view quite frankly is that sustainable living is not in our nature and that in the end, we humans will do what we have always done, which is to move from one near ecological disaster to the next.<br />
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The question of education though is interesting because it relates to a fairly large number of other social factors which go into supporting our unsustainable consumption.<br />
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As an overview:<br />
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<ul>
<li>There is a mutual causation between expectation of education and social complexity. Social complexity itself can be unsustainable as has shown by Prof. Joseph Tainter regarding a number of civilizations including both the Western and Eastern Roman Empires.</li>
<li>Social complexity has a significant number of sustainability costs both tangible and intangible.</li>
<li>Humans have rarely if ever lived sustainably, and the cases where long-term sustainability has existed, it has been through co-evolution of ecosystems.</li>
<li>The purpose of sustainable living then is to cultivate skills, resources, and communities which can continue to flourish as our current ecological crises continue to develop.</li>
</ul>
But before we begin, I want to put out a few thoughts on the athropogenic global warming hypothesis. The fact is, it seems more likely than not (looking at this as a historian) that AGW is happening, but given the fact that even local cycles last for hundreds or thousands of years, it seems that sixty years of really solid evidence doesn't get you much beyond just over the preponderance of evidence hurdle. One certainly cannot say that any scepticism is misguided, and certainly scepticism at the more alarmist claims seems relatively well founded given that the climate models do not agree well with historians' understandings of climate in medieval Europe (particularly in Northern Scandinavia, Greenland, and Iceland) for example. But I digress....<br />
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The first thing to note is that there is generally an assumption (which is totally ungrounded in the archaeological record) that primitive individuals were particularly easy on the environment. In fact this is not true. One can date bronze age Yamnaya tombs in part with some accuracy based on the initial ground level's soil degradation from overgrazing. Much of Europe was deforested early in order to supply iron to early armies. Similar examples occur almost everywhere there is wealth.<br />
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More interesting are the cases were a surprising level of sustainability was achieved by people who had very different views on sustainability than we do today. For example the aborigines hunted to extinction (given the pattern, probably deliberately) a species of monitor lizard larger than the Komodo Dragon as well as the three largest species of native crocodiles. In essence, the most sustainable civilizations worked carefully to co-evolve their ecosystems including sometimes eliminating species they didn't want there. There are however a few other examples. Rice farming is relatively sustainable because it works with natural flood plain nutrient cycles and in fact chemical fertilizers were first developed because wheat was depleting the soil and there were significant concerns that wheat eating peoples otherwise could not compete with rice-eating peoples.<br />
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The second point broadly speaking has to do with complexity, and in particular social complexity. Complexity is largely a function of specialization and regulation. One has a larger number of social roles, and an increasing amount of effort that goes into keeping those roles working together. An individual making an axe handle requires much less regulation than a factory of workers that produces axe handles on an assembly line. Complexity is the driving factor in ever-longer education times.<br />
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Complexity, as Tainter shows, is made possible only by heavy energy inputs. In other words, we can afford to have a large government, to grow crops in heavily mechanized ways etc because we have a surplus of energy. In Rome it was pillaged gold and silver that allowed them to effectively import agricultural surplus from elsewhere. Here we use fossil fuels.<br />
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The wishful thinking that we can hold onto a modern life in the face of disappearing resources is what I see as the key mistake of technocratic approaches to sustainability. The hard fact is that we cannot and the life that we live after we go through the current transition will be very different than it is now. It will likely be more spartan. So the question is what is worth conserving? Perhaps the answer lies in family and community, and in a simple lifestyle paying much more attention to what is important: place, family, and community.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-42762279569814012182013-04-27T06:09:00.004-07:002013-04-27T06:09:44.075-07:00What is wrong with affirmative action? A Communitarian CritiqueThis is a post about what we should be doing instead of affirmative action. It is my thesis that affirmative action was a flawed solution to the problem when it was first put forward, and changes in the economy have undermined it so that it is now a bad solution to the wrong problem.<br />
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Affirmative action as it exists today is what we get when people assume that society is built of isolated individuals and that we can overcome the legacy of segregation by helping some individuals escape that legacy. Black thinkers have often said that we need real effort to overcome the legacy of segregation and affirmative action is a way we tell ourselves we solve the problem but in reality we merely perpetuate it.<br />
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<h4>
Racial Segregation as Historically Unique</h4>
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The problems of affirmative action come first from a flawed understanding of segregation and past social role-enforcing legislation. The liberal narrative, based on the theory of autonomous individuals, is that segregation was a way of keeping individuals who happened to be black (or other racial minorities) down, and it thus gets compared to laws, at one time prevalent through the US, barring (pardon the pun) women from practising law or other professional careers.<br />
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This narrative misses the point of segregation at the time, and it draws a false equivalence between laws that restricted the careers of women to laws that restricted economic opportunities of blacks. The difference of course is that at the family level, men and women have always been economically interdependent. We get married, have kids, and pass what we have on to them. Thus changes in laws regarding gender and economics have relatively immediate effects. Changes to laws regarding racial restrictions on economic opportunities, however, have long shadows because intermarriage is not as common and was at the time banned in much of the country. Blacks and whites are thus not as economically interdependent as men and women are, and so capital does not get mixed up every generation.<br />
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<h4>
The Effect and Legacy of Segregation: Why Affirmative Action Fails</h4>
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Segregation is thus best understood not by its effects on individuals, but on families, neighborhoods, and communities. Segregation isolated families, limiting economic opportunities and providing effect to efforts by the wealthy to keep families trapped, dependent on work almost as if slavery never ended. You keep blacks separated, without opportunities, and dependent on jobs on the plantations, and they can never move up in the world. Their children will be dependent on jobs on the plantations, and the cycle will continue forever. With the end of slavery, freed slaves didn't have capital to start with. Segregation helped ensure that would never change.<br />
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Segregation thus needs to be understood as a way of ensuring that wealth and capital could not accumulate in minority communities rather than a question of animosity on a personal level. Additionally segregation was not only common in the South but at some points relatively common throughout the entire United States. It took different forms in the industrial North but if you substitute 'factory' for 'plantation' there the same overall statement holds.<br />
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In this regard "desegregation" never happened and most of the urban United States is quite segregated. The rural United States is far less segregated, mostly because of Mexican migrant workers who have worked for cash for a few years, only to buy land and tools with cash, and settle down to start new lives. To the extent that rural America is segregated (at least in the West), it is between sedentary individuals and migrants, not racially. The cities (particularly the big cosmopolitan cities) are very different and segregation in one form or another is common throughout the United States. One of the big divisions that must be understood in the affirmative action debate is between rural Republican supporters and urban Democratic Party supporters, neither of which really understand so well how the other side lives. Rural Republicans on average tend to be far more diversity-loving than urban Democrats for example, but also much more conscious of the effects if immigration.<br />
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Affirmative action was first passed when the primary urban economy was that of manufacturing. One could have a good solid career without a college education, but a college education meant a better chance at moving into management. Affirmative action should be understood in the context of desegregating a corporate workforce more than desegregating a society. What affirmative action did not do however was to directly address the flight of capital from predominantly black neighborhoods. While one might have hoped that the black manager would still live near the black floor workers, in reality what has happened is that people with money have moved to the suburbs and those without money have stayed where they are.<br />
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Thus affirmative action became a way of continuing to economically isolate predominantly black neighborhoods and communities while saying we are addressing this issue by helping a few individuals escape those neighborhoods and communities. Affirmative action thus becomes a way to tell young black students that getting an education and moving to the suburbs is a way to sell out and give up on the communities they grew up in.<br />
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Although race and poverty are historically deeply intertwined in the United States, continuing to emphasize that connection helps perpetuate programs which address the wrong problems. If we want to break the connection between race and poverty we must start by breaking the connection in our solutions and addressing urban poverty specifically, instead of trying to help individuals escape "their kind."<br />
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This idea seems outside the mainstream but it is a common thread from black thinkers from across the political spectrum. Jesse Jackson and Clarence Thomas are more on the same page here than they are with the so-called mainstream consensus, and while this view is a direct challenge to liberal theories of society, it addresses the realities on the ground.<br />
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<h4>
Why Racial Solutions are the Wrong Way to Go</h4>
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The typical defence of affirmative action is that it helps level the playing field. The problem however is that this presupposes that families don't matter but corporations do. People should be dependent on corporations for jobs, and family legacies are the primary problem to overcome. Racial preferences end up however dividing a society which should be unified in looking for deeper solutions to the problem of urban poverty. Racial preferences end up thus being how we say we are solving a problem even when they no longer make any sense.<br />
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Moreover the primary beneficiaries of the preferences still belong to family legacies. If your father was the first black man to attend Princeton, then when you attend, you get to count towards their statistics to show progress. None of your capital goes to address the problems of the poor black neighborhoods. But hey, it's progress, right?<br />
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What's missing of course in the discussion are the people left behind. We save blacks by screwing the black community.....<br />
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<h4>
Five Basic Necessities of a Good Life</h4>
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Our society is aggressively materialistic, and the left in my experience is even more materialistic than the right today. We are told you must have televisions, smart phones, computers, and the like. Some things (like a phone or a computer) may be functional necessities for access to services, and there may be other things which are functional necessities for living together in cities. However mere subsistence is not a good life, nor is meaningless consumption. Dorothy Day wrote significantly about this in the 1940's in the same pieces in which she critiqued social security.<br />
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The engines of "social democracy" which are at the heart of anti-poverty efforts from the New Deal on tend to assume that poverty is a function of a lack of subsistence and just not having enough immediate money to buy things with (and we dare not ask what people intend to buy with their welfare checks because that would be against their autonomy).<br />
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If that weren't bad enough, the other side to social welfare programs is exactly what Hilaire Belloc complained about. Means testing ensures that people cannot meaningfully be on public assistance and self-employed at the same time. Public assistance thus chains people to looking for a job and working a job. But hey, at least they can still buy stuff, right? In essence social welfare as we know it is disempowering, socially corrosive, and not conducive to either addressing poverty generally or to human flourishing.<br />
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What do we need to flourish beyond merely having access to food and water? I have identified five basic things: A home, a family, something to do, tools to do it with, and hope for a better future. Our current approaches to fighting poverty actively attempt to deprive people of all these five things. To the extent that poor people circumvent these rules by taking on small jobs for money under the table, they are fighting a totally corrupt and oppressive system and they should be commended.<br />
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By a home of course, I do not merely mean a place to stay. I mean a place one can call one's own. Ideally we should work to help people move into their own homes, though the practical details become more complicated especially once banks get involved. The home is the economic center of the household. It is the center of both economic production and consumption. Economic production in the household is one thing critically missing from anti-poverty efforts today.<br />
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Family comes in two important and interlocking aspects, but both form an important safety net. The first is the nuclear family. The nuclear family lives together, eats around the same table, and helps around the same house. The nuclear family forms the nucleus of the household.<br />
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As Elizabeth Warren has shown in "The Two Income Trap," family is the most essential safety net there is. Marriage forms very strong economic ties, and these are essential.<br />
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Extended family also is not to be underestimated as a safety net. Extended family provides a wide range of resources that is difficult to come by otherwise.<br />
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However the importance of family goes well beyond the safety net aspect. In addition to providing security, families provide social context and social contact, two things we need to flourish. Families must be cultivated among the poor.<br />
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The third is "something to do." We humans are economic and creative creatures as well as being social creatures. Idleness causes a great malaise in the spirit.<br />
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Of course I don't mean that merely a way to pass one's time. I mean there is a need to do something creative and productive, and ideally one which is hooked into the other four elements. This can, I suppose, be a mere hobby but it is better if it is a family business.<br />
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Such a business cannot exist without ownership of tools.<br />
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The goal of all of this is to have security in the present and a hope for a better future. <br />
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<h4>
Rethinking Education</h4>
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We are excessively credentialist today, far more than we ever have been. People go to school to get credentials more often than to get education, and this is particularly true in business school. If you are going there to get the piece of paper, then the fact is the education is worth less than the piece of paper the diploma is printed on.<br />
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Education has thus become a way to suck money out of the middle class and transfer control over the economy more and more to the super-wealthy.<br />
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If that wasn't bad enough, our public school system is designed to look like a great equalizer while it in fact perpetrates massive class distinctions. More and more funding gets shifted onto the communities, leaving wealthier neighborhoods with far better schools than poor neighborhoods. Our education system claims to equalize things, but in fact it just perpetuates class distinctions, many of which are closely tied to the legacy of slavery and segregation.<br />
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And yet there is hope. In the knowledge economy, open source software and other things are becoming more common, representing a real rise of a Distributist social order over a Capitalist one, often by people who have been left out of the economy. Right now this is a phenomenon of the middle class, and the challenge is to help poor families reach into this world as well.<br />
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To this end, I think it is worth noting that most of our education infrastructure is not particularly useful. It is true that learning math and reading is important to these things but only to a point. I have argued elsewhere that double entry accounting systems are largely transcriptions onto paper of accounting systems designed for illiterate and innumerate peasants. Education does not equal intelligence.<br />
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The approach forward must be one which stresses apprenticeships and self-study, along with guidance of mentors. Most of the knowledge industries can be managed in this way. However for this to work people must grow up around tools. Increasing access to tools and facilities is thus the primary work that must be done. Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-18932929731424809892013-03-15T20:25:00.001-07:002013-03-15T20:25:54.700-07:00An alternative to Liberalism, part 1, post 1: Introduction and some DefinitionsThis is in part a critique of OzConservative's <a href="http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2010/08/chapter-1-liberalism-as-orthodoxy.html">insightful critique</a> of liberalism and in part an expansion. My critique is somewhat nuanced, and is not necessarily a refutation of what he says. In many ways I go beyond the piece I am replying to, while in others I may not go as far.<br />
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My overall thesis is that liberal philosophy is built on two fundamental pillars, autonomy theory and technocracy. Autonomy theory confuses descriptive truths about human existence with prescriptive recommendations, and thus effects a bit of a slight of hand. The real problem though is when this is combined with technocracy, namely the idea that social progress approximates technological progress and therefore we can invent our way out of problems. These twin ideas form the heart and soul of liberalism, and they can be shown to be as sexist, for example, as anything that has come before.<br />
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Finally I will try to offer something of an alternative. It is worth noting that this is not the only alternative, and it will be drawn from pagan traditions both in the Classical world and Northern Europe. In this regard this places me much closer to the Catholic and Orthodox thinkers I know than to the Protestant ones I know. The major difference is that in rejecting Christianity and other internationalist religions, I am free to reject the idea of a single world authority.<br />
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But before we begin it is important to be clear about the nature of social constructs. Liberals often call things "social constructs" to dispute their binding nature. Social constructs however can be quite binding. For example, there is no innate difference between a twenty dollar bill and a five dollar bill. They are printed with different designs. The relative value is socially constructed. We are not really free, however, to just decide that five dollar bills are worth fifteen times what a twenty dollar bill is. Moreover the entire liberal economic system would collapse if social constructs were done away with. Money, for example, couldn't exist. Many social constructs are thus built on social imperatives and so we can't do without them.<br />
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In part two I will discuss autonomy theory, and an alternative based on Greek and Norse paganism. My thesis here is that humans are necessarily self-authors, but working in a context defined by culture and validated by others. This context provides subtext as well and it suggests a very different way to think about identity, that we should identify with our works and actions rather than with our emotions or thoughts. Viewed from this way, self-authorship is a fact of life and can neither be enhanced nor repressed, and the disagreement with modern liberal thought is one of quality vs quantity. Where modern liberal thought tends to seek to expand the scope of self-authorship, a very different, and more traditional approach is to expand the ownership of works within a domain.<br />
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In part three, I will discuss technocracy, and alternatives to this approach as well. Technocracy will be dissected regarding the actual, measurable harms that it causes, particularly in medicine, and will be discussed in terms of corporate and political machinery as well. An alternative will be provided which will look at social systems not as machines but as organic systems. In passing a more traditional alternative will also be discussed, namely the tendency to anthropomorphize everything (in this view the natural world is like a person, as is the state, the family, the war-band, etc), and the idea that this may not be such a bad thing.<br />
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In part four, I will take issue with the basic historical narrative offered by liberalism, and look at two very specific examples of cases where the facts don't meet the narrative, namely women's position in ancient Athens and the reformation in Europe.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-20385341250345259312012-12-10T04:10:00.001-08:002012-12-10T04:10:13.675-08:00Why DOMA section 3 Should be Struck DownThe Defence of Marriage Act has three sections, the first lays out the reasons for the act, the second exempts same-sex marriage from the requirements of the full faith and credit clause (note that recognition of marriage is not required under that clause anyway and so it effectively does nothing), and the third defines marriage as one man and one woman for purposes of federal law.<br />
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I see section 3 of DOMA as a theft of responsibility from the states, which generally otherwise get a free hand in defining family law for their residents. Once marriage is made into a federal issue then the federal government can steer the states on the matter. The DOMA is itself not too threatening in this regard since it is only one criteria added. However, if in the future, other criteria are added, navigating the state and federal marriage codes could become quite complicated and states would have every incentive just to incorporate federal law by reference, thus depriving states of sovereignty in this area.<br />
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To be sure DOMA could be struck down in a very bad way, in a way depriving the states of their sovereignty in this issue. I don't think think that will happen because I don't think the court will want to dive into such a contentious issue right now and upset so many state's laws, and so any victory against DOMA which is in line with a court.<br />
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Some things, such as eligibility to marry, should be between a state and her people, not between the federal government and the people. The size and scale of social machinery are the principle threat to family and tradition and for this reason whatever the federal government is capable and competent to defend, marriage is not on that list.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-34924658920640174512012-11-26T02:53:00.002-08:002012-11-26T02:53:21.635-08:00Social subsidiarity in Balinese societyAs mentioned my son is learning about Bali in social studies. The <a href="http://elfishpolitics.blogspot.com/2012/11/sacred-space-and-cosmology-in-bali.html">last post</a> discussed the way that sacred space is woven into all aspects of the Balinese life-world. This post will discuss social organization.<br />
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This gave me the chance to introduce my son to Aristotle's ideas of social structure, as well as to explain largely how the society works using subsidiarity as a principle, namely the idea of a larger order dependent on autonomous smaller orders for its existence.<br />
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In Bali, the two large orders are caste and town (Pura adat). The castes follow standard Hindu rules, though due to sound shifts, V's are changed to W's (so Vishnu is called Wishnu, and the Vasya are the Weisya).<br />
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The costs and benefits of the Hindu caste system are too numerous to go into here. Whole books could be written on the subject, but two points are worth noting. First caste stands in the way of self-sufficiency. Different kinds of labor are divided by caste such that one cannot achieve much without working with others of different castes. Thus one important aspect is that the caste system trades independence for interdependence and thus ensures that society must always work together. Instead of an undifferentiated mass of individuals as we are used to thinking of society in the West, Hindu society aggressively partitions society and apportions members of it with lots in life. This may be explored in a future post.<br />
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However the major focus of this post will be the town. As an economy that was up until very recently dependent on rice agriculture for survival, most Balinese come from an agricultural background. Even today rice farming is a very important both economically and culturally to the island although tourism is the main industry on the island these days. The primary form of farming is that of small rice paddies, periodically flooded based on water availability. Water management is a central communal focus.<br />
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<h4>
Family and Neighborhood</h4>
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The fundamental unit in any society is the married household. Married households are societies in miniature and they are the primary method of passing cultural expressions and values onto children. As in most societies these are often multi-generational and there may be several generations living under one house. However in general, only married child is allowed to stay in the home of the parents and inherit the living quarters. Other sons must go out and build their own, while daughers move into their husbands houses upon marriage.<br />
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Each married household itself must belong to the banjar through the husband's membership. The banjar is the smallest social/governmental unit in Balinese society, being similar to a neighborhood association but with a wider range of power and responsibilities than is seen in the West. The Banjar is thus properly seen as an organ of government in Balinese society and a fundamentally democratic one (Bali is traditionally, like most Hindu societies, a monarchy but one with local democratic institutions).<br />
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The banjar thus constitutes the first of the fundamental public institutions of <br />
Balinese society.<br />
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<h4>
Farming Association and Water Management</h4>
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The second fundamental institution is that of the Subak, or farming association. The Subak is actually more akin to a water district, and the primary responsibility is to coordinate schedules for flooding the paddies so that there is enough water for every member. Because there may be some distance between the paddy and dwelling, the subak and the banjar may not be coterminous. A given banjar may consist of people in different subak2, while a given subak may consist of people in different banjar2.<br />
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One can see in this approach something akin to the guild system of Europe. Here the various professional individuals work together to divide up scarce resources and ensure that everyone is productive.<br />
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The Subak and Banjar essentially form the warp and weft of village organization, and are woven into the municipal government. These various villages would then form the kingdom of Bali which into historical times was a monarchy (and the royal family is still well respected and carries with them a great deal of moral authority, as far as I can tell).<br />
<br />Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-9459146685952251452012-11-22T06:56:00.001-08:002012-11-22T06:56:01.675-08:00Sacred Space and Cosmology in BaliBeing in Jakarta (on the island of Java) right now, my oldest son is studying Bali in social studies. The material he has been given is hopelessly confusing to folks who are not familiar with anthropology but fortunately I was able to help him make some sense of it.<br />
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I intend to publish two blog posts about my interpretations of what I have seen in his books. These dovetail with a lot of my own anthropological studies and consequently it is important. The first, this post, will be on sacred space and cosmology in Bali. The second, to be written soon, will cover subsidiarity and family/town structure.<br />
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I write about these topics because I believe that they have a lot to teach modern mankind. We have lost our sense of sacred space, and are isolated by servitude dressed up as freedom. If we begin to understand our condition through the eyes of those who hold what we have lost, we can begin to rebuild. It may not be along the lines of any specific group, but we can't start until we know what we are missing.<br />
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Unlike Islamic sacred cosmology which is global in scope and centered on Mecca everywhere, Balinese Hindu cosmology is local in scope and kept very close to the human experience. In this way, it provides I think a very human and earthy sense of what has been lost. <br />
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One of the important foundational principles I have found over and over is the fact that in traditional cosmologies that horizontal space is isomorphic with vertical space. This means that horizontal space models and vertical space models are often interchangeable. As in the Vedic coronation ritual, this can be circular model, or as with the directional system of Bali it can be linear.<br />
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<h4>
The Four Directions and the Center of the World</h4>
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Balinese villages are laid out according to four directions which are not necessarily perpendicular. These directions are defined rather by natural layout and sacred space. The primary axis runs from the observer to the peak of Mount Agung, a stratovolcano and highest point on the island. It also runs the other direction towards the sea. This makes Mount Agung the directional pole, or center of the world to traditional Balinese society.<br />
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Mount Agung is also metaphorically and physically up, from the perspective of the village. Not only is it a tall mountain peak but it is traditionally seen as the dwelling place of the gods, much like Mount Olympus in Greece. Away from Mount Agung is the sea, which is seen as physically and metaphorically below the observer, and the dwelling place of the dead. Thus the axis from Mount Agung to the sea is also the axis from the heavens to the realms under the waves and under the earth, and thus a vertical axis. This is important in the Three Temples section below.<br />
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There are two other directions which are important in Balinese society: East and West, which address the rising and setting of the sun. These directions are not necessarily perpendicular (and in fact can be parallel to in rare cases) the main axis towards/away from Mount Agung.<br />
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<h4>
The Three Temples</h4>
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Every village has three temples attached to it, which make up a model of sacred space along three planes. These correspond generally to a universal model generally, and an Indo-European spacial model specifically which is of course not surprising given the fact that it is fundamentally Hindu in outlook<br />
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The most important temple is the Pura Desa, or "Village Temple" which is located in the center of the town. This is dedicated to Visnu, but spacially is positioned in the center of human activity, and therefore must be seen in two overlapping contexts.<br />
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The first such context is that this is the temple of the human domain, much like Midgard in Norse mythology. This is on the horizontal plane, in the area of human activity, and it is worth noting that Visnu alone of the Hindu gods was assumed to have come to earth and lived life as a human twice, as King Rama of the Ramayana and Lord Krishna of the Mahabharata and the Krishnayana. The connection that Vishnu has then with the human condition is different in quality and kind than the other main Hindu gods. Therefore this has to be the first interpretation as to the place of the Pura Desa.<br />
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The second context however is that the center in Vedic ritual is associated with kingship and sovereignty. This is true in both the Asvamedha and the Vedic coronation ritual. It is worth noting that the Vedic Raj, or King was always from the warrior or Ksatrya caste, and also Vishnu, in both of his avatars, was a Ksatrya. Thus the Pura Desa represents a point of social order, and the presence of the kingly influence, in Balinese village life.<br />
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The second type of temple is the Pura Dalem, or the temple to the dead, represented directly away from Mount Agung from the reference point of the village. The temple of the dead is thus metaphorically below the village and thus corresponds to the underworld. While Hinduism had, by historical times, moved away from the idea of an underworld of the dead and towards a system of reincarnation only broken by the self-deification that comes with identifying with the universal (the Upanishads say that the gods became gods through this process), this shows a trace of the older cosmology has not died away. In Hinduism the underworld is also the world of the Asuras and hence a place of riches and gold, from which prosperity flows. This leads to a central ambivalence towards the underworld found across the Indo-European world. On one hand, it is a spooky place full of often hostile entities, but on the other it is the place from which all prosperity comes. Certainly ritually this means that the dead in Balinese society dwell below the realm of human activity.<br />
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As a side note, outside of India and Hinduism, most Indo-European traditions had a great deal of variety regarding possible lives after death, and it is also possible that these were not seen as mutually exclusive, and that one might be reincarnated and at the same time spend an eternity in the realm of the dead. This sort of ambiguity is most prevalent in Norse heathen religion, but is clearly present in Greek myth as well, and the Greeks had a very lively relationship with their dead. Daniel Ogden has written a fair amount on that topic and I highly recommend his works on Greco-Roman necromancy in this context.<br />
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The final type of temple found in relation to every town is the Pura Puseh, which is located towards the center of the world and the dwelling place of the gods. Thus it is metaphorically above the realm of human activity. Here the divine ancestors and the gods are worshipped.<br />
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Overall these two aspects serve to orient village life in Bali around sacred space and cosmology. In essence the sacred model of the world is forced into one's mind at every turn and it must be ever-present.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-11146721885799211192012-11-22T01:18:00.003-08:002012-11-22T01:18:49.407-08:00Improvised turkey stuffingRight now I am living in Indonesia. One thing about being overseas is the fact that it is not necessarily always easy to get all the same ingredients one is used to working with. So today being thanksgiving I cooked a turkey.<br />
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No, I couldn't get all the stuff I would normally use for stuffing. So I improvised. And no, I didn't measure anything.<br />
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What did I add?<br />
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<ul>
<li>Day-old rice (this is what you'd make fried rice out of because freshly cooked rice gets too soggy) How much? Well I added what I had. </li>
<li>2 Granny smith apples, diced</li>
<li>Lemon juice (1 1/2 lemons was arguably a little too much, so maybe one lemon next time I try to recreate this?)</li>
<li>Cashews. No idea how much. Maybe 100g?</li>
<li>Ginger root, just a bit</li>
<li>Soy sauce to taste</li>
<li>Tumeric leaves, 3 smallish ones</li>
</ul>
I tasted a little bit on the edge that was fully cooked and arguably a little more tart than I wanted but really quite tasty. <br />
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Tumeric is one of those things you can grow in pots indoors in the US if you can buy some fresh tumeric root at an Asian market.<br />
Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-59495007940328972042012-11-12T23:24:00.000-08:002012-11-12T23:24:08.365-08:00A Critical View of the Gay Rights Movement.As time goes on I have become fairly disillusioned with the gay rights movement. It isn't so much that I disagree on issues so much as I disagree on a vision of the society of the future and the overall trajectory our culture needs to take to survive what I see are coming crises. Those of us who are traditionalists find it very hard to support a movement which is fundamentally hostile towards tradition generally, especially when this extends not only those traditions minimally necessary for their causes. The failure to embrace traditions and traditionalist defences of their causes means that those of us who do feel there is a real need to retraditionalize and yet find through our traditions that we agree with the gay rights movement on some issues must choose between what we feel is a fair application of traditions in support of a group that would prefer that we don't exist, or fighting anti-traditional forces at an unacceptable human cost.<br />
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The problem with an anti-traditionalist view is that it fundamentally isolates people from eachother, destroys all sense of place, and thus stunts human flourishing. There is a rising traditionalist movement both among the left and right of American politics, and I place my hope there instead of in the anti-traditionalist progressive wing.<br />
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<h4>
The Traditionalist Defence of Same-Sex Marriage and Gay Rights Hostility</h4>
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In the primary traditionalist view, marriage is about children as it is universally across cultures and history. The basic issue anthropologically is that men and women are differently situated regarding reproduction and so societies are generally forced to choose between women bearing sole responsibility for childraising and creating a social and legal framework for sharing such support between men and women. That social and legal framework is marriage and is more universally ritualized than is saying farewell to the dead.[1]<br />
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This view is echoed in Aristotle's "Politics" where he suggests that there are three layers to society, namely the individual, the family household, and the polis. The household's main role is that of creating children and passing culture on to them so they can form households that are within the union of the polis. Of course in addition, the household is an economic unit, and one which supports the elderly in most societies and times, but all of this is put in the primary service of the raising of children.<br />
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The family household is the bedrock of the state. It provides a stable foundation for raising children and this also provides the basic unit of grass-roots culture of all sorts. Strong families then produce productive citizens, and this is why Cicero said (in "The Republic") that one should not turn one's parents in to the state for crimes because the state needs strong families more than it needs criminal justice.<br />
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It is worth noting of course that neither Aristotle nor Cicero likely had any problem with male-male sex per se, and it isn't clear what Greek attitudes were towards female-female sex were, though there is some evidence for widespread occurrences of this in religious contexts in vase paintings and the fact that the religious organizations that gave rise to Sappho's erotic poetry were also found throughout the Greek world. Of course the Greek world was full of rules regarding who could have sex with whom and what sorts of acts were acceptable, as are all cultures.<br />
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From this perspective then, marriage creates a family household with characteristics which make it uniquely qualified for childrearing. These include essentially a form of corporate existence which can outlast the death of any single member without necessarily there being a loss of property, custodial rights and responsibilities to children, and the like. But children are the future and they are the focus.<br />
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The decline of the American family then occurs through a series of stages including the rise of the ideal of an independent retirement, the shift in voting from per household to per adult. As time goes on however, we have in my lifetime supplanted more and more of the traditional family structures with institutions, changing from neighborhoods and children playing together to factory farm day-care/preschool/public school systems chained together with ever-lengthening expectations of years that children shall go through that system. And we expect schools to play ever-increasing roles in culture war issues and many of the huge battles over abstinence-only sex ed, and portraying homosexuality as normal in public schools is a result of this. Add to this ever-increasing social services supplanting parent roles so both parents can work and the elderly can have an independent, if lonely, retirement in the name of not being a burden to anyone. This decline of the family and replacing it with government institutions is very concerning and fortunately there is a small, growing traditionalist movement which is seeking to reverse this to some extent. This includes a nacient domesticity movement as well as a general increase in multi-generational households particularly as immigrants come to the US.<br />
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From this perspective, same-sex marriage is not necessarily a bad thing. It provides, for children who are in de facto same-sex households anyway, the same legal protections regarding continuity of their environment that those children have in opposite-sex households. If marriage is about the children then the question of same-sex marriage needs to be about the impacts on the children not the impacts on the parents, and if marriage enables better support of the children, then we shouldn't disadvantage the children just because they are raised in a household where both main contributors are the same sex.<br />
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Such an argument has a potential to broaden the appeal of same-sex marriage as a cause but every time I have suggested it, I find myself under attack mostly from the very advocates of the cause I am suggesting could be furthered there. It is hard to understand why advocates for a position would be actively hostile to people reaching out to others on behalf of that position, but I think the issue is that it is easy to see this as dangerously close, from their perspective, to the idea that marriage is about procreation. I don't think it is a problem to suggest that marriage is about procreation cross-culturally, though, or that we are in a relatively unique period of history where a combination of factors are temporarily weakening that interest including the fact that we have had a huge social subsidy through fossil fuels which has largely fueled the modern age.<br />
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I think that these are almost undeniably true, and that as energy prices continue to rise many things we take for granted including the potential for an independent retirement for most people. Our consumption of medical technology today is also unsustainable, as is the apparent middle-class boom in wealth caused by housing prices continuing to rise.[2] The very things which enable us to see this as an issue today are not guaranteed to be around far into the future. Consequently I think there is some wisdom in avoiding the arrogance which suggests that all previous generations have done things wrong.<br />
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The fact is, tradition is dynamic. Aspects of tradition can be repurposed and traditional rites can change greatly in a short amount of time.[3] The lack of a traditional framework in modern culture has a great deal of cost in terms of mental health.[1] Consequently one of the promises of the movement to retraditionalize society and in particular the family is that this improves sustainability long-run. Tradition thus doesn't necessarily mandate certain viewpoints, but instead provides a narrow rhetorical framework for arguing about them, for example making the children the focus of any debate on same-sex marriage. The fact though is that while this is constraining it offers a sense of place and stability that is lost as tradition atrophies. One major reason for the New Age movement may be a reaction to the loss of our vital traditions.<br />
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The failure to accept that people may embrace a traditionalist view of family and yet support same-sex marriage means that traditionalists such as myself find ourselves struggling on one hand for the idea that children need the support that marriage offers in same-sex households and also the fact that the proponents of same-sex marriage believe that tradition is what holds us back from social "progress." But it is a funny sort of progress which uproots people from their towns, and weakens families, robbing people of a sense of place in the name of "freedom," and it is a funny sort of freedom that does not include a right to one's traditions. I have even heard opponents to my views suggest that the sustainability issue isn't real because we can solve it by building large numbers of nuclear reactors. Great, supporting same-sex marriage requires ensuring many more Chernobyls and Fukushimas..... If that is the price, no thanks.<br />
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But I think we are offered here a false choice. Another option is that we focus on reconnecting the family with the raising of children and the care of the elderly and worry less about the specific structures of other people's households in that area, and recognize that same-sex marriage may well be a way to help do this if the context is right. The major problem is that non-traditionalists (which comprise the city folk, both right and left) tend to be hostile towards the role of marriage in raising kids. There are a number of reasons for this, some more legitimate than others, but this is the backdrop under which this dialog occurs.<br />
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Saving marriage in its traditionalist sense does not necessarily mean banning same-sex marriage. It does however mean that adult children should live near their parents to the extent possible, and that mutual support and assistance in raising future generations should be offered, but fighting for this means fighting against the tide on both sides of the political spectrum.<br />
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<h4>
The Gay Rights Movement as Homophobic</h4>
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The second major problem I see with the gay rights movement is that it is fundamentally homophobic insofar as gays and lesbians are treated as fundamentally other. This sets up a sort of passive-aggressive acceptance of homosexuals on the basis that they will never quite match society's definitions of "normal." The idea is that gays and lesbians must have equal rights because they do not conform to societal models of normality. Because they are fundamentally other, they cannot be normalized, just accepted. We will never see a market for a dyke barbie playset because, we are assured, homosexuals are a small minority for biological reasons.<br />
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This is not the only area of course where we see this sort of passive-aggressive acceptance of "the other." It is common in race and gender as well. For example, there is a significant gender disparity in medical textbooks on figures representing health and disease, with male figures more often representing health and female figures more often representing disease.[4] One can find similar racial disparities in many areas.[5] For example, Time Magazine darkened OJ Simpson's mug shot in the 1994 issue focusing on the murder of Nicole Simpson and OJ's arrest. The subtle standards of normality are brutally pervasive and all rhetoric must be read in their context.<br />
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That context of normality in modern culture is defined by Disney movies for little girls, by Barbie and Ken, by romance movies generally, and by bridal magazines. There are industries upon industries which make money essentially selling heterosexuality to young girls and young women. Therefore heterosexuality is normal, and people who deviate from that are not. The cultural argument then boils down to "are they bad? Or is it that they can't help it?" The basic assumptions accepted on both sides of the debate are deeply homophobic and seek to constraint as many people as possible to a life of exclusive heterosexuality, and in this context "gays are born that way" carries with it a subtext of "you aren't born that way, are you?"<br />
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Of course the reason is that once you reject this false choice, many more unpleasant questions start surfacing and the issue becomes very difficult to contain. The idea that homosexual sex might actually be normal within limits for most people forces back the questions relating to marriage, why we fight against it so hard, and so forth. There are however growing numbers of people (myself included) who reject sexual orientation labels because we see them as social control mechanisms, and this brings us back to the fundamental questions of same-sex marriage but from a viewpoint so far unlike what goes on in political discourse that it just can't be reconciled with either major camp.<br />
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It is as if our society presents us with two boxes, marked "gay" and "straight" and tells us to get in one and stay in it. If we look around there is a small box hidden behind those two labelled "Bi" but anyone who goes in that box gets treated with suspicion by everyone else. But the natural condition is not to choose any of the boxes. Many societies have woven homosexual sex through their societal structures in various ways and therefore I conclude that virtually everyone is capable of having fulfilling sexual relationships with people both of the same sex and opposite. This may feel intuitively wrong in our culture, but we cannot separate the industries and social forces which construct our taboos from those feelings.<br />
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I contend that until one moves beyond the general hostility towards homosexuality in our culture, a hostility which deeply pervades even the gay rights movement, we cannot really discuss on even terms the question of same-sex marriage, and once we do the issue will be so heavily transformed we will no longer be able to recognize it. I think, however, if you separate the traditionalist framing of the issue from hostility towards homosexuality it makes more sense than the anti-traditionalist view. The only question left is which direction to take it, while focusing on rebuilding the family as the bedrock cultural institution and taking back authority from the state to vest in the family.<br />
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Fleshing out a view of human sexuality which works from a cross-cultural and trans-historical perspective is very difficult. However, I think it is clear generally that our views of sexuality and the biological nature of sexual orientation in our culture do not actually work when studying most cultures and times, particularly those cultures which have normalized significant same-sex sexual contact in some contexts.[6]<br />
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<h4>
Notes:</h4>
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[1] Grimes, Ronald. "Deeply into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage"<br />
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[2] Warren, Elizabeth. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A">"The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class"</a><br />
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[3] Turner, Victor. "The Ritual Process."<br />
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[4] Davis-Floyd, Robbie. "Birth as an American Rite of Passage, 2nd Edition"<br />
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[5] One can see an argument that race provides a critical difference between Brandenburg v. Ohio and Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project on the question of when advocating to or on behalf of a terrorist organization is Constitutionally protected.<br />
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[6] For example, the Sambia of New Guinea require that boys become men by fellating tribal elders, see note 1 above. Also Aristotle discusses the use and limits of pederasty in ancient Athens while Plutarch practically calls this, along with wife-swapping, the backbone of Spartan society in "The Life of Lycurgus". Note also that males having penetrative sex with male slaves was common in much of the ancient world. The imposition of the Levitican prohibition by Christians in Late Antiquity was largely unusual at that time.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-24488923923599378042012-11-07T00:40:00.000-08:002012-11-07T00:40:15.516-08:00Meditations on MachineryThis is a response to <a href="http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2012/11/life-under-compulsion-the-billows-teaching-machine/">Life Under Compulsion: The Billows Teaching Machine</a><br />
which I felt was too long to put in the comments. I highly recommend the entire Life Under Compulsion series at Front Porch Republic. <span id="goog_985557452"></span><span id="goog_985557453"></span> <br />
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The first time I started to really question the machine it was on reading what is probably one of the greatest (and most unusual and underrated) pieces of feminist literature of all time: "Birth as an American Rite of Passage" by Robbie Davis-Floyd, where she criticizes in great detail the Modernist concept of the body-as-machine (she is a major proponent of natural childbirth). I began to slowly realize how fragile the basis of modernism was at that moment as I sought what would replace it. Her book clearly is quite complementary to this essay here.<br /><br />But then I kept noticing how this falls in place. As far back as we can see, the body is seen as a universe in miniature. If the universe is a machine, so is the body. If the universe is like a tree, so is the body. The metaphors are always the same. This is why Plato's tripartite structure of the person relates to society, and by extension to the divine (leading to the idea of the Trinity rather directly, practically in Plato's time). To the Platonists, the body was the universe, and the seven fold planetary bands of differentiation were present in the self as well as the world, as was the band of sameness (to borrow the model of Timaeus). Interestingly this reduces astrology largely to a "science of synchronized clocks." If the universe and the body are on some level the same, then we can deduce certain things about the body by looking to the movements of the planets. The changes in the bands of difference in the world correspond with changes in the bands of difference in the self.<br /><br />But then I read "The Sacred and the Profane" by Mircea Eliade, and noted that he pointed out the modernist secular view of the house is that it is a machine, and that this is removed from the traditional sacred nature of the dwelling, and I realized that Eliade was partly wrong. The secular view of the house was still traditionally the body made large and the universe in miniature, just that everything is now a machine instead of a tree, or the sky. This view of the world, society, and the self as mechanical systems is thus to a good part what is wrong with the world today.<br />
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So what should replace this "everything as machine" approach? How do we move towards a more organic way of living? <br />
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Readers will have their own ideas or perhaps will find them. Personally I have come to enjoy a different model, that of "everything as ecosystem." The human body is an ecosystem not only of cells but of various microbes, etc. Many of the processes such as bone remodelling can be thought of not so much as rigidly mechanical but rather as ecological flows. This works in part because just as in an ecosystem everything fills more than one function, this is true also in our bodies. Bones for example, function as calcium reservoirs, structural supports, energy storage areas, and immune organs.<br />
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But the large point is that this organic model of spontaneous, highly complex order is one which supports a vitality of life that is not present elsewhere. This is not quite the Hayek's spontaneous order. It lacks the mechanical sense of liberalism. Rather it is something else.<br />
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But the metaphors we attach to have tremendous influence on our thought processes. If we think in terms of ecosystems instead of machines, then perhaps we can move our own lives and the communities we are members of in the right directions.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-92046450754298506592012-11-03T08:05:00.000-07:002012-11-04T04:50:24.018-08:00Towards a Distributist principle of Separation of Interdependent Concerns, or Multidimensional SubsidiarityOne thing that sometimes annoys me as a Heathen and a Distributist is that because Distributism arose from within the English Catholic tradition, some people think Distributists must support Catholicism or at least a religion like it (Orthodox Christianity and the like). The argument then is that a state must support a policy of discouraging a specific act not because of identifiable social harms but rather because such an act is sinful. Because I don't accept the Christian view of sin, I cannot agree. I do however agree that many people find such a view useful and I don't think they should be denied this.<br />
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I see society not as a series of concentric circles starting with the individual, then family, then community, then state, but rather as a multidimensional tapestry, woven in different directions, with each of us as a thread weaving in and out around the others.<br />
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I recognize that this post breaks with Distributist tradition in important ways. Many Distributists would like to see the polis closely fused with religion and proponents of this approach rightly point to the fact that most communities in fact are highly integrated in these areas, but large territorial units do need to accommodate diversity, and this is nothing new. The Roman Empire was very pluralistic (unless, like the Jews and Christians, you refused to participate in the pagan traditions around the military and therefore would not assist with the defence of the state), as was the Archaemenid Empire --- Cyrus is mentioned in Isaiah as something like a Messiah for allowing the Jews to return home, but Cyrus was a worshipper of Marduk and conquered Babylon using religious politics as his primary strategy, and those who followed him were mostly Zoroastrians.<br />
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Religious pluralism is thus at least possible even going along ancient models. The specific place of that pluralism though is not well agreed upon in Distributist thought. I have decided to offer my own proposal then, which looks at social context as being several interdependent "dimensions" each depending on and pervading the others. This is thus not so much about separation of church and state as it is interdependence of religious and public order, and of the institutions which support them. The nature of that interdependence may need some further discussion to flesh out however.<br />
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In the development of a response to this issue, I came to the view that there was a larger principle at stake, namely that different social spheres required different organizational dimensions to address, and that the institutions that populate and support these spheres have duties to all the others. Thus rather than the principle of separation of church and state in liberal philosophy, I end up with the idea that the church, state, guilds, families, etc. should remain generally neutral towards the other players in the other dimensions but support the functions of the other dimensions as they can. Church and state are then interdependent rather than independent and each has a duty to the other. <br />
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Additionally the occasional calls for moralizing of the state I think miss important lessons from the Middle Ages and how the hegemony of the Catholic Church set up the very power struggles that lead to the Reformation. Throughout the Middle Ages, there was a delicate dance of power between kings and churchmen, often over money, sometimes with temporary victories on each side. This delicate dance of power can perhaps be seen to be the source of the Reformation, where the ideas of Martin Luther became a staff with which nobles and kings could beat the church with. Understanding the Reformation in terms of this struggle goes a long way towards understanding both why it was successful primarily in areas less subject to Roman acculturation, and why many other laws accompanied the Reformation, such as bans on use of certain herbs in brewing beer (under rhetoric almost identical to the modern "war on drugs" no less).<br />
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I believe instead that it is possible to recognize that human flourishing is best handled, not by dividing social contexts into mutually exclusive spheres like we often do in modern society, but by recognizing that different aspects of human flourishing require different organizations to support them, and that these organizations are as interdependent in society as they aspects of human life are in the individual. What arises from this is a very different notion of separation of church and state than we are used to.<br />
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Before I get into this, I expect that addressing social functions of religious groups will certainly ruffle feathers. I want to note that my thoughts there are largely tentative and that it is hoped that further discussions particularly with people who disagree with me, will help us all arrive at greater truth.<br />
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In my view, the goal of a pluralistic society can no longer be thrown away, nor should it be. Distributism is already making inroads into Neopagan and other non-Christian religious groups for the same reasons that Catholics adopt it, but where there is a search for roots with hands in the soil, there is also possibility of conflict over issues ranging from abortion to animal sacrifice. In a pluralistic society, some truce must be made. The Catholic will not wish to participate in a pagan animal sacrifice, and the pagan household will not wish to be forced to baptise their children.[1]<br />
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<h4>
The Importance of Social Context</h4>
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One central theme of distributism is the recognition of the basic anthropological truth that humans are largely defined by social context and that we best grow when we recognize we are not isolated individuals but rather parts of larger units. This isn't to say that the individual isn't important. In fact social contexts change over time in part because of the actions of individuals, but social context nourishes us, and when we are all alone in a crowd, we suffer. One point I am adding here is that government, alone, cannot create all aspects of social context, nor is it simply the household writ large. Many aspects of the household must be supported by non-government organizations acting with the support of the local government.<br />
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Of course people are imaginative and inventive. One of Victor Turner's major contributions to anthropology was the way in which the people he studied (the Ndembo tribe in Africa) tended to re-purpose religious rituals, so it is not at all true that individualism isn't an aspect.[2] It is just that the individual and the social context are both engaged in an eternal dance, each forming the other, and, we hope, nourishing the other.<br />
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In the spirit of addressing this social context, let's now turn our attention to fundamental social institutions. Each of these institutions is necessarily a cultural institution. One thing I would like to emphasize is that just as we might expect that there would be multiple trade guilds in a state, so too we should expect there may be many different religious communities. In the interest of proper human flourishing, the government should not take sides in conflicts between them.<br />
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The different spheres are then less independent than interdependent, and each sphere has duties to the others. I will look at the following spheres and their social organizations here:<br />
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<ol>
<li>Family life, organized into household</li>
<li>Commercial life, centered around guilds or other organizations</li>
<li>Religious life, organized into religious groups</li>
<li>Public order, organized by the state</li>
</ol>
It is assumed that subsidiarity applies to all levels. The extended family applies subsidiarity to households, and those to individuals. Each sphere has duties to the other spheres including enforcing subsidiarity appropriately. Of course significant abuses by smaller entities can mean larger entities may eventually have to take over (one example in modern history might be federal anti-discrimination statutes as a reaction to state-enforced segregation).<br />
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Each of these dimensions is a cultural dimension and it is fully dependent on the others, and must therefore consciously support the others.<br />
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<h4>
The Function of the Household and Family</h4>
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The household is the bedrock institution of any society. Children are begotten and raised in a household. The household is the primary force in transmitting culture on to the children and it is the primary influence in providing social context to children. In our modern world we have many forms of households, as has been the case forever. Some households will have one parent, and some two, for example, and whether the loss of one parent was due to divorce or death is perhaps secondary to the question of social support for the household itself.<br />
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I want to save questions like divorce or abortion for future posts, but I will note here that these are questions which have tremendous importance for households generally, as do issues of reproductive responsibility. (As a Heathen I am reasonably sure that my stances on issues like divorce or abortion will not be welcome to Catholics or Orthodox Christians, but I hope they will be thought-provoking.)<br />
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The household has may be seen as the meeting point of all dimensions of society, but in actuality the most local level of any other dimension meets all the others as well. Thus they serve multiple purposes towards every other dimension.<br />
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Households support the economic sphere in numerous ways including home-based businesses, members of the household holding or working other businesses outside the home, and choices in purchasing and consuming economic goods. One key challenge today is to bring consciousness today to such household choices.<br />
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Households support the state through their enculturing role in raising children, and encouraging good citizenship on the part of members, through contributing (through taxes) to the maintenance of public goods, through participation in bodies of government, through being available to defend the state when attacked and in numerous other ways.<br />
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Households support religious groups through participation and economic donation, but more important I think is the capacity of households to take part in discussing religious tradition, asking questions, challenging answers at times, and thus ensuring a greater understanding of that tradition when enculturing children into it. There are of course many other ways that household support religious groups.<br />
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(I have decided to skip the guild in this discussion because this area needs additional thought regarding how to better integrate into at least a transitional approach.)<br />
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<h4>
The Function of the Religious Community or Church</h4>
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For the purpose of this discussion, I will be talking only about the social benefits of religion. The spiritual benefits are the source of these social benefits, but for this discussion this is not relevant.<br />
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Religious community is important for a human sense of place for many reasons, and consequently it nourishes the family, trade sphere, and state. Religion is the fundamental basis for the way people think about the order of life and hence every other aspect of life, from the family to commerce to the state. Faith, not belief, orders everything, and tradition orders faith.<br />
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Religions provide two components necessary for a meaningful life: rite and mythos. Everyone has at least some of these and we order our lives around them.[3]<br />
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Both rites and mythoi provide narratives deeply steeped in human life and spiritual experience, which provide patterns for us to live in our life. The rites and mythoi provide an internal sense of order and this provides order not only for the individual but the family, the business, and the state.<br />
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In order to do its job properly, the religion needs relative independence from the sphere of public order. It must be at least partially detached from mere worldly concerns. The state may defer to the religious group on matters like marriage, but the religious group must be free to conduct rituals largely free from the interference of the state.<br />
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This is not to say that religious freedom is a blank check. Where religious practices threaten the ability to live together as a community, it may need to be abridged. Certainly one cannot allow one group to kidnap children of another group for human sacrifice or as brides or bridegrooms of their religious leaders, but a mere sense by one group that a practice is wrong is not enough to interfere with it.<br />
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Traditionally religious groups have typically provided additional support structures to families as well. Churches have fed the poor, grown food for the poor, arranged help for those who need it, and so forth. Such support structures have ranged from the seasonal Things in pagan Scandinavia to the Catholic Worker houses and farms. Thus religious groups not only order life but support and protect the family household.<br />
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Religious groups have a general obligation to support the family and the state, and to protect both from the other. They facilitate commerce by providing additional forums for social discussion. Religious organizations thus provide a philosophical, personal, and experiential ordering of all spheres of life which are not found directly in the other dimensions. Public order is not personal order, and not an order for life.<br />
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<h4>
The Function of the State</h4>
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The state exists to provide public order, and to prevent any single entity in any other sphere from becoming too big or powerful.<br />
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Cicero said that the basis of the law is that there are certain requirements for us to live together in cities.[4] This largely echoes Aristotle, who places the household at the center, and this is a path Cicero continues in his discussion of turning in family members for crimes.[5]<br />
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The state must take over at least the following concerns:<br />
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<ol>
<li>Encouraging just distribution of property, and ensuring that no other entity in other dimensions becomes too large or powerful</li>
<li>Protecting property rights of the household and members of the household from violence by other households</li>
<li>Running those pieces of public infrastructure which otherwise would require monopolies odious to the Distributist social order. This is a key difference between libertarianism with its religious faith in business and Distributism with its emphasis on community.</li>
</ol>
The responsibility of the state doesn't end there. The purpose of the state is to nourish and provide proper ordering for the other dimensions of society as entities in those areas interact with themselves. Business deals occur as matters of public order. In essence the state does everything needed to ensure the religious groups, the families, the guilds, the small businesses, etc. prosper and that the larger businesses do not get so powerful so as to threaten or distort the structure of society.<br />
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<h4>
Cross-Dimensional Concerns of Subsidiarity</h4>
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A state which is too large, or a trade guild which is too powerful, or a great aristocratic family can all threaten the social order. One important aspect of subsidiarity is the management of power and responsibility and the way to ensure that actions are taken where knowledge is local. A state which is too powerful will threaten religion and the family, as we see in modern America, A religion which is too powerful will threaten the state. Church and state fighting the hegemony of the other lead to the possibility of total victory by one side, such as in the Reformation in Germanic Europe and the British Isles. The large businesses too can distort the society (again see modern America for examples there).<br />
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Every dimension of society has a responsibility to push for subsidiarity in every other dimension. Churches must push for smaller states, states must push for smaller, more intimate and personal, churches. The megachurches of thousands of worshippers every Sunday must give way to the small congregation of perhaps a couple score of faithful. Powerful families must be reined in, powerful businesses must be reined in.<br />
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But through this approach we can have pluralism not only as the liberals suggest, but real, deep, and vital pluralism of culture and tradition. Our immediate social circles can be smaller but more personal, intimate, and supportive. As the immature ecosystem contains large numbers of poorly supported plants which eventually, through succession, get replaced by smaller numbers of more productive, mutually supporting plants, so too our communities can thrive and prosper.<br />
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In the next post, I will go over my view of human flourishing from my heathen tradition and parallels in Hindu and Catholic thought. <br />
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Notes<br />
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[1] This was required legally in most of the Middle Ages. For example the Gragas in Iceland had significant discussion as to who was required to do a baptism and under what circumstances. My argument is that without turning our backs on having some degree of plurality in our culture, we can no longer have such requirements.<br />
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[2] Turner, Victor. "The Ritual Process" See also Grimes, Ronald. "Deeply Into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage"<br />
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[3] For example, Eliade, Mircea, "Myth and Reality" and "The Myth of Eternal Return." Also see Eliade's "The Sacred and the Profane." The one thing I am less than convinced by is the idea that secularists lack a sacred. Just because one claims not to have rituals doesn't mean that in fact one in fact lacks them, as the Quakers show. The same can be shown with myths, and I would be unsurprised if a close look at secularists wouldn't show the same patterns.<br />
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[4] Cicero, "The Republic"<br />
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[5[ Aristotle, "Politics." In The Republic, Cicero suggests that family members should not turn eachother in for crimes because the interest of the state in strong families outweighs the interest of justice.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481993869114211552.post-33145804927997589742012-11-01T02:07:00.000-07:002012-11-01T02:07:00.501-07:00The World TreeOccasionally, as a heathen, I have discussions with Catholics and other Christians who think they understand the idea of the World Tree. In general, they do not. I figure this is as good of a place as any to discuss the differences in how trees are described in the Bible vs in Norse (and other Indo-European) myth. It is also a useful place for the beginning of an interfaith dialog on cosmology and meaning, not from the perspective of discussing relations but rather of learning to speak eachothers' languages.<br />
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So I will start by describing my understanding of the way trees are portrayed in the Bible, and then move to Norse and Indo-European myth generally. Finally I will move to the question of what the tree metaphor tells us in a pagan context, and what truth we find.<br />
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In the Bible, trees are always known by their fruit. There are the trees of life and knowledge in Eden, the likening of a teacher to a tree, and knowing the teacher by the fruit in the New Testament, etc. Norse myth however tends to look to the tree generally, not as an olive tree or another element of agriculture, but rather as a deep, universal, self-contained metaphor. Trees thus represent the universe, the society, and the individual, and these three things are considered to be interchangeable in terms of mythic patterns.<br />
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<h4>
The Tree of Man in Norse Myth</h4>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Then came three,<br />
three from the throng,<br />
From the lair of the Gods,<br />
And they found on the land<br />
Of little might<br />
Ask and Embla[1]<br />
Of no fate<br />
<br />
Breath they had not<br />
Song[2] they knew not<br />
Hair, nor looks<br />
Nor good countenance<br />
Breath gave Odhinn<br />
Hoenir gave Song[3]<br />
Hair gave Lodhur<br />
And good countenance<br />
-- Voluspa stanzas 17-18 (my own translation)</blockquote>
The first interesting parallel here is to Hesiod's Cosmogony where Zeus, the chieftain of the gods, creates the human race from ash trees.[3] Add to this the sisters of Phaethon being transformed into amber-teared poplar trees, and you see a strong connection between humans and trees in Greek myth as well. Complete Celtic cosmogonies have not survived, nor were myths of this sort used in Roman times. On to the Indo-Iranian branch, we see the association of Kundalini coiled around the base of the tree, but the tree is the human spine, again showing this metaphor found in these other branches as well. It is almost certain that tree as human and human as tree is a motif found across the Indo-European cultural and mythological traditions.[5]<br />
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But back to the creation of humans in Norse myth. Rather than created from the dust of the earth, as in Genesis, humans are created instead from trees which are already living but seen as lacking the unique aspects of human vitality. The gods provide these capabilities, animating and providing additional social context to the trees (but see below). Hair was a marker for social status among the Norse with slaves having very short hair while others allowed to have longer hair.[6] Similarly countenance provides social context.<br />
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However the application of this area doesn't presuppose a total lack of social context to trees. In the 12th century Icelandic poem "Havamal," we have:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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The lonesome fir-tree<br />
Stands in the field<br />
Bereft of bark and needle<br />
So is the man<br />
Who is shunned by all<br />
Why should his life be long?<br />
-- Havamal stanza 50 (my translation)</blockquote>
The lesson here is that just as trees shelter and support eachother, so too with human society and that any one of us that is abandoned by society will not live long. Similarly we have cases of logs being dressed as people and becoming like humans, and the importance of clothing in determining social context.<br />
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The overall note here is that the tree is a model for the human. In my own spiritual approach, I say: "Grow like a tree and be not afraid of shadows: Seek the darkness and then the light!"<br />
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When the seed of a tree germinates a slow process of awakening occurs, which culminates in a root beginning to push outward from the tree and move into the earth below. From the darkness of the earth below, the seed finds water and some nourishment. Slowly in this way, the seed then begins to send up leaves reaching towards the sun. It is through this process that human growth is best done.<br />
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The darkness below represents many things. It represents the tradition and the ancestors (the land of the dead usually being below the earth in pagan societies). It is a land inhabited sometimes by fearsome monsters, and so facing fears and poking around dark corners of history and the psyche are part of what I recommend.[7] It is through the discipline developed here that one can be grounded in one's quest for the divine.<br />
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The light is of course the land of the gods. It is the part of the spiritual experience that gives those peak experiences that Maslow wrote about, and where we can be tall and imposing, carrying spiritual weight wherever we go.<br />
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The tree reminds us generally of the nature of the hero, tall, strong, and unyielding like a tree.<br />
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<h4>
The Tree of Society in Norse Myth (and Platonic Parallels)</h4>
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The tree is also a social metaphor and this is perhaps best seen in the Volsung Saga (a prose edition, basically, of the earlier Sigurd cycle of epic poems) where the Barnstokk hall is built around a giant tree with the tree in the middle. This is in essence a manifestation of the king but also the society. Odin thrusts a sword into the tree proclaiming that whoever can pull it out can have it. This may be the origin of the Arthurian sword in the stone story.[5] In this story the tree nicely sums up the connection of the human and social structure.<br />
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At this point, suffice it to say that the world, the social, and the human tree are all interchangeable and interrelated. Examples will be given in the next section. A good organization is no different than a good individual, and even when we talk about "incorporation" we talk about it as creating a figurative "person." While in some ways we arguably carry this too far in other ways we do not go far enough. Our organizations would be better if we think of how to structure them in human terms rather than merely as machines.<br />
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In Republic, Plato makes the argument that society is fundamentally like a human in anatomy because we make up societies (in Letters he extends this to Godhead and therefore establishes this framework as the precursor to the Christian Trinity). Plato argues that humans are divided into three centers, a head, a heart, and a belly with different functions and that society works with the greatest justice when these functions are performed by their experts in harmony with eachother.<br />
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One other important aspect discussed by Mircea Eliade and others is the use of the societal tree to represent the center of the world.[8] This leads us directly into the final portion of this metaphor: The World Tree.<br />
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<h4>
The Tree of The World in Norse Myth and Hindu Parallels </h4>
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The World Tree is noted in Voluspa immediately following the creation of humans from Ask and Embla:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I know stands an ash,[9]<br />
Called "Yggdrassil," [Yggdrassil means "Odin's Horse]<br />
A tall and high tree<br />
With white dew<br />
Then comes the floods<br />
that fall in the dales---<br />
It stands evergreen<br />
At the well of Urdh.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Then came maidens,<br />
Much in knowing[10]<br />
Three for the hall<br />
That stands under the tree:<br />
The first was called Urdh,[11]<br />
The second Verdhandi[11]--<br />
They scores did cut--<br />
Skuld[11] was the third.<br />
They lots allotted<br />
They lives chose.<br />
To the sons of men<br />
They uttered destiny.[12]</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
-- Voluspa stanza 19-20, my own translation</blockquote>
The tree is mentioned over and over possibly in this context in the mythic poems Vafthrudhnismal, Grimnismal, Havamal, and others. It is the central model of Norse myth, and we learn that its branches reach above the home of the gods, and the roots go down into unfathomable depths below. The World Tree is all pervasive and alive.<br />
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One important point though is that we can not be entirely sure whether the tree in any of these contexts really is used to represent the universe, human society, or the individual, and it is in this ambiguity that the myth takes on its deepest and most vital aspects.<br />
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Turning to Hinduism, I am reminded of one of the Upanishads where a young Brahmin in training is sent out to meditate on various natural elements including the sun, moon, sky, wind, and lightening. He is told to meditate and try to realize that "That is what you are." The message, as found in many of the other Upanishads, is that the deep truth (Brahman means "The sacred truth") in each of us is the same as in everything else, and the Upanishads teach that when we fully recognize this that we become no different than the Gods. The world tree here is similarly all pervasive and it teaches that we are in everything and everything is in us. The models do differ to some extent. While the Hindu model is more static, the Norse model suggests that the tree may serve various metaphorical aspects during our development and the unification with everything is really only at the end.<br />
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I can think of no better model of integrative living than the tree, however, because it reminds us that our organizations, ourselves, and our world are more different in scale than in nature.<br />
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<h4>
Notes:</h4>
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[1] Ask = "Ash" as in ash tree. It is also found generally as a poetic title for a warrior. Embla is of uncertain meaning. Proposed meanings have been "Elm" or "Vine." "The ornamented" is another proposed etymology. Given that "ash" was also used in kennings for yew trees, which have separate male and female plants, and where the female trees show ornaments, I tend to support this etymology.<br />
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[2] The original word here is "Odh" which can mean song, inspiration, frenzy, or madness. The name of the god "Odhinn" or "Odin" means "Master of Odh."<br />
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[3] Hoenir is otherwise known for his silence.<br />
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[4] See also Polome, Edgar, "Essays on Germanic Religion"<br />
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[5] Not purely a scholarly reference but see Travers, Chris, "The Serpent and the Eagle: An Introduction to the Elder Runic Tradition"<br />
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[6] Peter G. Foote and David M. Wilson. <cite>The Viking Achievement</cite>.<br />
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[7] Borrowed in part from Assagioli, Roberto. "Psychosynthesis: A Collection of Basic Writings" Assagioli saw Dante's "Divine Comedy" as the ideal model for psychotherapy, in particular that of preparing the human spirit for mystical endeavors. My model is similar.<br />
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[8] Eliade, Mircea. "Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy"<br />
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[9] Note the Old Norse word here is "ask" which is the same as in "ask ok embla" in the human creation myth.<br />
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[10] The implication is that these are sorceresses.<br />
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[11] The names of the sorceress-norns are interesting. The first's name is usually used to mean "fate" but literally means "What has turned or become." Verdhandi means "What is turning or becoming" while Skuld usually simply means "debt." The debt is quite possibly related to the primordial debt in Greek myth discussed by F. M. Conrford in "From Religion to Philosophy."<br />
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[12] The Old Norse here is "orlog seggja" and can be more literally translated as "They spoke the primordial lots or layers." The idea of fate becoming effective on speaking is also found in the Old English poem "The Wanderer.Chris Travershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06211762965865744803noreply@blogger.com6