You may find out anyway

Not knowing or not wanting to know ... looking life in the eye or burying one's head in the sand. These are commonly accepted options. Unfortunately -- or fortunately, depending on how one looks at it -- these aren't as clear-cut as they once were. Oh sure, there is no shortage of indivduals who would love to just close their eyes and make it all go away, and not being able to do that, they tune into their favorite propaganda/news channel and simply see and hear what they want to anyway. As we saw last time, we do it in regard to the past, so why not also in the here-and-now. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but this approach is getting less effective each and every day. You're probably going to find out what's going on anyway.

It's getting harder and harder to keep a secret, have you noticed? President 29 (Harding) fathers a child in the broom closet of the White House and writes heavy-breather letters to his mistress and who knows about it? President 35 (Kennedy) turns out to be quite the ladies' man and when did we find out about it? Sooner than we found out about Harding. President 42 (Clinton) gets frisky in the Oval Office and the torches and pitchforks are out because we know about it while he's still in office.

We suspected for years that "Big Brother" was watching us, and the reaction the Manning and Snowden revelations unleashed was so strong because no one had wanted to believe that it was as all-pervasive and detailed as it is. This particular issue is complicated by the fact that Americans -- not exclusively, but in particular -- are not so sensitive about such things when they are happening to others (What's the big deal about tapping Merkel's cell?) but are overly sensitive when they are affected themselves (What do you mean they're listening to my phone calls?).

The point is that everything, sooner or later, gets out, becomes known, is revealed. The Internet never forgets. Sure, technology has made all this more possible, but it's not the only reason that we get access to more than we sometimes want to know and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep anything to oneself.

The flip side of this is, of course, that there in an increasing amount of information we're not allowed to keep to ourselves. Apply for a mortgage or any significant loan. Get yourself a passport. Gee, get on an airplane and have yourself scanned. For Americans, who are most often content telling a commercial enterprise anything they want to know but get freaked when we find out it's the government, this may all seem normal. But, for Germans, just as one example, the notion of the "glass citizen" (der gläserne Bürger) is somewhere between disconcerting and downright frightening. By contrast, they may be willing to tell the government more, but they get very, very uneasy when this information gets into private hands. And rightfully so. However, the ability to restrict the divulging of information, the capability to protect one's personal, private sphere, is becoming ever more difficult.

I know, I know ... all of you are perfectly honorable, responsible, and open individuals who have absolutely nothing to hide. That may well be, but that's not the point. The downside is that not everyone who has access to you will treat you as such. The more of us that's "out there" is all the more over which we have little influence and absolutely no control. At what point does our publicly available self become "more real" than our own private person?

This is not only something to think about, it is something you need to think very deeply about. And, if nothing else, it is something that we certainly need to become more aware of.

It's not clear that we know where we've been

The American philosopher George Santayana once noted that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. What he failed to note, however, was that when you're doomed, you end up taking a whole lot of others with you. And, that's pretty much the case right now.

There are others who will tell you that history is written by the victors. There is certain more than a grain of truth in that one, even if conscientious historians like Howard Zinn strove to face this truism head-on. In other words, you have to search far and wide for one that isn't.

Taken together, we're faced with something of a dilemma. One reasonable conclusion seems to be that since we're reading a distorted history, we're learning all the wrong lessons (if in fact we're truly learning at all). It is especially problematic when different victors with different histories meet. The confrontation is too often volatile.

This, in turn, should make us aware of at least one thing: we need to be careful with the histories we believe to be true, and when in doubt, it doesn't hurt to do some checking to make sure the one you're using is worthwhile. More often than not, people choose to believe what they want to believe and only use the "documentation", if you will, to "prove" their foregone conclusions. What our friend Wm. James said about thinking in general is just as applicable to histories in particular.

In the course of my life, I have come to discover that most of what I was taught about history in school and those entertaining and dramatic depictions of history that flowed across the TV screen were, almost invariably, not just false, they were downright dishonest. I'm not so naive as to think that there are no dark sides to any nation's history, nor am I gullible enough to believe that what others are pushing as their own official versions might have "conveniently" left out those less savory parts. But, if I have learned one thing from the Germans in my time living here, it's that regardless of how painful it might be, it is absolutely essential to confront your history, to deal with it, to come to terms with it. Some are still struggling with it, to be sure, but at least it's on the table for discussion.

I'm no big fan of the idea that the past is the best predictor of the future for the simple reason that too often the past we are looking at isn't the one we should be looking at. Consequently, I'm making a plea for getting the real one and taking a good, hard look at it. If nothing else, it can provide a view of a whole lot of mistakes that we would do well to avoid in the future.

For example -- and it is only one, of many -- I have searched far and wide but simply can't find that example where waging war was a good thing, that it actually solved a problem or that it lastingly made the world a better place. But, as recent events have shown, it is still an awfully popular "answer" to some as yet not clearly formulated question. I simply don't get why we don't get it. What's worse, instead of coming to the realization of its futility, we're actually expanding it, turning it on ourselves, so to speak. (Or what is all that militarization of police forces all about?)

At bottom, for me, then, is the question: don't we know or don't we want to know?

How do we know where we're going?

Back in the 90s, comedian Steven Wright did a stand-up routine which included one of my favorite paraprosdokians that went something like, "I woke up the other day, and everything in my apartment had been replaced by exact replicas." How did he know? Though funny, it's bizarre, but like all good humor, it contains within it, some grain of truth. Sometimes things change and we're not quite sure how, or everything seems to be as they always were, but they're different, or ... well, you get the picture.

Just yesterday I was having a chat with a friend over lunch. As so often, the subjects were world events, breaking news, the situation in the world ... nothing out of the ordinary. It struck me, though, as he spoke that all the key words he was using -- the government, politicians, training and education, society, the social order -- were all common, everyday, familiar words, but -- and this makes all the difference -- none of them meant what I once thought they meant, nor what I was taught that they meant, and most poignant of all, nor what he was implying that they meant. All of the concepts had changed, but I wasn't immediately quite sure how, or though it all seemed to make sense, it was somehow very different.

No, I didn't stop him and tell him I was having a Wrightian experience. In fact, we both went on as if nothing had happened at all, but I'm convinced that I'm not the only one who has such feelings. I would be willing to be that every one of you has, at one time or another, in one situation or another, have felt that everything was cast in a quick pale of doubt, that nothing is as it once was, that though you understand each and every word being said, they're just not making sense.

None of us is going insane (or if we are, this isn't the reason), nor are we simply feeling our screws loosen, nor is there anything actually wrong with us at all. We're not lacking in any particular way. These feelings, these experiences are perfectly normal, at least they are these days. I can't speak for past ages, I can only speak for my own, but we are going through (a) a great number of changes (all at once) that are (b) radical (in the true sense of the word; that is, going to the very root of things) in nature, and that are (c) I believe, unavoidable. There are times (as history has shown us) when things can change in a really big way -- like the "discovery" of monotheism, or the emergence of argumentative discourse, or the "discovery" of perspective, or the acknowledgement of time as a dimension -- but none of these changes -- all of which we, today, simply take for granted and accept as givens -- happened overnight. What history also shows us, however, is that each of these great changes took less and less time to accomplish and each change was far more subtle than the one preceding it.

The time in which we could firmly and unerringly rely on our five senses has gone for the most part. Crassness has been superseded by subtlety, directness by innuendo, details by implications, and the clearly marked lines between fact and fantasy, between news and commentary, between reporting and advertising, between investing and speculating, between service and exploitation, and more are becoming increasingly blurred. We need to be aware, not only that such changes are taking place, but also in which directions these changes are taking us. What is more, it is imperative that we find ways to help make others aware as well.

There are days when I'm convinced we all live in Mr. Wright's apartment.

#500

It's really hard to believe. After more than a quarter million words, I've come to my 500th post. If I were a champagne drinker, I supposed I'd be popping corks.

Blogs aren't all I write, but blogging does take up a good portion of my time. I've poured a lot of words into academic containers, I can assure you, for it seems that higher education is unthinkable without text. What I learned over there was that we have established a lot of fact, we have described a lot of phenomena, and we know one helluva lot these days. But what I've realized that in spite of all that, we're really not all that smarter -- as a species, that is -- and we're certainly not any wiser for it.

Writing aficionados will tell you that you need to write a million words. Well, just over five years, just over 250,000 words ... you can do the math. Who's says I'll even live long enough to know whether I found it or not. At least in the blogging world, that is. But, maybe it's not a hard-and-fast rule.

Yes, the 500th blog post. There was a time when numbers were thought to mean something. (Oh, we still think that they do in some areas: like business where as long as the last one is bigger than the previous one we think we should be happy; or if you're the millionth customer somewhere. Funny: the bigger the number the better, but it hasn't always been so. There was a time when small was beautiful: one world; a happily married couple; for Christians, the Trinity; the four corners of the earth; the seven wonders of the world ... OK, so some numbers were left out. We moderns all know that was all meaningless nonsense anyway.No, I'm not going to make a case that gematria or number mysticism is "true", but it is a way to get off dead center and maybe see things in a slightly different light.

Take the number 5, for example. Traditionally, this was the number of change. After all, it was at the midway point between 0 and 9. The mystic Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin thought it was an evil number, and I suppose it is, if change isn't one of your favorite things. And 500? Well, that's two orders of magnitude greater (5*10= 50, or one order of magnitude; 50*10=500, the second order). If one order of magnitude is a kicker (for example, four may be a foundation, but think of 40 years in the desert, or 40 days of fasting, or 40 days of rain ... those familiar Bible texts start to look a bit different, I must say), then what's two? If 10-times is a spiritualization, then 100-times starts looking cosmic. Right. And that's kind of how I feel right now?

Stated somewhat differently, it would appear that my 500th blog post should mark some kind of fundamental change. And maybe that's where I am. To be perfectly honest, in all that I have written here over the past five-plus years, I've done everything I could to be clear but civil, to be controversial but considerate. And now, perhaps, it's time for a change. Why not?

It would seem, dear Reader, that now is simply a propitious opportunity to vary the presentation, to alter the approach, to step up to the plate, to ... well, you get the point. But, perhaps it's time to simply up the intensity. Now, that's a thought ...

Where to go, what to do?

Though there is still, and will long be, plenty of grey areas in the world and how we see it, we are, nevertheless, standing at a metaphorical fork in the road. We're faced, believe it or not, with an essential and existential choice.

If we simply follow what appears to be the main road that we're on, we're doomed. You can call me a pessimist, a cynic, a nay-sayer, a doom-and-gloomer ... it doesn't matter what ... but we'll be out of here soon. It's no joke that we're destroying the environment; it is an established fact that we are contributing significantly to global warming; it is inevitable that sea levels will rise another meter in the next 100 years, driving hundreds of millions of people further inland; we have definitive proof that fracking and transporting sludgy sand across thousands of miles of farmland and aquifers is going to poison our water; we know that the casino capitalism we are practicing is not sustainable and another, even worse, financial disaster is inevitable and imminent; we can see that growing income inequality will have drastic, most likely violent, consequences. There are so many things that we know and that are clear and so many things that too many are too willing to do too little about. In other words, our current social, economic, technological and political trajectory is toward disintegration. We have it within our power to commit collective suicide or to allow ourselves to be murdered by the irrational believers in post-modern ideals.

When we stop to reflect on what we're confronted with, it becomes very apparent very quickly that these are not just decisive, dividing issues, they are inherently divisive: take the earth apart for its oil and minerals; divide crops into specialized areas and regions in order to industrialize; industrialization is the breaking down of a whole process into its lowest manageable units; poisoning the ground water cuts us off from one primary essential for life; capitalism is founded upon the idea of taking more than one needs even, or especially, at the cost of others. In other words, these are all rational activities and approaches, but in the end, they are destructive and deadly. The ultimate division, course, is the separation of life from the body, which we call death.

On the other hand, we can change. Though time is running out, it is not gone. There is still hope that something, that a wide variety of things, can be done to avoid catastrophe. The clock is ticking though, so we really don't have a lot of time to just sit back and think about it. We must act, and each and every one of us -- as I have been repeatedly emphasizing -- is required to take part, to get involved.

One option has been taken from us: the option to do nothing at all. In not acting, or in choosing not to act, we, by default, will be moved along the destructive path we are on. To choose is to choose to act, to do whatever is within your power, the scope of your creativity, the breadth of your knowledge. And here's the important point: it doesn't matter what it is. As long as you include in your action the benefit of at least one other human being, you will, in all probability, be on the other fork in the road.

If you don't believe me, try it, and find out.

The rational reduction

Growing up, the TV was black-and-white and full of Westerns. It was easy to tell who was who, for the good guys wore white hats and bad guys black ones. It has taken me years to get over it.

As we saw last time, with the introduction of perspective, points-of-view became the way to see and understand the world. More than one is possible, of course, so the question immediately arises as to which perspective, which point-of-view is the right one. We quickly moved from a simple what-is to what-is-right. A reasonable person will tell you that it depends: when seen one way, thus-and-so is right; when seen another way, something else is right. Our sensibilities regarding right and wrong, however, don't like to deal with more than one "right". Something is right, or it is not. In other words, we developed a whole way of thinking based on what is right. The good guys, in the white hats were right; the guys in the black hats were wrong, and a whole lot of effort was put into making sure we youngsters understood the message. Like I said, it's taken me years to get over it.

The competition between competing points-of-view leads rather quickly to relativity. Everything becomes relative, it depends on how you look at it, and in the end, it means that any point-of-view is as good as any other point-of-view, one opinion is as good as any other. But this is intellectually and emotionally unsatisfactory, we feel deeply uncomforatble. We long for clarity, for surety, for certainty.

And here came the cavalry or the posse to the rescue. It was all very clear: the good guys were right because they could draw faster and shoot straighter; they were stronger and better fighters; they overwhelmed the dark forces with strength, intelligence and, well, violence. Might made right. Apart from all the possible color associations that one can spin off of this, it was by power and sheer force that right was established. And in all this sorting of the wheat from the chaff, of the good from the bad, of the right from the wrong, we added an even more insidious degree of certainty ... at least those of us who were still in doubt. It was not simply a matter of either/or, either you're right or you're wrong, no, it became a matter of you're either with us or you're against us.

Not only was this thinking approach taken to an insane degree in recent American political history, what we find quite prevalent this days is the thinking that if you don't agree with the right point-of-view, you automatically subscribe to its opposite: if you are for the Palestinians, you are against the Israelis; if you are for gun control, you are against guns; if you are against the death penalty, you are for allowing violent criminals to roam the streets; if you are against GMO foods, you are an organic tree-hugger; if you are against casino capitalism, you must be a communist. Yes, it has come to this. And this type of thinking, this type of argumentation, which is way too prevalent these days, is dangerous, for it carries within itself its own seeds of destruction; it is by nature destructive thinking. It is this allegedly "rational" thinking that allows for the clearly irrational behavior we witness all around us: the destruction of the environment in the name of profit; the perpetuation of war and oppression in the name of freedom; the ... well, I'm sure by now you get the picture.

Our rationality is at an end. The rational reduction that I have experienced throughout my own lifetime has become, well, irrational.

Reference
Gebser, J. (1986) The Ever-present Origin, Authorized translation by Noel Barstad with Algis Mikunas, Athens/OH, Ohio University Press [originally published 1949]. (EPO)

Putting one's mental house in order

As anyone who has ever encountered mythology, say, in school, knows, it's impossible to keep all those gods and goddesses sorted out: who's responsible for what, who did what to whom, how does all of it fit together? This was the case two-and-a-half thousand years ago, as well, and the first people to try and do something about it were the Greeks. Thales, Pythagoras, Euclid, Democritus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many others set about putting our mental house in order. Fact, reason, logic, argument, demonstration, proof became the hallmarks of a clear mind and an acute understanding of the world around us. It was at this time, more or less, when the mutation to what Gebser calls the Mental structure of consciousness occurred.

For a millennium or more, humanity experienced, literally, heady times. Great systems of thought were attempted. Everything that could be measured was and things were described, categorized, classified, systematized, defined and ordered. The foundations of modern science were laid. With the fall of Rome, of course, we entered the Dark Ages; that is, a time during which we took a long break from all this, but we slowly but surely recovered. Around the first millennium AD, we really moved into high gear and in many ways made up for lost time. Universities and other institutions of higher learning were founded; study became more systematic, and thinking became more secular. And then a small shift occurred.

This is best experienced by looking a paintings and illustrations from the Middle Ages, for example, and comparing them to visual art produced around and after the Renaissance. What do we find? Perspective. Yes, the perceiving of something from a particular, identifiable vantage point, a point of view, if you will, and the rise of point-of-view thinking, which we all more or less take for granted these days, has brought about significant and far-reaching changes in our minds and how we understand the world.

In a manner of speaking, the world was mentally, conceptually divided into pieces. What was once a whole, which is how the Ancient Greeks saw the world, became a conglomerate of competing viewpoints. Where once reason dominated, rational argumentation dominated. We should recall that the very word "rational" is derived from the ratio, which is, among other things, a division problem.

Just why this is problematic will be the subject or my next post.

Reference
Gebser, J. (1986) The Ever-present Origin, Authorized translation by Noel Barstad with Algis Mikunas, Athens/OH, Ohio University Press [originally published 1949]. (EPO)

Different strokes ...

There was a time when the world was full of magic. There were nymphs and sprites, gnomes and dwarves, wizards and witches, and an array of both positive and negative forces that determined much of our lives. Almost all of us experience the world this way when we are children, for our environment is full of wonder and terror and protection and amazement.

Because of the association with childhood, this way of thinking is most often belittled by us moderns, but unjustifiably so. My favorite example of it, however, is in the film, "The Gods Must Be Crazy". While flying over the Kalahari, a pilot simply throws his Coke bottle out the window of his plane and it is found by Xi, a local bushman. Like everything else around them, the tribe first believes it to be another gift from the gods. It is the hardest things they have ever experienced, and it brings an unhappy, even destructive, dynamic into their lives. They agree that the gods must have made a mistake and the "evil thing", as they have come to call it, must go, so Xi declares he will take it to the end of the world and throw it off. The rest of the movie depicts all of his experiences with the modern world along the way. While the decision and the solution may appear child-like, Xi is anything but a child. He is a respected member of the tribe; he provides and cares for his family; he is willing to travel into the unknown to protect everyone from the evil influences of this "thing"; and, as is seen throughout the rest of the movie, he is a clever, resourceful, highly-skilled problem-solver. No, this is a loving, caring, responsible adult who just happens to understand the world very differently than those he encounters along the way.

The gods in Xi's world are capable of carelessness. They aren't particularly powerful even if they are caring for the tribe. Over time, however, the powers attributed to the gods increase in strength and become more formalized and find new expressions. These may be seen in the exquisite paintings found in the Lascaux Caves in Southern France, dating back some 40,000 years, or in the highly refined and intricately developed cosmology of the Ancient Egyptians. The pantheon of gods expands, and each god is in command of a particular force or power or controls some clearly defined aspect of life and nature. Whereas art and writing are unknown in Xi's Magical world, both of these methods of expression become dominant factors in the Mythical world. Of course, we moderns like to belittle this type of thinking as well. We find it these days in the adolescent love of superheroes, sports legends, our reverence for our "alma mater", be it high school or college (though in these latter instances it is not only tolerated but encouraged, oddly enough).

Two points are worth noting here. First, neither of these modes are childish ways of thinking. Xi demonstrates this clearly for the Magical structure, and the great empires of the past -- the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans -- were all products of the Mythical structure of consciousness. Second, in both cases, we can find examples of such consciousness in our everyday, modern lives. They are not dead and forgotten, they have not be discarded, rather they have been maintained, cultivated and adapted to play important roles in our lives.

Our modern problem is, to a great extent, that we fail to recognize them and put them off, but, as I believe, much to our own peril.

Reference
Gebser, J. (1986) The Ever-present Origin, Authorized translation by Noel Barstad with Algis Mikunas, Athens/OH, Ohio University Press [originally published 1949]. (EPO)

A blast from the past

Allow me to shift gears, ever so slightly.

There is one aspect of blogging that simply fascinates me: what gets read the most. In my own humble case, it is a post from just over four years ago about -- are you ready? -- "The Archaic structure of consciousness". Yes, you read that correctly ... how obscure is that? Not only is this the most viewed entry at Diaphainon, it has been viewed twice as often as the next closest entry. It's not only at the top of the list, it is far, far ahead of the pack. I can't help but wonder why.

The post is a brief summary of (Jean) Gebser's (1986) description of the earliest consciousness structure in his model of consciousness unfoldment (cf. EPO). Put most succinctly, what goes on in our human heads hasn't always been the same. At different points in our history, major shifts in how we perceive, see, and comprehend the world around us have occurred (Gebser calls them "mutations" to emphasize the differentness from one structure to the next.) Archaic consciousness is hardly consciousness at all. Feuerstein (1987) describes it as "a dimly lit mist devoid of shadows" (p57). In this structure, it was this dawning of awareness that put us on the path to becoming human. Yes, this is a tough notion to grasp, I agree. And you will probably agree as well that this isn't the first topic that would be on most people's what's-that-all-about agendas.

Personally, I like to think that this high number of page views is due to college professors touching upon Gebser's model and throwing their classes into confusion, whereupon they go home and google the subject to see if they can find out more. If my guess is correct, I sincerely hope they find my brief summary helpful.

Irrespective of the reason for this post's popularity, it is worthwhile to remember, to recognize, that what goes on in our modern heads is not what has always gone on inside people's heads. What has gone on and how significant these changes have been over time cannot be overemphasized. The difference that obligates, of which I've written in the last three posts, can be traced back directly to the emergence of this rather obscure, hard-to-grasp structure of consciousness.

In the next post or two, I will try to make clearer what this means.

References
Feuerstein, G. (1987) Structures of consciousness: The genius of Jean Gebser - An introduction and critique, Lower Lake/CA, Integral Publishing.

Gebser, J. (1986) The Ever-present Origin, Authorized translation by Noel Barstad with Algis Mikunas, Athens/OH, Ohio University Press [originally published 1949]. (EPO)

Beware, humans!

I would hate to think that anyone has got the idea that I'm condemning or belittling or making a case against a good number of my fellow human beings. A couple of points are worth noting.

Juat as they say, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is most likely a duck. So too, if it walks like a human being and talks like a human being, regardless of how much nonsense that might be, it is definitely a human being. We can, and do, recognize those of our own species, easily and readily. It's hardwired into us, so to speak. And this is good so.

Of course, we humans are the only creatures on the planet capable of cruelty, of sadism, of unbelievable acts of depravation and violence, but never are these people not human, nor subhuman. In our rage and anger and sheer horror, we may refer to them as such, but that does not make them so. They're still humans. Bad humans, evil humans even, but nevertheless humans, and they need to be dealt with accordingly. The moment we allow ourselves to become just as cruel and depraved, say, out of feelings for revenge, we are really no better than they are, even if we like to think our reasons for our actions are justified. In all cases, where actual insanity is not involved, the perpetrators have also found a justification that permits them to do what they do. The line between right and wrong is always fuzzy. It would be nice if things in life were clear-cut and simple, black-and-white, if you will, but more often than not they are not, they're grey. It's always a good idea to keep this in mind.

You see, not only can we humans know, we can know better. We have conceptual -- often, moral -- categories of right & wrong and good & evil, preferences & dislikes, positive & negative prejudices, sympathies & antipathies, and more. If asked point-blank to explain the criteria for any of these, we most often soon have trouble making ourselves clear. They are not always hard and fast, clear-cut, easily describable criteria, and we soon realize that the boundaries tend to be fluid depending on context, prior history of participants, their closeness or distance to ourselves, and many other factors.

No one ever said it was easy, but I'm here to tell you that it is necessary to get a firmer handle on whatever it is we think we believe ... in regard to ourselves and certainly in regard to others. More often than not, even the best of us get in our own way. We can be our own best friends, and our own worst enemies.