I echo many when I say that I do quite like it, especially its overall cut: the way to embrace religion in the public sphere of a pluralistic country is only to regard it as allegory and divine poetry, not "literal" anything. If he continues to develop a politics that includes that sort of underpinning, I see him going very far in U.S. politics. I voted for him in the last election, and I was proud to do so.
Some of this jives, especially the first two; for the rest, I leave to the judgement of others. The last two seem uselessly vague to me.
Your Existing Situation
Works well in cooperation with others. Needs a personal life of mutual understanding and freedom from discord.
Your Stress Sources
Feels that life has far more to offer and that there are still important things to be achieved--that life must be experienced to the fullest. As a result, he pursues his objectives with a fierce intensity that will not let go of things. Becomes deeply involved and runs the risk of being unable to view things with sufficient objectivity, or calmly enough; is therefore in danger of becoming agitated and of exhausting his nervous energy. Cannot leave things alone and feels he can only be at peace when he has finally reached his goal.
Your Restrained Characteristics
Egocentric and therefore quick to take offense. Sensitive and sentimental, but conceals this from all except those very close to him.
Feels that he cannot do much about his existing problems and difficulties and that he must make the best of things as they are. Able to achieve satisfaction from sexual activity.
Feels that things stand in his way, that circumstances are forcing him to compromise and forgo some pleasures for the time being.
Your Desired Objective
Needs a change in his circumstances or in his relationships which will permit relief from stress. Seeking a solution which will open up new and better possibilities and allow hopes to be fulfilled.
Your Actual Problem
The fear that he may be prevented from achieving the things he wants leads him into a relentless search for satisfaction in the pursuit of illusory or meaningless activities.
Before I traveled overseas, I never knew McDonald's could serve as a postmodern sanctum, and — save for the occasional Taco Bell burrito — I rarely ate fast food. This all changed when I moved to Pusan, South Korea, ten years ago to teach English. Overwhelmed by the onslaught of new sights, sounds and smells my first week in-country, I retreated to a McDonald's near my school, where I was able to stretch a Big Mac Meal into three hours of Zen-like oblivion. The appeal of this environment came not from the telltale icons of franchise culture (which I'd always found annoying), but in the simple opportunity to put the over-stimulation of urban Korea on pause. Once I ended my Pusan stint and started traveling across Asia, I retained this habit of occasionally seeking out McDonald's in times of mental exhaustion.
I like the gist here: McDonald's as a kind of mechanical, reproducible island of its own culture, no matter where it is in the world. (Though Potts hastens to add that, in subtle ways, there are distinct features country to country.) My quibble, though, is with the unending usage of "postmodern". Look, the word doesn't really mean anything distinct any more. Potts might have just as well said "McDonald's could serve as a 'I don't know quite what to call it so I'm just going to say' postmodern sanctum." The word is a catch-all; it is a substitute for thinking, for precision.
Let me, in painfully brief fashion, introduce a parallel here: McDonald's and big airports. When you are in either, you know where you are, but you could in truth be anywhere on the planet and the general gist and feel would be essentially the same. Both are waystations on one's journey. The overall communicative patterns present in McDonald's (the signs), no matter the city, are similiarly uniform to the communicative patterns of airports (again, in signs), no matter where they are situated geographically. There are even interior design patterns consistent airport to airport, just as there are for McDonald's.
Then you start to realize that in the industrial world, where things are reproduced again and again from common templates, there are quite a few more things that take on the quality Potts refers to, namely a sanctuary from the local culture. I've named airports. Well, any mass transportation hub (railroad station, bus station) when built to similar scales are consistent culture to culture. Highways and roads (again, allowing for varying scales of size) fit here, too. Museums are basically the same structurallly, culture to culture. Roman Catholic Churches are always breath-taking whether you are in Rome or Taxco; there are even common sculptures and design/architectural features. Are all of these "postmodern sanctuaries"?
See, this is why "postmodern" is such a stupid term and needs to be retired. It means nothing (or rather, it could mean anything, and suffers from semiotic dilution). If, rather, we are talking about the pattern of mass reproduction from common template, then that is something else, something far more interesting, something that involves inclusion of far more details, contexts, and social forces. And, frankly, it is something that seems more "human" and "bodily" than the wacky-geek-sci-fi quality of all things "pomo".
Why do I say bodily? Because the human body reproduces things from common templates all the times. Easiest examples: cells, skin, hair. My point is that if we have bodily examples that, metaphorically, result from the same forces that, in society, we call "postmodern culture", then we should at least recognize the parallel, that of mechanical reproduction from templates. Maybe doing so highlights the lack of thinking involved with any usage of "postmodern". I think it does, but I haven't really made my case here to that extent. For me, the bigger, more resonant question is, "What it is that brings us to reproduce from common templates, in so many different varieties yet from demonstrable similiar roots, and do so through the ages of history?"
An interview of Ann Coulter, by....a jamband music e-zine, Jambands.com. I haven't checked in with the mag since it was founded. I traded Phish tapes with its founder, Dean Budnick (thousands of people did, actually) back when all I did was live and breath Phish music. And I briefly thought of writing for Jambands.com before I get involved with that thing out in Boulder. But I digress. Check out the interview. You think you know someone, and then they drop names of their favorite Dead songs.
I have to say, her craziest statements aside, there is something to Ann Coulter's polemic that I think is right on. Maybe it has to do with highlighting (in exaggerated ways, of course) the strangeness of aspects of the American left. Which she does, pretty much like no one else. I love the title of the interview, quoting her as saying "Deadheads Are What Liberals Claim to Be But Aren't". Pretty funny. But I haven't read or purchased any of her books so please no big emails saying she's the anti-christ, because I'm not buying it and I don't know anything beyond her television appearances and short excerpts from her books....emphasis on short. There's a lot to dispute with Coulter but she does offer much by way of substantial arguments.
UPDATE: To head off any confusion, allow me to make clear that I confine my intellectual interest in Coulter to what I think her main point is right now: that there is a "liberal infallibility" strategy that some use in the public sphere in lieu of actual, rigorous arguments. This is a very substantial point, made in various ways by too many people to count. It is popularly known as claiming "victim status" and, frankly, it is reprehensible when used as a substitute for making a real case that people can respond to and debate without fear of being labelled politically incorrect.
Polemicism is a tricky game, with all sorts of slippery slopes. Do i wish she wasn't a polemicist and rather confined her arguments to more serious modes of presentation? Sure. I wish that about a lot of people, from all political backgrounds.
The rest of my fascination with her has to do with observing her rise as a media star. It is quite interesting, not the least of which is the fact that, as I link above, she's being interviewed by a frickin' hippie music magazine. Talk about a strange juxtaposition! And that, amazingly, she is actually conversant in all things Dead. I find this hysterically funny. I mean, whuda thunk?
Allan Berra has a nice piece on the wondrous city at Salon.com (day pass req'd). A kwote:
So what is the outlook on Venice's future? Not so good, but then, it hasn't been since practically the 16th century, when the tiny Venetian empire dueled with the mighty Ottoman Turks for the economic supremacy of the Mediterranean world. The foundations originally set in the earth alongside the city's canals are crumbling; a serious disturbance in the Adriatic Sea could flood the entire town; a major fire might destroy any or all of the city's most treasured buildings (Venice is without fire hydrants). All these reasons -- and several more -- have been offered to explain why Venice cannot survive. If Rome is the eternal city, Venice is its doomed cousin.
Hannah and I were there a year and a half ago, amidst a tour of Italy that included Rome, Assisi, the Cinque Terra, and Florence. Even though I was 30 at the time, I still think I was a bit young to really appreciate Venice. All the more reason to go back, and to take Twyla when we do.
...as an object of art itself, as well as an archetypal/allegorical symbol of The Great Mother. It is over at The Woodshed. Check it out. Discussion is encouraged.
For passages such as this, from his Life Against Death: The psychoanalytic meaning of history, a book which wonderfully interprets the insights of Freud (taken from throughout his Freud's career) and juxtaposes those against insight from various sources, including religious texts (taken allegorically) as well as artists. Here: Freud, The Bible, William Blake, from chapter 3:
Infantiile sexuality is the pursuit of pleasure obtained through the activity of any and all organs of the human body....
[note: Interestingly, this would include the brain and the mind, wouldn't it?]
...So defined, the ultimate essence of our desires and our being is nothing more or less than delight in the active life of all the human body. That this is Freud's notion becomes abundantly clear if we examine the specific nature of the "perverse" components in infantile sexuality. They include the pleasure of touching, of seeing, of muscular activity, and even the passion for pain. It is therefore perfectly consistent, and implies no change o view, when in his later writing Freud added the term "life instinct" as synonymous with what he in other contexts called "the sexual instinct," "Eros," or "libido". And there is no difference between Freud's notion of the ultimate essence of the human being and William Blake's when he said, "Energy is the only life, and is from the Body.... Energy is Eternal Delight." As with the concept of repression and the unconscious, so in his concept of the libido Freud appears less a an inventor of unheard-of novelties than as one who grasped in rational and scientific form intuitions which have haunted the imagination of poets and philosophers through the modern or Romantic period of our intellectual history.
Freud and Blake are asserting that the ultimate essence of our being remains in our unconscious secretely faithful to the principle of pleasure, or, as Blake calls is, delight. To say this is to call in question the psychological assumptions upon which our Western morality has ben built. For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal. Parental discipline, religious denunciation of bodily pleasure, and philosophic exaultation of the life of reason have all left man overtly docile, but secretly in his unconscious unconvinced, and therefore neurotic. Man remains unconvinced because in infancy he tasted the fruit of the tree of life, and knows that it is good, and never forgets.
Also interestingly, this view is not a "reduction to infancy" that some of Freud's critics claim. It is nothing of the sort. (Freud acknowledged that there is no "return to infancy" possible.) It is merely the view that what happens to us during infancy is a set of perceptions, reactions, and movements that imprint us, and thus stick with us throughout our life in some way. In his interpretation of Freud, Brown allows for "levels of being", if you want to look at things that way. It requires no big leap to deduce that here, "delight" applies at sensorimotor, mental, and essential/spiritual levels; we seek the pleasure of "delight" at each.
But without getting into the hair-splitting headgame that is "levels" (after all, "levels" is a largely speculative construct that, in my view, has been blown WAY out of proportion, and provides little to no real insight to working artists, either), it is perfectly plausible and defensible argument, not to mention one that furthermore jives with common sense, to say, as Blake did, that "Energy is the only life, and is from the Body.... Energy is Eternal Delight." The particular exciting aspect is to see how, timelessly, Freud, Blake, and the Book of Genesis arrive at the same general insight.
"Delight", then, takes on an archetypal quality all its own, doesn't it? It connects well with Paglia's insight that great art is, at first, its surface beauty, or if you will, "surface delight"; whereas meaning comes later. Which is none other than "mental delight", which involves complexities of conceptual juxtapositions, as well as "spiritual delight", which involves sharpened perception and clarity, the fullness we perceive during and after the art experience. In any perspective, it is "delight", of whatever kind, which fuels art, time and time again.
POLYSEMY Magazine has started a staff blog. It is called The Woodshed. Today is its first day, so check it out, bookmark it, sign up for its RSS feed, comment on its ideas, and enjoy its growth in the coming weeks, months, and years.
Like the magazine (have you subscribed yet?), it is at the root of the arts, and it is "for working artists, by working artists" who crave the "interdisciplinary + depth" sort of state of mind.
On the basis of observations and experiments with newborns, neuroscientists now know that infants are born with neural mechanisms devoted exclusively to music. Studies show that early and ongoing musical training helps organize and develop children's brains.
- Susan Black, "The Musical Mind," The American School Board Journal, January 1997.
I love the idea that the tones Twyla hears, is starting to vocalize, and (already) tinkle-trinkles on piano and whatever other instruments she might take up "organize" the way she cognizes. Howard Gardner has said that musical intelligence is a "special intelligence", treated differently than the others because it probably carries "more emotional, spiritual and cultural weight than the other intelligences". Schopenhauer said that music is a form of unconscious philosophy — in other words, music sets the conditions by which worldview is formed.
I'm guessing, but I think that the particular kind of music we are talking about is non-verbal music. Or, if we include lyrics, then we focus on the melodic aspects of that. When we talk about the effects of music in the way Black and Gardner do, it is the felt-sensations of "tones given order", music's real definition. It is not merely sound, at least as I define sound. The definition is a holarchy of sorts: you have sound as it occurs in nature; the sub-set of which is tones (or sonority) which are picked out and focused upon; the ordering of which is music, the "play of tones". Musicians are trained to find and perform tones from the larger bed of raw sound. Composers are trained to give order, shape, and contour to tones, usually many tones, through the coordination of different levels and aspects of rhythm.
The first step is to have training as a musician, at least at the level of beginner. Everyone, no exceptions, ought have at least beginning music training. This is the logical implication of Black's and Gardner's research. The fundamental practice is singing and hand perscussion. From there, instruments such as the piano and others are taken up, applying the imprints left on the body, mind, and psyche from singing and hand percussion.
To the extent that people err in beginning training, it is in the avoidance of simple songs. Songs ought carry the day for musical training far into adolescence. Music theory, including even scale and certainly chord progressions, requires a mature mind, on one hand, to see the connections between scales and chords (which are abstracts and distillations) and songs, and on the other, to not find their practice interminably boring. Great lives in music have been killed by practice of scales and chords at a too-early point in one's development. No important cultural, aesthetic, or expressional energy is transmitted by scales and chords alone. These are strictly for training/drillwork, and unimportant unless part of a rigorous training for composition or advanced instrumental performance.
In the best songs, even the simple ones, the timeless spirit resides, waiting to leap out and be acknowledged by all present. Songs veil the alchemical soul work that went into each's creation in the first place. It is veiled but is still there. Attention to the song, for its own sake, ought be the alpha and omega of 99% of music experience until the adult years. For music has its importance in cognition, but its real importance is in the joy shared by performer and audience. Bodies vibrate, together, and have since music was first born, a moment which in truth hasn't stopped unfolding and never will.
Good stuff, including the Sony BRAVIA ad called "Balls" (the one with all the bouncing balls). I mention that because my first article for POLYSEMY references this ad in the larger context of contemporary experimentalism in the arts.
Man, this guy is fast becoming a national treasure. From today:
ABC news has asked viewers to send in evidence of global warming. How is it affecting your life? ABC news wants to hear from you. This is like Life magazine asking readers in 1952 to describe the communists under their beds. Bald? Slavic? Ruddy? Drunken? Well, I can help. Naked hairless blistered ocelots prowl my yard; mutated day-bats flutter around the eaves, and the other day a polar bear got up on two legs and pushed around a fume-belching two-stroke-engine lawn mower as some sort of ironic protest. Although it may have been the neighbor mowing the lawn with his shirt off. Also, water levels are down around Jasperwood. The top tank on the Oak Island Water Feature is down an inch every morning, and while I might suspect the repair crew managed to puncture the new liner while replacing the stones, I suspect methane emissions are to blame. To do my part I will cork the dog’s hinder, since today he finished processing a bratwurst that fell on the floor, and my stars. Fire in the hole, indeed. Even the dog got that expression Curious George had when he broke the bottle of ether.
I am not susceptible to disaster scenarios. I do not believe we have ten years to prevent the inevitable collapse of civilization. As long as I can remember I have been fed end-times scenarios – death by ice, death by fire, death by famine, death by smothering from heaps of clambering humans scrabbling for purchase on an overpopulated world, death by full-scale nuclear exchange, death by unstoppable global AIDS, death by a two-degree rise in temperatures, death by radon, death by alar, death by inadvertent Audi acceleration, death by juju. Doesn’t mean we won’t die of juju. But somehow we survive. The only thing I take away is a vague wistful wonder what it would be like to live in an era when things were generally so bad that the futurists spent their time assuring us it would be better. Say what you will about the past, but at least they had a future. All I’ve ever had, according to the experts, is a grim narrow window of heedless ignorance bliss followed by a dystopian irradiated world characterized by scarcity, mutation, and quite possibly intelligent chimps. You have no future. Oh, and don’t smoke!
Bah.
I’m a stupid optimist. Either the vehicle that takes me to the boneyard will get six miles per gallon of processed dinosaur, or it will run for ninety days on a milliliter of Sea-Monkey urine. Either way, all in all, we’ll make it.
Most everyone probably knows that Al Gore has a movie out called "Inconvenient Truth" and it makes a case for global warming (including the main premise that the debate is settled on the issue; it exists, he claims). Well, since this is and should be a debate, Iain Murray has put together 25 "inconvenient truths" of his own; inconvenient, that is, for Al Gore's argument. I think it is worth reading.
I just watched the entire piece, in ten parts via YouTube. Compelling, to say the least. D.C. politics, man — not for the faint of heart, that is for sure.
Once you think of nations as people, the cult of unity, which assumes that togetherness for its own sake is a virtue, kicks in. Our discussions of foreign policy have been corrupted by this sloppiness. One improbable example was the deeply flawed Steven Spielberg movie Munich, which took it as a given that nations are prone to the same psychological maladies as individuals. A more familiar instance of this thinking is the idiocy that confuses votes by the mob of kleptocracies and tyrannies in the United Nations General Assembly as some sort of expression of democratic will. A conclave of dictators doesn’t become democratic merely by voting on where to order lunch. Also, by seeing nations as people with different lifestyles, we confuse nationalistic dictatorships with democracies. When a cabal of murderous thugs like the Baathists takes over a country, it is not self-determination no matter what the Michael Moore crowd says.
And then I love his next line, "Egalitarianism has its place when it comes to talking about people, but it’s misplaced in foreign policy." Damn right.
You're an enlightened world citizen. Your T-shirt says "9/11 was an inside job." You're pretty sure we're living in a fascist state, that President Bush taps the Dixie Chicks' phones, Christian abortion clinic bombers outnumber jihadis, and the war on "terror" is a distraction from the real threats: carbon emissions and Pat Robertson. Then you learn that 17 people were arrested in a terrorist bomb plot. How do you process the information? Let's take it step by step.
The POLYSEMY team has put together the POLYSEMY Bookshelf. It is our offering to the study of art and the humanities from an inclusive perspective.
There is also a "Our Staff is currently reading..." list. My guess is that the personal selections by the Staff will round out the list with more contemporary, leading-edge picks.
I can't tell you how exciting it is to be part of this. There is nothing like POLYSEMY anywhere....Anywhere, that is, except for right here.
(That's a link to the POLYSEMY site, where you can check out the Bookshelf. Sneaky of me, huh? Very sneaky...)
What is POLYSEMY Magazine? I'm proud to say it is a tangible, hold-it-in-your-hands space for perspectives relevant to working artists. Our debut issue is but days away from being sent out. This is the final stage of labor, in a sense — a very gratifying labor, at that. This is a magazine at the root of all the arts.
Ok, I'll say one more thing. The idea is to provide food for creativity — food that satisfies and sustains. There's no agenda beyond that. Rather, that humble agenda is plenty.
We are nearly to our subscriber goal for our first issue. We would love to have you as a subscriber! Do you want to support a unified culture for the arts? Subscribe today!
Since my first days writing for NRO, I've been pounding the table about how a good definition of conservatism would be the axiom that "human nature has no history." Children born today are, genetically (for all intents and purposes), no different than they were 1,000 years ago. What makes a child today grow up to be an accountant rather than a Viking marauder is this thing called "civilization" and the chief incubators and transmitters of civilization are not peers and they are certainly not genes, they are parents. Our very conception of what civilization is we inherit from our parents.
Certainly true. Our conception of what civilization is also is highly influenced by the humanities — Languages, the Arts (via the Canon), Philosophy, and Religion. These are overflowing with rich examples and opportunities for education. The curriculum of the course of a child's education, and into adulthood, ought be centered around and based upon (developmentally speaking) these crucial areas. All ought be taught from a global, comparative point of view, but anchored by the tradition the child is born into.
I'm not at all convinced (or even hopeful) that public schooling is the way to go; certainly there is institutional inertia that would attempt to prevent a radical restructuring of curricula of this kind. I'm personally in favor on the continued growth of decentralized, local homeschooling associations between like-minded parents. These associations would take cues from books precisely written to broadly outline courses of study in these areas, through a child's development. I call for the growth of "homeschooling manuals". Mothers and fathers need not be experts in any particular area. The best kind of learning, the learning that lasts, is when mothers and fathers learn right along with their kids. An ongoing book club for the family. The hiring of private tutors when necessary (such as to teach piano and singing through songs appealing to children). Education should be practical, affordable, and unpretentious. At the heart of learning is always learning how to learn. Echoing McLuhan, learning is a medium the message of which is itself. A broad, inclusive "paideia", or "training of the physical and mental faculties in such a way as to produce a broad enlightened mature outlook harmoniously combined with maximum cultural development" is an impulse that goes back to antiquity. This needs our efforts to renew it for the contemporary age.
In his bound-to-be-influential book, In Our Hands, Charles Murray advocates the renewal of civic participation in all aspects of life, in no small part from the renewal of the American "impulse to associate". Civic, religious, sporting, educational associations used to be an reality of everyday life in America. The large beauracracies of Big Government have crowded out the need for such associations, at a loss of the fabric of community that associations support. I have no idea whether his plan to give $10,000 to every adult, every year will ever be enacted into law (I hope it will be). But I know that Americans need more not less reasons to be together, to work together, to collaborate, and to be good neighbors.
To me, the rise of decentralized home-schooling associations is perfectly in line with the re-emergence of emphasis on education based on the humanities. The humanities reflect on "what it means to be a human". The more we think about that, the more I think we are led to the realization that we are better humans the more we work with others, especially those that live close to our home.
"Think kosmic, act local"....or something like that.
It was fantastic. Nothing but good times beween the four of us — Paul, Hannah, Twyla, and myself. I will write a bit more later.... (weekend so good, head a bit groggy right now).... so in the meantime, check out Paul's blog entry about the weekend.
Brand new, never-been-seen articles by Thomas Morgan (Tuff Ghost), Jean Rivard, Victoria Lansford, Dan Allison, Hannah Dallman, and yours truly. Plus an indepth interview of the inimitable Paul Salamone.
$9 for an entire year's subscription (three issues).
I just picked up an M-Audio 49-key USB MIDI controller. Essentially a keyboard, essentially like the CASIO keyboard I played with when I was 14, hitting those orange buttons for drums and cymbal crashes.
But I'm excited to have this. I've been doing more and more film-scoring (and have applied to a film scoring MFA program here in Chicago). This keyboard will be (ehem) instrumental in slapping together musical sketches for particular scenes of films. I can show these to film directors with relative ease, and this saves me the hassle and guesswork involved with recruiting live musicians without knowing whether the film director is looking for what I have in mind. These slapped together pieces of "visual composing", an industry term of sorts, will then lead where it should — to live musicians performing music off written charts, which is then recorded and added to the film. The thing cost $100, but it'll pay for itself the first time a film director listens to a proposed piece of music and says, "meh, could it be a little faster?"
My heart will always be with the ole wood'n'wires piano. Nothing, and I mean nothing can substitute for the resonance of acoustic instruments. The digital revolution ought not forget what it is in service of. Not itself (for we see how thin purely electronic music can be when performed live), but for new ways to renew and re-jigger what we do with acoustically, with wood, metal, muscle, reed, and breath. It is for playing, it is for experimentation, it is for breaking out of old patterns in music, in order to return to what got us into music in the first place — the wonder of tones, vibrating.
From this article, reminded of his quote: "Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings."
Synaesthesia -- the unity of sensations when experiencing art. Of course it is real — it is what naturally happens in the awareness of a person with wide experience in the arts and humanities, to find music in poetry, dance in sculpture, architecture in painting, and so on. It is the essence of the psychedelic.
From this 2004 article that ruminates on the state of "metaphysics" which he wonders whether is in need of an update, John Derbyshire ends with this:
We Americans are heading into a “crisis of foundations” of our own right now. Our judicial elites, with politicians and pundits close behind, are already at work deconstructing our most fundamental institutions — marriage, the family, religion, equality under law. The human sciences are showing human nature in a strange new light. Yet perhaps all this will matter as little in the daily lives of Americans a few decades from now as Russell’s paradox and Gödel’s theorem matter to working mathematicians. Perhaps we shall come to our senses and stop trying to analyze and deconstruct our humanity down to the bitter end. Perhaps we shall realize that in order to get on properly with life, as with mathematics, a great many things just need to be taken for granted. What will our new metaphysic be? Perhaps the one that sustained Bertrand Russell’s grandmother: “What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.”
Particular emphasis on the last sentence, of course.
Ayatollah Hussein Khomeini, the grandson of the Iranian Islamic revolution's founding father, is arguing "freedom must come to Iran in any possible way, whether through internal or external developments." Explaining why he favored American intervention, he said, "If you were a prisoner, what would you do? I want someone to break the prison." Richard Just, of The New Republic, doesn't advocate military intervention, but nonetheless reacts interestingly:
...there are plenty of ways short of military action that America can oppose tyranny in Iran and elsewhere. Sometimes, it's worthwhile to be reminded that there are a lot of people in the world who are more or less imprisoned--and who are counting on Americans not to mind their own business. How sad that, these days, it's liberals who need to be reminded most.
IT'S OFFICIAL. WILBER IS A GURU -- THE E-MAIL OF THE DAY
This is from reader of my blog who wishes to remain anonymous, a request I am happy to honor. I do know that this person is the writer of the various extended comments that are attached to my recent posts on Wilber's disgraceful behavior and intellectual crimes. This includes the clear-as-day comment about what I subsequently termed the Three Cards of Wilber Apologists, which is elaborated upon below.
The reader, I think, has been rather thinking aloud over the previous comments (that's my interpretation, anyway) and what follows below expertly brings together several threads previously touched on. To me, this is definitive, and it is relayed with full permission of the writer. My hats off to the efforts of this noble soul.
The underlying essence of the previously mentioned 3-cards, played often by cultic leaders and apologists of the eastern religious/western psychological milieu, is this: any negative response to the leader or inner circle of the group can only be ones own fault (i.e. blame the victim). You’re either not smart enough to understand (at a lower level), lack sufficient self-awareness (are simply projecting), or have failed a very deep test (when the group/leader hurts you, this is actually helping you).
Consider the following in regards to Ken’s latest Blog, and notice how he’s now playing a few new cards, equally cultic:
http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/50
(1) The Ultimate Guru Trump Card (Witness me, and see the truth): The evidence Helen offers in support of Ken’s actions is not at all relevant to the issues at hand, but is, instead, this: “(I’ve) SEEN YOU, SAT IN YOUR AURA, and HEARD YOUR VOICE”. Helen offers nothing of substance in regards to the actual issues being discussed. This is nothing more than GURU talk by a devotee and should be seen as a huge red flag to folks at II. This card is a real ‘trump card’ favorite among cultic apologists (i.e. if you felt his spiritual energy, man, you’d know it’s true).
(2) The Hook, Then Heal Card (Listen, and be healed): Ken calls his previous Blogs “Hooks”, which is just another name for the skillful means card. The “hook, then heal” combination deal, however, is necessary once the GURU trump card has been played. That is, once wisdom is established, it’s time for compassion, forgiveness, and healing. This particular card implies two things at once: (a) Ken is the teacher (wisdom), you are the student; and (b) there is something wrong with you that can be healed by the teacher (compassion).
Consider how this has all come about. Ken, after taunting someone into a fight, with derogatory comments and snide remarks (HOOK), tries to then HEAL their angry nature by asking that they look at their own shadows (if they have the COURAGE to do so). The implicit point of this move is the following: if you listen, now that you’ve been HOOKED, and follow my instructions, you just may realize what is wrong with you, and be HEALED, never to get HOOKED again. In other words, when Ken hooked you, he did so only because you don’t really know your true Self (IAMness). By listening to Ken, however, you might truly “RE-OWN” yourself, “RE-INTEGRATE” yourself, because he does care, he does FORGIVE YOU, and he is filled with compassion for you (notice he mentions he did this out of much love for Frank and Don) and will not teach you through his Blog and classes at IU (so sign up now!). Ken, bringing it all together now, concludes by combing his wisdom and compassion, with spiritual waxing about bathing in the infinite well of rehabilitation.
Folks, outlining how and why this is classic cultic behavior is too elementary to even go into. Just pick up any book on the subject, or go read about the true root of all this: Adi Da.
(3) THE GAME OVER, I WON CARD (everybody stop, I’m the game-master): In the end, Ken is trying to silence critics/outsiders by asking that they simply STOP, which is all he really wants at this point. He asks that they take a moratorium on judging others, on loathing and condemning him. Notice that none of this addresses anything of any real substance; it’s just an attempt to bring it to an end, with him still on top as the teacher. He is the game-master, after all. There is no substance to any of this stuff, and in real academic or spiritual circles (or within an adult community) such cards are considered completely and totally out of bounds. They only work in guru and cultic environments. Ken, PLEASE, you are the one who needs to STOP.
Is there anyone at II with the courage to tell him this?
Well, I know for a fact that people are at least thinking about it. I'm with the author. Anyone gonna stand up and say, "I'm done with the games!" Hmm?
It goes without saying that I think each and every insight is entirely spot on, and reveals Wilber to be no longer the "pandit"/commentator he claimed for years to be, but rather a full-fledged guru. Which is what is truly disappointing and depressing. Because the reason I got involved with his work, signed on (back in the day) to be the director of Integral University Art college, and spend 16 months writing and researching art/aesthetics, was essentially to stand up for the humanities, beyond the inadaquecies of the French school of deconstruction, and secondarily, the Frankfurt School of disembodied "critical theory", both of which have nearly destroyed the humanities education at the university level in America, and elsewhere.
I resigned in part because the real effort of Wilber became clear. He wanted to be a trickster figure that messes with people's minds. It is my suspicion (time will bear this out) that we can add a third school to the list above. The Wilber school. It is the school of hubris, of inflated emphasis on psychology as the alpha/omega, of occasional insight, of maddening long-windedness, of superficial scholarship, of the cult for the spiritually disillusioned creative class. Or, in a word, Wilber's spectacularly awful and useless book — the Wilber school is the school of American Boomeritis. I have said for sometime that Wilber, to put the absolute best spin on it, is no more than a psychological speculator, a writer on theoretical psychology. His recent work, both in print and on his blog, confirms he is not what I had hoped, a true warrior for the humanities. He advertises himself as one of "America's preeminant philosophers". That advertising is false.
To defend the value and restore the humanities to their richly deserved spot at the root (radically) of common imagination requires real interdisciplinary (or transdiscisplinary) work that, in the words of Paglia, is done "reading and writing at home or in the library", and then passionately teaching in a classroom. It is slow work; no real scholar writes quickly, it is as much soul work as anything; one must absorb, not skim over, the humanities across the ages. There is a tradition one must learn through and through. I believe this tradition's newest name is "the integral tradition". In this integral tradition of the humanities, there is no progressivism. Renewal is the operative dynamic. Real scholars write for the future, not the present. Real scholarship, the only kind that stands a chance of restoring the humanities in popular imagination, is not done by forming a Hollywood cult, or pretending to rationalize digusting and irrelevant behavior such as Wilber's. We cared about this because we tolerated the P.R., under the assumption more was under the surface. We knew now that what is under the surface turns out to have been laughably narcissistic and woefully empty.
To the extent we, in the post-Hollywood world (which from the moment of its inception in the American 50s, leapt beyond the implications of European thought) need any kind of deconstruction, it is only of the psychadelic variety, not theoretical psychological as is Wilber's real daemon. We don't need "theory", or Wilber's "theory" unless the very strict conditions of mastery of the history of philosophy and aesthetics is first exhibited. He has not done so, thus we can rightly see his "theory" as generally useless wind (with, yes, occasional insight). Do the insights outweight the wind? Not a chance. Quadrants, levels, lines, states, types — squashed by the power of renewal in any full-fledged member of the Canon. Nothing of the French, Frankfurt, or Wilber schools can hold a candle to authentic works of art. Nor, interestingly, have these schools demonstrated any feel for interpreting art. The French school disqualifed itself with its silly "there are no facts" and demonstrable eros-killing; the Frankfurt school is lost in abstraction (cf. Danto); the Wilber school is nothing but needless "theory of criticism", divorced from the task at hand much like the Frankfurt school. All three feature game-playing twits who mutilate language to laughable hair-splitting extremes. My god! Paglia (in 1991!) already outlined everything needed for interpreting art: an updated and reabsorbed New Criticism (with its oft-maligned formalism) that included psychology, social history, popular response, and yes, some deconstruction, but used for a real purpose. Deconstruction, when it helps, has, at best, only limited value, and can be discarded after repeated exposure to the Canon. This limited value is to allow us to shed preconceptions and be able to suspend disbelief as we absorb aesthetic, philosophical, and everyday experience. Genuine artists makes things (namely, their art) which accomplishes this for us: we must merely work to open our perception, to suspend disbelief. Deconstruction is always in service of illumination and illumination alone.
Dealing with your shadow, Wilber's favorite little game, has value, but it is a thin value (especially in a private, therapeutic environment; are you taking any clients, Mr Wilber?) compared to the real work this world needs. We need to passionately advocate from the tops and bottoms of mountains for people to dig into the primary sources of the world's art, philosophy, religions, and literature. Don't buy any pre-fab, readymade, non-thinking conclusions about anything in the humanities unless you have checked it our first for yourself. Me and many others have waited for Wilber to get his act together, to use his position to work in this direction. Our waiting is done. He obviously never intending such thing in the first place. His is but lip service to the "good, the true, the beautiful", serving but his model, his theory, and no more. He has his horse, plenty of lovers to provide him food on his island of his own making, and so he'll be fine. We need not worry.
Those of us working to renew the collective imagination work tirelessly and largely without credit (which we generally don't seek) will continue to do so. It is actually quite clarifying to know that the Wilber school belongs in the dust heap with the French and Frankfurt schools. What is the phrase? A "teaching moment"? Well, we just had one. My aim for contining to write about this is so those paying attention don't ever forget this. The road out of Wilberland has some rocks, some gravel, some grass, and we are working on pavement. But it has been bushwacked by many people before me. It exists. You must look for it, and then run don't walk down that road. Make art along the way, or work to frame the insights you gain, and the world, as well as the humanities, stand a chance at survival, thanks to you.
p.s. My prediction: Forced into a corner, without any further ground to claim, Wilber will own up to being a guru through the concoction of a new kind of guru, entirely to explain/rationalize himself. It's the "No, no! I'm a second-tier guru! With none of the baggage of traditional first-tier gurus, which are everyone but me, or my "Integral Friends (tm)"...." I say this unseriously, of course. But would I be surprised if he does this or something like it? Not at all.
I am optimistic, and I normally would have looked to the West for help in reforming Islam, from secular liberals, Westerners who are traditionally opposed to the enforcement of religious beliefs and customs. In certain countries, "left-wing," secular liberals have stimulated my critical thinking and that of other Muslims. But these same liberals in Western politics have the strange habit of blaming themselves for the ills of the world, while seeing the rest of the world as victims. To them, victims are to be pitied, and they lump together all pitiable and suppressed people, such as Muslims, and consider them good people who should be cherished and supported so that they can overcome their disadvantages. The adherents to the gospel of multiculturalism refuse to criticize people whom they see as victims. Some Western critics disapprove of United States policies and attitudes but do not criticize the Islamic world, just as, in the first part of the twentieth century, Western socialist apologists did not dare criticize the Soviet labor camps. Along the same lines, some Western intellectuals criticize Israel, but they will not criticize Palestine because Israel belongs to the West, which they consider fair game, but they feel sorry for the Palestinians, and for the Islamic world in general, which is not as powerful as the West. They are critical of the native white majority in Western countries but not of Islamic minorities. Criticism of the Islamic world, of Palestinians, and of Islamic minorities is regarded as Islamophobia and xenophobia.
I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, throught their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
My own criticism of Islamic religion and culture is felt by some to be "harsh," "offensive," and "hurtful." But the attitude of the cultural experts is, in fact, harsher, and more offensive and hurtful. They feel superior and do not regard Muslims as equal discussion partners, but as the "others" who should be shielded. And they think that criticism of Islam should be avoided because they are afraid that Muslims can only respond to criticism with anger and violence. These cultural experts are badly letting down us Muslims who have obeyed the call to show our sense of public responsibility and are speaking out.
I have taken an enormous risk by answering the call for self-reflection and by joining in the public debate that has been taking place in the West since 9/11. And what do the cultural experts say? "You should have said it in a different way." But since Theo van Gogh's death, I have been convinced more than ever that I must say it in my way only and have my criticism.
Emphasis all hers.
Note: The first issue of POLYSEMY Magazine contains an insightful commentary on the murder of Theo van gogh by Thomas Morgan (aka Tuff Ghost). Subscribe today!. This debut issue is days away from being shipped. Jump onboard!
A classic book by Ernst Cassirer, and lemme say she just dove into its finest points like she dives into mashed avocado. Don't believe me? Here's the proof. See, we start 'em young on aesthetic theory and German philology in the Dallman household. Yes'm!
POLYSEMY Magazine has started a staff blog. It is called 
From the preface of her new book —