seekersandsought.com

When the writing of this piece began it was on the Earth Day celebration some forty years after its creation.  This in turn was but two days after the annual 4-20 celebration when so many participated in the joy of smoking marijuana.  These are results of the Counter-Cultural legacy, still alive, healthy and active if not always apparent in the headlines.
In deserving lengthy studies and not just a short piece, it will have to do here, even as some would suggest that this was the significantly positive cultural  revolution of the past century.
Of this historic movement the first three active terms that come to mind are Beatnik, Hippy and Social Revolutionaries, the former leading to the latter.  The earliest primarily applied to the world of letters and arts beginning with Kerouac, Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, as well others, with the latter offering that “By avoiding society you become separate from society and being separate from society is being BEAT.”  We then find in a November 1952 article of the New York Times Magazine the title “This is the Beat Generation.”   As one writer explained, “It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately of soul,…a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness.”  For Ginsberg, “The point of Beat is that you get beat down to a certain  nakedness where you are able to see the world in a visionary way, which is the old classical understanding of what happens in the dark night of the soul.”  Others, like the jazz talents Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, as well humorists like Lenny Bruce would hang out at coffee houses and say ‘Dig,’ ‘Cool,’ and ‘Crazy.’   As William Burroughs once noted to Ginsberg: ‘The most dangerous thing to do is to stand still.”   It is no accident that he also stated that “In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.”  Existentialism had finally arrived on these shores
Something historically had happened that altered our assumptions, perceptions and values, at least for a good number of the young.  This past century has been called one of decay and sometimes even one of annihilation.  The Great War of 1914 (rooted in the Spanish-American War of 1898) concluded its first chapter in 1918 with people afterwards playing with parties and dances and  feeling euphoric;  whatever else, there is little to bemoan.   Still, many never returned home, expenses were high with no point at all in that “war to end all wars.”   Yet this was only a preamble compared to the arrival of the Second Chapter, ending with the Atomic Bomb and discovering rational people responsible for Nagasaki and Hiroshima as well as camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald .  This proved to be a different and difficult reality and it hit so many veterans so hard on returning that they a drove to education by way of the G.I. Bill and drink for comfort followed by a population beginning to consume more and more, from Levittown,  Pennsylvania to films stereos and television  as if there were  no tomorrow.  For some observers, it would appear that we were entering an age of nihilism.
The revolution in the media had played a major role in the cultural changes occurring  not only because of  radio but movie theaters packed with people on Wednesday dish night and between the double feature, news reels of the war in “bringing the war back home,” as the song said.  Top this off with war bonds followed by televisions later with up-to-date items like watching the explosion of the hydrogen bomb.  The world of the depressive thirties dramatically had changed into something no one could anticipate or understand except those few who stepped outside, to someplace where living was not of and by the rich and dominated by right-wingers from Senator McCarthy and the John Birch Society to the war in Vietnam that left little room for good conscience in the land of extremism.  From the state slaughter of innocent peace-nicks in 1970 to eleven days later at Jackson State College and the police killing two black students, the path was clear—go crazy (i.e. normal) or go free.  For some observers, it would appear that we were entering an age of nihilism.  When there is nothing more to believe in it is time to turn to the development of the self and one’s creativity.
This was the tapestry that introduced new perceptions, a  counter to those  days of madness, with a desire for equal rights, as well movements like S.D.S.,  N.O.R.M.A.L and S.A.N.E.  At play were other forces as with the personal experiences of those who began to participate in this cultural revolution, each story unique and to be experienced on the basis of that person’s biography and a larger body of artistic places than offered here.   For now, it is a time to tune into the new, fresh and uncomprehensible change from those straights who had created and knew they owned this mad world while Burroughs offered  The Naked Lunch, James Dean “The Wild One” and England, “Angry Young Men”.
From the new music of the black jazz musicians to the post-realist painters like Andy Warhol and the writings like Kerouac’s On The Road a new mental and emotional explosion outside of the past and tradition was being (and is still being) created leaving the Great Wars, Cold War and War on Terrorism behind.  These were the true drop-outs that made a splash because of their talent and impact.  From the East Village of N.Y.C. (The Village Voice) to San Francisco (The City Lights Book Store) a collective spirit began a profound effect on the minds of many of the young.  Going beyond the Avant Garde now with drugs, free love acceptance of all sexuality, secular thought and blacks and woman as equal there was something both startling and, for the establishment, something very frightening about this total freedom of expression and activity.  Hitch-hiking or jumping trains to where ever one would go, including Europe; dropping out of college as well the system, and openings like William Burroughs experimenting with all imaginable drugs (and some not so imagined) , these were not to be thought the proper behavior for The an in Grey Flannel Suit.  A massive division was being born like none other in our history.
These were people who lived for today, the present, since there was no tomorrow for the existentially alive in the Atomic Age of wars.  They accepted a universe that was chaotic and absurd with a joyful  liberation while embracing poetry readings at coffee houses.  Americans were seen as passive in their materialistic obsession and trapped in their compulsive attachment with electronic and mechanical engineered products.  The anti-establishmentarians were by choice, outsiders.
There was something of a heritage, or better, some varied roots, to this challenging change.   A   number of these earlier thinkers and artists can be read about in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1956).  It only need be noted here that many others from Sartre to Camus were already looking beyond the tradition of foolish faiths and western reasoning for a new exploratory place for existence.   Starting in the nineteenth century, a growing number of talented individuals from poets like William Blake, Baudelaire to thinkers like Nietzsche were creating non-conforming realities.  The world was shrinking and the thinking was growing.  It is no accident that there was an artistic independent move associated with the word Bohemian that continued into the post war years.
We now find long hairs, goatees, women (‘chicks’) thin with long straight hair and rather pale makeup drinking espresso in coffee houses while listening to jazz and live poetry readings.   No longer a standard of conformity was being faithfully followed.
Here it should be brought forth that the subject of a counterculture is really three forces that came to interplay—the Beats, the earliest; Hippies with civil rights and peace movements; and finally the whole earth and ecological  movements.  The overlap can lead to some confusion but it should be noted that the first and fundamental element of all this was the idea of a drop out of this western consumptive and violence driven society that seemed increasingly more inclined to worship death and greed than any beginnings of original creation.  Here was an affirmation of living humanism, whatever that may mean to any particular being—animal as well as human.
Liberation was not a passive term any longer and it was earned by creative action, first in writing and music followed by a larger horizon well away from the growing boredom, its redundancy and the passivity that was all too obvious.  First we begin with:
BEATS
This has become a small planet as WW. II proved.  Beats were known to travel to other lands and even live there while writing as with William Burroughs in Tangiers and writing about Buddhism.  It was no accident that Ginsberg was attracted by the thinking of the Buddha and that yoga and meditation now made its dominating presence felt.  Our post-World War II world was replete with refreshing thinking and ideas that took the young into a global frame of culture and ideas as it now was a land of existentialism, drugs and jazz driven by bohemian nonconformity favoring personal identity over society’s superego drive for conformity.  It is a significant set of circumstances that at the time that Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were in Tangiers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was awaiting trial for obscenity in his publishing at the City Lights Book Store of Ginsberg’s Howl as was Kerouac’s On the Road being published at the same time on the east coast.   The mid-Fifties were traumatic for the establishment who feared the unknown that others embraced.  Lenny Bruce, the famed humorist of the era, was also tried for obscenity in San Francisco which ironically today is seen as a haven for the unusual and unique personas.
It was in 1957 that Howl and then Road were put on trial to no avail except perhaps making them both much more significant.  Howl was compared to The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot who in his poem The Hollow Men suggested that “This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper.”   This poetry was matched by the hit that the Road made when it was declared that it will be known as the Beat Generation novel while being on the best selling list for 5 weeks—the revolution had officially taken effect both nationally and internationally with both German and Italian publishing rights.  Ginsberg said it succinctly when noting that “Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something or just the froth riding on a wave of its own.  We were all three, I suppose.”  Was Kerouac happy about this?  Perhaps, at first, but later he noted that “Too much adulation is worse than non–recognition, I see now.”   And Ginsberg turned to Buddha even to aiding in Colorado a place to study where one could expand one’s one inner self into new realms of discovery.  Fame and fortune is for the living dead not the creative living.
Perhaps a specific could help the uninitiated to better gain a feel for something that cannot in fact be adequately explained, especially by someone who was there: for the old slogan is that “for one who was there they cannot tell you what happened, and if they do, it is wrong”:   For good reason—too much, too fast, too beyond and too existential.  The quote here offered is from On The Road:
“… the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
Needless to say these were people who often were referred to and welcomed such referrals as the “mad ones.”
HIPPIES
Beat, beatnik, beatify, beatification, and so one; the term has its place in the history of western arts as both confrontational and revolutionary.  Rooted in the revolution of literature, art and music at the end of the nineteenth century, this was one more, an American contribution to a new mind-set, something born out of the post-war boom years for an odd number of baby boomers.
While Beat, also known as beatniks and beatitude gave rise to hippy or hipsters, this was a thousand times more problematic to define for anyone, including those who might want to think that they belonged or belong or might belong.  This is a break off of the beats in some sense as these became hippies, bippies, flippies skippies or maybe dippies, although in time clearly something like groupies.
After the end of the Second Chapter of  the Great War these dropouts turned to existential living, drugs and the new genius of music, jazz.  Inclined towards a bohemian life and nonconforming they were ready for the Beats as they marched on a stage they created where as hippies they would first join and be supportive and then move on.  A quote from the beginning of Ginsberg’s Howl might enlarge the picture:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for
an angry fix,
angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connections to
the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,…”
The reference here of those hipsters reminds us that the term “hipster” had roots that preceded the beat movement, going back to the beginning of the century where the bohemian life style had its beginnings.  While the beat world was a sea dominated by the ship of creative writings, music and the arts, the hippy was a more popular, embracing an ocean of many of the young who wished in the early years to be associated with the literati and the music by the Beatles, the revival of folk and singers like as Simon and Garfunkel and Buffalo Springfield.  They soon became more a collective of long hairs (and the musical Hair), beards, tie-dye clothes and finally rock-and-roll where one could join the dance floor and have sex by osmosis.  The sexual revolution began before the pill of 1970 and homosexuality was now given rights of passage further than by those like Burroughs and his Naked Lunch.  Guitars became hot and “love is all you need” and “looking for someone to love” replaced in those early years of the “Me, Me, Me” generation.  We now had communes with people driven more by profits and a passive/leisure life as well a commitment to peace rather than militant frustration as groups named themselves: The Grateful Dead.  Existential was here and alive while often found in coffee houses.  From Catch 22 to American Pie there was offered an alternative view of living and embracing its riches on an unheard of large scale.
This was a world where drugs became a central participant along with the art of humor from Lenny Bruce to George Carlin and recordings like those of Ken Nordine and Firesign Theater—both unique kinds of drugs to aid in the exit strategy that so many of the more prosperous young longed for.  Remember that prosperity had come to the States and with it time and leisure for the young as they took advantage of it completely with sex to drugs, especially the move to more divergent drugs.  Marijuana was the most favored by most of the beats.  Benzedrine helped these writers in the earlier years to break through the narrows of daily living while the second part of Howl was written on a peyote trip.  When Ginsberg entered the world of LSD he found it “perfection” and in 1960 with the guidance of Timothy Leary he entered the world of psilocybin  mushrooms.  No surprise that Ginsberg would enter the early years of political demonstrations after a one year trip to India where he embraced another alternative view of reality.  From Eastern mysticism to yoga, vegetarianism, organic foods, commitment to peace and more the sixties expanded the horizon introduced by the Beats now labeled Hippies, the world of Leary where the slogan became “turn on, tune in, and drop out.”  His ally at Harvard, Richard Albert, went further, turning to the orient, changing his name to Ram Dass and offering his book: Be Here Now.  The world now had no doors closed and with Ginsberg going political the picture even enlarged.
POLITICS, SOCIETY AND ECOLOGY
This post-war period was an era of crises, from Korea and then Vietnam, only to be running along side racial, feminist and ecological growing demands for recognition.  If the Hippy world seems rather problematic in defining from rock to the age of Woodstock, the era of demand for public change was and is even greater and can today be more confusing.  The hippy counterculture events continue today with the annual “Burning Tree” gatherings, but it is more than the new music of the Beatles and their legacy, open sex and freedom of drugs since the right wing political atmosphere was simply expanding beyond expectations.  Although the march for equal rights and peace is far too long a subject for a fair treatment here, there was along with Beats and Hipsters the civil rights acts of the sixties tied to a peace movement that could engage the national establishment in Chicago with political stands against war, racism and sexism with the nomination in a park of a pig for president which was then to be eaten.  Draftees were applying for asylum just as today many who are doing the same, although not drafted, first doing what was thought best but discovering by way of  their experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq another story.   For those of us who marched, the crisis was and in some ways still remains potentially dangerous, one where we do not know if there will be peace or an effort to repeal the Civil Rights Act. This has been and is a deep ditch we have yet to climb out of as the oil spill in the Gulf demonstrates.
Yes, for some this may seem to be coming to an end, while the left-over Beats and Hippies remain part of a counterculture still alive especially as an environmental movement.  From the Whole Earth Catalogue to the movement for an earthly positive policy we have seen the beginnings of something that will have longevity rooted in the counter-cultural’s place in history. Climate change is too dangerous a phenomena to leave to debate by the establishment which has an interest in profits, today and tomorrow.  But there are many other examples, such as the issue of what we buy and eat.  These environmentalists have been recently called upon to aid in a move to undermine the power of the corporations in the branding products that are no better and just more expensive than other products.  One can read Naomi Klein’s No Logo: (10thAnniversery Edition) to follow the arguments for good common sense and a more ecological balance of consumption.  It is little wonder that the far Right politically and economically oppose those doing such as they were angered by the two groups noted above, often referring to them as bums, liberals, communists and Nazis—no one can call these establishment folk literate.  The simply revolutionaries are people who push for more organic foods and more natural ways to live - not good corporate business practices.  The conflicts continue because basic issues of conformity and abuse continue.  Whether climate, water, food or growth of our population, this is more than communes, moving now into a planetary crisis where everyone has a vested interest in the outcome.
From poetry to energy, creative writing to good diets and from  realizing that too many are rationalizers and not reasonable, the future awaits those who understand the long road, beaten but not defeated, that so many have embraced outside the mainstream of the pathetic traps that are not necessary.  The doors have been opened by those before us.
Now what?
PAX/LOVE

While being little more than abstraction on the surface, LOVE  is not the first I have confronted.  Consciousness and Humor also have received my attention in print form.  Dangerous, yes, but sometimes the most dangerous concepts deserve serious consideration.  Love is such a concept. It is broad, deep and diverse.  It is so diverse as to be used, or should we say, misused in a manner that is at best confusing if not nonsense.  The truth be told, we love one another but beyond that it can get very meaningless.  Loving one’s mate makes sense, but saying “see my new shirt or blouse, I just love it!” makes no sense at all.  The latter is the activity of the ego that we are all born with and first express with crying for our diapers to be changed or for food or when walking for attention.   A four-year-old saying, “I love you mommy,” means nothing since the concept of love must come from the growing and maturing of a self where such concepts can be grasped and at least understood on some personal level.  Such a term even changes and expands as we grow older and thus must be taken for the complex potential and expansion that attends it.  Love is a very big word and no way should this to be taken as an exhausting or even complete offering of understanding.
There is a clear social cohesion that sits on the shoulders of what we would call love and from that we acquire a larger sense of what we may mean when we use such an abstract term.  That is why I would first begin with what many might not be considered love since it is not a rational act bur rather  one that is normally associated with being an inherent drive; what one associates with INSTINCTS.
If we spend the time to observe the animal kingdom beyond us humans we can see what we could rightly call an exercise of  love between the mother and infant whether they be elephants, lions, giraffes or monkeys.  The  fact is that the instinctual drive of this maternal closeness is so powerful that others of a particular group of same species of  animal will  tend to join in with their own support of the very young and vulnerable - protectiveness of the vulnerable is a given just as are human mothers who equally are so driven.  This could be considered a fine example of unconditional  love
Perhaps those with a television could chance upon the Animal Channel where one would be pleasantly surprised and enriched by this most inherent form of love in action - and for those with birds nearby please note how the mother builds her nest, allows the chicks to start to grow as she flies for food for them and defends them from other birds and cats.
Of the many animals of the wild that demonstrate this inherent love of offspring, none show this more clearly than those of  the elephant kingdom.  Here the mother cares as much as any mother could for her offspring, from food to protection and to warmth.  When witnessed it is impossible to argue that animals, especially mothers, don’t express what we like to label as love.  Perhaps this is a clue as to where we should travel next, for this is place where the female can demonstrate that all too rare form of love, that on unlimited love.
Again, this is only one of a variety of the expression of this inner feeling of what we call passion, compassion, community and maternal love.  And before entering one of the varieties of  love that can eventually become much more complicated if not even confusing, we should note the implication of the above as it applies to MATERNAL  love.  We here speak to what has to be the most basic and fruitful of all love all the way from that of the instinctual to that of friendship.  We know that without this particular love nothing else would matter for without it we - none of us - would be here.  If one could ever equate this maternal love with any other, I would suggest it is uneven at best.  I can say yes to father’s day being a father, but in no way would I ever equate my limited bio-chemical and psycho-dynamic role with to that of  the mother of my children   At the least there is something profoundly special in the tie of birthing and communing with the results of that birth that only a woman can know.   As we should know this is love that is taught to us all, male as well the female child and so, beyond the instinctual component there is the ultimate model in the mother love, for it is love that is the cement that holds relationships together.  There is no way that the male can match the potentials of the female anatomy.  What is more powerful than creating life whether a particular woman expresses this potential or not - it is always there even in one’s later years.
Perhaps the most universal love beyond the power of the maternal and somewhat equal to instinctual we have so far mentioned and which females inherently possess is that of FAMILIAL love, that one that holds the unity of the family together as a procreative, cultural and economic force with which we could not survive; but a place where the man can and should play a key role in communing and expanding the horizons for all.  To a certain extent this ties together well with our instinctual love since at least in the beginning and for the good of  the breed there is this tie between the mother, newborn and mate for that group of such creatures and their future survival.  And lest we forget, a common theme throughout this paper is the female of all species that create life and which the male should help maintain in whatever group to be noted.
When the family is born, it is the maternal instinct of the female drive and male desire that makes what follows work.  This is not to debase the role of the male but rather to give priority to where it most belongs.  It is very possible if not probable that the adventuring young males not only compensate for not giving birth to the family directly do so by hunting, fighting and eventual governance.  It is the female that made the original and early communities work, for the root of society to take hold, and  for the evolution that gets us to where we now are.  In any case, the family becomes the core foundation for the community, its growth and all that follows.  Perhaps we have lost a sense of the power of motherhood, the matriarch and the core of all our communities.  If so, we could truly become a lost species.
Of all the examples of love one could discuss one of the most potentially  problematic is that motivated by CHOICE , one that could be considered the opposite, the most existential of the acts of all the various examples of love here noted.   The problem with choice as with the existential life is that there are so many choices one can make in a lifetime.  I once read that one could find at least 2,000 partners to settle down with - to love and create a family with - is probably right.  Perhaps there are more than 2,000, who knows; one thing for sure is that love as choice often can be a difficult burden since there is no free choice that exists without some type of burden - the price we pay for freedom.  This is a garden of love that is so large that so many other elements inheres in this significant field.
Yet this burden of freedom, of saying I cognitively make such a choice may be one of the historically more interesting.  Perhaps the most clear example would those of the royalist tradition.  Nobles and lords had a great concern for property and thus inheritance and the carrying on of the good name.  Here the choice of mate, therefore, what woman would breed what was the appropriate heir became central to the point for some like that of Henry VIII of England, breaking with the Roman church (whose theology he agreed with) in order to find that mate who would give him a male heir.  Historically, everywhere, not just in the West, this was no small issue of what could be called a love of choice, specifically that of political convenience
There are other examples of this love in action.  The most common, perhaps, is the younger attractive woman tied to the older successful and more prosperous  male.  Moving up the social ladder can be a powerful driving force in love by choice, especially when attractiveness and wealth are involved.  This was a classic story of the of the latter female mate of Louis XIV of France. True, one could ask is this true love but then a point being drawn here is that the term “true love” means very little if one would be honest an opened to the phenomena that so many have come to and continue to live by.
The LOVE OF LIFE also may seem even more abstract than other examples but then so much around the word love is extremely abstract - nothing to be found at a blue-light special at K-Mart and without it suicide would not only be painless but the most popular sport bar none.
The most important contributing force for the human condition and development regarding love by choice my be the addenda inherent in such an action of a required demand for focus both on the choice and special implications of said choice, all of which m can contribute to the maturation of those partners involved.  Love without implication can only occur within the confines of instinctual love where the act of procreation possess its own implications beyond any deep reasoning .  Moreover, this potentially existential  relationship can imply the growth of a love as two become in time more and more one and where the power of commitment can become powerful for a variety of reasons.  If one were to look at the historic and multi-cultural background of love and marriage they may find that this is much more common for of the growth of togetherness than any one other form of human love.
This brings us close to another form of love, that of RESPONSE , or the act of a joie de vie.  When someone shows you love and you find that you indeed like that person there maybe a place for a possible reciprocity for mutual love to grow in time.  This is based on the assumption, one that has historic support, predicated on the theory that the strongest love beyond instinct is that which grows in time and within the relationship, with all the struggles and joys, and with the force of a collective memory that makes the two more than the sum of  two - a third being - a couple.  This also requires  a committed focus to that choice with much work (and luck) that often offers a great deal  more than the even the effort applied.  This is love for the more mature, and one where buona fortuna might apply.
This raises an interesting aspect of love that comes with an EXPANSIVE love, one that grows out of the experiences, learning and sacrifices people make.   There is an old adage that states:  when a man and woman marry the man must always remember that as conflicts arise the wife is always right - and no, I can’t say how this works for a gay marriage.     In the end there is the argument that all love when acted out in the marriage ceremony is a civil act for the good of the community.  As with animals we have a collective responsibility to mate, giving life to a new generation and offering order to our community.  This is not appealing to the young teens looking to Hollywood love for their model but then there are not a great many teens who can offer much to a community except perhaps their own youthful exuberance and happiness (hopefully).  This is, however, an underlying force for love’s existence on a scale beyond the two and their progeny - I married for children.
And in the end there is a certain RECIPROCITY to love since one side does not a good sandwich  make.  Tied to so many of those forces for love’s existence noted above there is this inherent dualism that should and at best plays a key role for all love.  This even implies to love of the arts for what is an art work, whether a painting or music, without an audience to laugh, cry and expand their own horizons from the experience.  All love, in the end, does expand our horizon, making something more of nature, the world and our own society; making something more than the obvious.  Even many of  those who live alone their whole life can therefore know love given their attachment to the creative urges we are all born with.  In a sense, then, love is in so many ways, a fulfillment of our self’s existence, a completion between our birth and death where the point is ever that moment when we have that overwhelming feeling, that sense of completion occurring.  Those alone and those together that participate in authentic  love know to what it is being spoken of here.
Perhaps this would be the appropriate place to mention the relationship of love to our sense of FRIENDSHIP, that state where those few in one’s lifetime make so much of a difference that even if one cannot be specific of some event other than the ties that make this love so powerful it sits there on your shoulder as though the energy of that shoulder would be seriously diminished without that other.
This latter component of love ties perfectly to that to a love based in part on being REFLECTIVE as is demonstrated in the love of the arts while for the artist it would be more accurate to associate it with that of love as INTROSPECTIVENESS, that which hungers in the artistic disposition of total commitment which all love inheres to.  We should remember that all love is transcending whether there is division or not - you would not be the same without any of these loves..
This last also would tie to one other element of love; the force of the ENERGETIC expression of living.  From the elephant to that of choice, love always requires some form of energy, applied effort on one and all, from the arts to the audience to couples to family and to friends.  Without this there is no success, joy and transcendence to add to that condition we label love.  And here it takes a great deal of energy whether to love a Shakespeare play, Picasso painting or a lifetime commitment to a mate - energy in the final analysis is the glue that makes it all work.
Now we come to the problem child for that large term love. i.e., ROMANTIC LOVE.  This is something of a trip, even a trite fools gold that is most often little more than fairy tales and escapism.  Perhaps the power of images which plays such a large part in our society today has something to do with the popularity of this form of love.  From romantic movies to sit-coms on television, the force of this “I’m in love”  has taken hold, especially with the more susceptible and impressionable youth.  This can be an experience of “being in love” that lasts for seconds, minutes or hours and when lasting longer can either be used to enter one of the other examples discussed above into a more positive force or left behind like a good but unsatisfying meal.  The risks are great since this is a flight of imagination where the force of the desire overcomes reflective thinking.  We see this also in popular culture (kitsch, the Germans call it) whether it be movies, television or  music.  This can be a dangerous basis for coupling and can contribute to a decline in healthy friendships.  Factors discussed are important for anyone looking for something more than a fad.  The counterculture, for example, had reflection and introspection, but by the time of Woodstock it had become little more than a groupie event.
Happenings like love can never be planned or expected – history does move in mysterious ways and the key is to be open but not in demand for such loves to occur.
Live is short while art is long -  love is an art.
PAX/LOVE

VPM

“Tell me, I forget.
Show me, I remember.
Involve me, I understand.”
Ancient Chinese Proverb[1]

By Vwadek P. Marciniak

Many subjects are inherently taught in a participatory manner, from chemistry to biology and music to the plastic arts, enough to make your eyes blurry.  As a natural methodology for both sciences and the arts, it is assumed that engagement is an appropriate pedagogical means to convey the maximum understanding in an exemplifying presentation.
This interactive idea often does not enter into the classrooms of what some characterize as less physically engaging subjects, from history and philosophy to literature and theology.  If this particular approach works so well in some disciplines then why could it not find an application for the humanities?
I have found this is not only possible but overwhelming advantageous.  There is no question that a student who engages their studies personally is more readily and completely involved and interested in a more comprehensive educational experience.
The ancient Latin word educate implies “to lead out” in opposition to training which has no inherent interior opportunities for the growth of the emotions and intellect of the students to face the complexities of the real world.  Training tends to be more attuned for regurgitation and testing while education, that more subjective experience, is beyond accurate testing.  One can never offer a test to tell anyone including the testee what has been absorbed.  The idea of “Involve me, I understand” is found in the thinking of John Dewey and can be traced to Rousseau’s Emile where the child is educated regarding the concept of growth and development with their hands planting and nurturing seeds which, beyond the simple and obvious implications, offers a psychological parameter and expansion of understanding about living.
An appropriate attempt in enlarging this point would be to draw a distinction between the gathering of data and personally gaining comprehensive knowledge, an interior understanding.  We know the first step in learing is the gathering of facts, of becoming informed regading a given topic.  But knowledge requires integration and assimilation as anyone who has written a worthy term paper can attest.  The computer is a very handy tool for gathering and organizing data but does not possess knowledge or understanding.  Ideally when the paper is written, a certain knowledge is acquired and the basis for expanding understanding, which may take years, can occur.  One can be informed as to what a metaphor is but only in time can actually grasp the implications of that knowledge and thus understand the implications of such data.  An accountant need only organize the data while others may be able to transform it into something deeper.
The humanities are not simply about dates or data.  It is about relationships, implications and impact.  The study of history, literature and philosophy requires at some point a transformation of a student’s assumptions, thinking and general understanding of living.  Its teaching requires not simply information or even knowledge, but more importantly, some inner personal understanding, giving it an interior home not unlike one’s own memory - which itself without reflection and introspection - is not very meaningful.  Information as knowledge followed by understanding is more complete and fulfilling than any manipulatable nonsense supporting pre-conceived notions that expand prejudices - it takes serious understanding to alter our pre-conceived perceptions.  We moved from the caves not only by processing data but more importantly by means of developing our comprehension of any and all nuances.  After all, the expanding of horizons can also imply an expansion of consciousness and there is no simple road map for such an expansion.
How to do this, or better, what process can we develop that may aid in such a development of an educationally driven experience where discovering and internalizing our heritage is a natural experience?  For my students the answer was The Voices of Time.
This is not an original idea but a personal adaptation drawn from an educational television show created and produced by Steve Allen called The Meeting of the Minds.  His creation was a television talk show with actors portraying famous historic figures where each reflected their own unique historic view as well something of their experiences.  A reading of these shows can be found in his book, Meeting of the Minds which could be an aid for those inclined to participate in such an academic exercise.[2]
Since context for historians is everything, it is important to understand what follows was created in an environment totally dedicated to the undergraduate’s general education at a major university.  Normally, when considering a liberal arts experience, we are attracted to an appropriate small liberal arts college with the exception of Michigan State University which decided in the 50’s to create a remarkable and rare pedagogic experience: it offered students a college totally dedicated to all undergraduates with nothing other than required basic educational experiences.
The creation of a non-degree granting college was a commitment to the first two years of a student’s basic liberal arts experience.  These four departments were basically for freshmen and sophomores, and were populated with highly qualified doctorates from prestigious universities.  There were no advising staff since qualified scholars teaching under-grad education were more than qualified to advise.
The four departments which all undergraduates were required to attend were American Thought and Language, Natural Science, Social Science and my own Humanities which at its peak had some 58 doctorates on staff.  The established syllabus when I arrived in 1966 possessed a unified syllabus, readings and exams for all sections.  Later the program was expanded with faculty choices of whole work readings in place of an anthology with our own exams followed with a fourth term elective dedicated exclusively to contemporary humanities.
It was the combination of these two forces, Steve Allen’s work and my experience in the Humanities Department, that made possible the creation of The Voices of Time.  Because of access to Public Television these shows were made available to a larger audience besides those in the live production since they could be aired.  Shows produced reflected  Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution with the Enlightenment and finally Modern.  Each was a product of dedicated students who were guided through the production including the making of their own t.v. recordings.
One of the largest shows was that of the ancient world where the setting was a café with live music that students had created and performed.  The technique applied was simple; students at the beginning of the term were asked of their interest in participating in the project.  First they were organized into small groups of from three to eight who picked a particular figure, such as Plato, Augustine, Marcus Aurelieus, Aristotle or Lucretius.  The idea was to choose those who had written materials that students were responsible for studying as primary sources, thus acquiring a better sense of their thinking and culture in addition to learning the distinction between primary and secondary sources.
Once research was gathered and used in structuring the historic figures they worked with those representing other figures in order to create a scripted discussion to carry the show for about an hour or hour and a half.  When this was finished each group would pick one of their own to represent their famous historic personalities.  After the script and casting was completed rehearsals began until the pattern of a substantial and accurate presentation was created.  Costuming and make-up was added by class-mates and after approximately 10 to 14 weeks the show was put on tape for the television studio to use.  For their efforts extra credit was awarded for participation, although for those who wished to not participate standard testing was available.
Since I had three sections to teach with as many as forty plus students in each it was no problem for students majoring in business, engineering, accounting and other disciplines to engage in a genuinely exciting participatory learning experience of western history.  From Aristotle to Dante, Machievelli to Locke and from Rousseau to Nietzsche as well as many others, a permanent impression of an historic genius was created, something living and lasting.
On three occasions, additionally, an enlargement of research, study and presentations occurred.  The original cause célèbre was the release of the movie Hair which disappointed because having seen a road company out of New York presented in Detroit it did not relate to the movie.  The disparity between movie and theatrical production was so great that when it was mentioned in a Contemporary Humanities class, students asked if we could create a more accurate rendering of this countercultural event.  Answering in the affirmative, we created a large outdoor presentation (cast, musicians and support of about 30) with live music at my farm on Memorial weekend where there was an audience of about 180 in attendance.  Two other outdoor shows were created over the next decade, including the writing of plots and scripts (a copy of one can be found in the State of Michigan Library).  It is hard to believe that these students did not take home a meaningful experience that will live with them notwithstanding their occupations.  (The leading musician went on to Pepperdine for a law degree.)
There are other examples from other pedagogues that should be
noted, two specifically, although different and for younger students, which are here being given credit and encouragement.
The first was an exercise in participatory education by the author-educator Albert Cullum.[3]  He made clear that “… if I’m not having fun in class, none is having fun.”  According to the article here cited, “…his students were treated to a decidedly unconventional approach to academia, routinely engaging in such imaginative activities as swimming up a giant paper facsimile of the Mississippi River; re-enacting the Lincoln assassination and the Cuban missile crisis; operating on ‘bleeding’ nouns in a ‘grammar hospital’; and,” lest we are remiss, “most impressively, reading and performing a raft of classic literature - from the Greeks to Shakespeare - in off-site settings as exotic as an actual forest.”
Making central our relationship to language, the fundamental seed for education and understanding our history, he offered an enlarged world of linguistic comprehension: “…boys and girls articulately defend their choice of history’s “best writers” - Shakespeare, Sophocles or Shaw - is a reminder of kid’s impressive ability to grasp the intangible and elusive, and how the path to success needn’t always wind through the times-tables.”  If a student at any level of their education is not expanding their literary horizon they mentally are starving for language which is central for the existence of our community: “The civilization which loses its power over its own language has lost its power over the instrument by which it thinks.”[4]
This last activity is striking since it runs parallel to the Voices of Time experience, demonstrating that Steve Allen’s principle could be exercised in high schools as well as colleges.  Cullum’s attitude regarding the ubiquitous pre-occupation with tests inform us that “…decent argument about the potential myopia of modern-day standardized testing, which customarily cleaves to math and grammar as the true litmus of our kids’ smarts.”  It can take time to learn the tricks of how to take exams and thus do well on exams which is not indicative of anything more than the ability to conform to the rules of the game.  The key is to go beyond exams and learn the language of the geniuses from whom we can expand our vision.
Cullum understands the importance of “…giving each child the gift of believing in him or herself - whether by challenging them to collect hundreds of new vocabulary words over the course of the year, or casting them in theatrical roles that promised a kind of field-trip to the unknown.”  To lead out and not indoctrinate, that is the purpose and challenge for an educator.
One other recent example of the role of direct engagement of students, in this case regarding the subject of history has recently been noted in the press regarding a YMCA program at Camp Cosby near Birmingham, Ala., one of several nationwide, where they learn directly about slavery.  In this case some 50 children, “one of whom is black, were experiencing the cruelties inflicted upon slaves who tried to escape north thorough the Underground Railroad.”  This may be traumatic but real learning often is.  This actually offers something of “a realistic perspective about slavery to fourth- and fifth-grade students by dressing as slave traders, bounty hunters and abolitionist and sending students on a risky journey through the dense woods surrounding the camp.”  To add further to the experience, they included a slave auction to begin the camp’s program.[5]
While there is nothing easy in learning important lessons at any age, it would be instructive if we could acquire a collection of various examples such as here mentioned that have been attempted.
There is one last fact that must be confronted.  Today there is the problem for higher education that should be mentioned by those of us who reaped the benefits of learning from the other side of the podium with the arrival of a democratization of higher education which has been suggested is disappearing.
Professor Andrew Delbanco has commented in the New York Times,  “Colleges: An Endangered Species?”[6] that the contemporary condition of higher education that universities have gone through phases from a relatively non-democratic institution to more representative and now less democratic.
As he put it: “At the turn of the century,…fewer than a quarter-million Americans, or about 2 percent of the population between eighteen and twenty-four,attended college.  By the end of World War II, that figure had risen to over two million.”  This was of course a result of the G.I. Bill that facilitated so many more potentially promising students.  As he further noted, by 1960, the “University of California at Berkeley was challenging Harvard in accomplishment and prestige, and…other state universities such as Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and, more recently, Texas and North Carolina joined the ranks of the world’s leading institutions.”
This is relatively well known but what is “less well known is the most recent chapter, which tells of a slow-down, if not reversal, of the trend toward inclusion.”  It turns out that “Over the last twenty-five years, as the tax revolts of the 1970s (starting in 1978 with California’s Proposition 13) became chronic tax resistance, state support for public universities has sharply fallen.  Public funds now cover less than one third of expenses at public universities…”  Things have never been the same starting with the Reagan years and the anti-economic support for state institutions.
Even the Michigan State Humanities Department no longer exists since graduate assistants now teach the history of the western world, politically, economically, artistically, as well as our heritage in literature, theology, and philosophy.  The qualified PhD spent years not only studying and teaching from their dissertation but then found themselves learning additional subjects beyond their own doctoral discipline.
We are losing our best to a narrowing of horizons, limiting of imagination and shortness of vision.  Who out there is fighting the good battle against ignorance to counter this condition?  It is time to participate.
===================================================================
[1] Lederer, Richard.  The Miracle of Language. Pocket Books, Simon     & Schuster NY 1991 p. 183
[2] Allen, Steve.  Meeting of the Minds.  Hubris House L.A. 1978
The scripts of Mr. Allen’s shows can be found in the Michigan     State Library, East Lansing, Mi.
[3] Kluger, Bruce.  USA TODAY March 24 2005 “…A Touch of Greatness, and available on video and DVD this month … author-educator Albert Cullum,…”
[4] Quote from Henry Beston found in Lederer, p. 209
[5] This from Samira Jafari.  AP El Paso Times “ALPINE, Ala.”
[6] Delbanco, Andrew.  “Colleges: An Endangered Species?”  NYTBR
March 10 2005

PAX/LOVE

“I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.”     Robert Frost
Discussing philosophy let alone political philosophy is beyond most of us to either broach let alone comprehend.  Throwing around concepts in the press like socialism, communism, liberalism or conservatism is not unlike throwing around overused dishrags as though they had some comprehensible meaning.  The fact is these are at best over used, misused and misunderstood terms, especially when we look for some guidance from our history.
For too many years now the citizens of this fair land have simply not given the same thought to their common heritage as they may have been willing to do for their own personal history.  If one were to lose their memory they would lose their name, place and all that had gone before, something that no one would ever want.  Yet we have a common heritage which among other things explains how we got here, what our heritage is about and the implications of choices for better or worse we have made in that collective past.  Think of it this way: suppose you wished to milk our heritage while sitting on a three legged stool where each  leg is labeled history, philosophy and literature.  Because of that base,  that seat you sit on sustains you as these three legs have aided in producing our sciences, technology and political transformations, activities that drive so much of our society.  Not understanding these relationships leaves us in the dark not unlike waking up one morning without any memory.  After all, the late humorists George Carlin and more recently Bill Maher have suggested that Americans are stupid.  Agreeing or not, whether stupid, ill-informed or uninterested because too busy or pre-occupied, this is not a society tied to heritage let alone reflective historical thought or writings.  A brief exposure to some relative recent thoughts on the background of the conservative thinking could help to enlighten.
We begin with the genius of Thomas Hobbes and his famed Leviathan (1651).  As a philosopher who prized history as a source of learning as well as being a participant in the newly developing and early arrival of the modern scientific revolution and enlightenment he offered insightful observations.  He was witnessing the developing commercialism,  competition,  social mobility and individualism as well the newly arrived nation state.  He was astute enough to realize he was witnessing  new changes in all these areas and he understood the arrival of early modernity.   He realized that the birthing of a  new political-social order meant the end of  religious social conformity and  he therefore recognized that a new order drawn from natural laws for survival called on the new nation state to apply restrictions to counteract the growing disruptive force of man’s self-interest.  Thus individuality must be restrained by offering security of life by political absolutism.  This could be suggested as the beginnings of the modern concepts of conservative thought.
A little more than a century latter at the time of the American and French Revolutions we meet Edmund Burke, an Irishman with a Protestant father and Catholic mother.   Raised Protestant, he served as a member of  Parliament where he proved his reforming ability by introducing and aiding in the passing of a law that separated the King’s budget from that of the state.  He was a substantive  philosopher, especially regarding his work on the Sublime and Beautiful and thus anticipates to some extent the beginnings of the new Romantic movement that was on the horizon.  He, therefore, was not completely conforming to the blind optimism of the rationalism of the Enlightenment.   His approach to politics was religious since tradition was far more  important than clever intellectual paradigms.  He also was historical in that he supported the American Revolution, thinking they were following the traditions of an England he felt was losing it, while apposing the French Revolution since it was destroying it’s religion and tradition.  In this case one can see that some conservative thought was reactionary rather than looking to the future.  The causes for the  French Revolution were “men’s vices - pride, ambition, avarice, lust, sedition.”   Could greed, one of the original seven deadly sins be far behind?  The old days are better than the new because there is evil in the world and we must be on our watch and wary to prevent it from taking over our lives and making things worse.
The power of fear and need for conformity can be seen as central for these thinkers.   As Burke made clear, personal property, religion and the traditional class structure of a Christian kingdom is what most matters. These may appear as pessimistic thoughts but they were a  large part of the conservative foundation in preserving some order in a time of change.
Basic to conservative thought the retaining and supporting that which conservationists most valuable, their heritage as they saw it.  But in political terms, nothing is that simple since to deal with the beginnings and development of the modern world is to deal with the implications of the rise of the modern phenomena of the individual and all it might imply.  Certainly in our own century there were many cases of political action to avoid some of those possible implications, as in Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Soviet Union.
A contrast of such thinking could make it more clear.  The push for individuality turned out not to be found in the heritage of conservatism but rather in what is normally thought of as liberalism.  For this we turn to a century after Burke and the writings of John Stewart Mill who also was a contributor to utilitarian thought, even regarding his own religious ideas.   As a defender of the growing sense of individualism, he was therefore a defender of representative democracy.   He even defended those who would be considered eccentrics and appreciated the writings of de Tocqueville.  Although living until 1873 he was still tied to many of the assumptions that had driven the Enlightenment as had the thinking of Hobbes and somewhat less so Burke.  Thus all three were not really part of the thinking that has transformed into our own  twentieth century world.  Put another way, the changes in economics made some of their earlier thinking rather antiquarian.
This brings us to the obvious conundrum as to what are we responding to when we hear arguments for a more conservative approach to our world, whether it be politics or society.
Since the eras of these three writers, there are at least two important changes that must be taken into account to understand what we mean when speaking of today’s conservatives.  First the age of reason from whence they drew has proven to be less efficacious and appropriate than once was assumed.  People, we would like to think, are rational in choices and actions when in fact history has proven that they are foolish if not often stupid in choices they make.  People are more likely to rationalize than reason so they can defend their previous assumptions.  As the economist Keynes and the stock market crashes prove, there is some serious group thinking that can dominate.  The other transformation impacting on our political ideas is the industrial revolution and the new economics that followed with the impact of such terms as capitalism and free markets - we now find the birth of homoeconomicus.   These two  have changed the landscape of political theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The assumptions of rationality cannot always be separated from the theories of a new economic world order that speaks of maximizing profit at all costs.  Beginning with the transformation that arrived with the economic changes of modernity, the obvious instructive revelation is the new power of money and credit to compete with the government that had been so central to the early conservatives.  We should remember that 100 years ago we were agricultural , living on farms and in rural areas.  Suddenly we find ourselves in a world where recessions and depressions have become all too common and so too, new fears of unemployment, homelessness and being so very poor in the land of plenty.  The rich grow richer while labor unions aided in creating a middle class, a very recent phenomena.  With urban living and blight as well an expanding population, local governments find themselves overwhelmed trying to make some sense of a civilized life in work and wages.  Communities are replaced by alienation and estrangement while divorce rates and crime rise.  There is a price to pay for first a mercantile and then capitalistic, materialistic and consumptive societies that have not been faced up to yet.
Most importantly for this essay,  the conservatives now do not agree with the original meanings of restrained individuality and a need for big government.  We now have marketing and advertising.   The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, the inventor of modern public relations, marketing and advertising  noted, Americans need to be told what it is that they should buy as in the herd instinct.   How do conservatives fit into this new paradigm?   They appear to support what they call free market capitalism and oppose anything from big government to even government in general.  The irony is that from a political philosophical position they do not seem to want to preserve anything but profit.  It was Joseph Schumpeter who once announced  that this is a system driven by waves of entrepreneurial innovations, or what he described memorably as a “perennial gale of creative destruction.”  To build something new first we must destroy something already established, hardly a conservative perception that also welcomes new sounds of confusion.  It is difficult if not impossible to make some sense of those who would support this economic system unless they are a Millian liberal and certainly not one who would want to be cautious and to conserve.
Two ideas, one driven by faith and the other by pseudo science, has taken hold of the conservatives inclined to give their new thinking some frame.  During the coming of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century we saw the rise of Calvinism, a version of Christianity that says that God has little reason to save any of us as we are all sinners even if a few are chosen (for whatever divine reason), and would be obviously blessed with prosperity and power.  This went over well with the bankers of Switzerland as well the British and their Puritans who are often Evangelicals in our own land.  Thus, today those who have wealth, deserve it, just as those who don’t, deserve acquiring nothing: a popular distinction between those of privilege versus those claiming a right.  These new conservatives believe in privilege.
What if you are more secular?  Here we have pseudo scientific social Darwinism where there are a few born genetically superior while the rest are born inferior.  The special few are the leaders and wealthy who deserve it for they are bio-chemically privileged and thus deserve all they get, even at the expense of the rest.  This conflict of physical roles is only compounded by the recent presence of those called neo-cons who argue that we, the U.S.A., are number one, the exceptional and special beings who are the only true power of good sense and decency in the world, and we should exercise it.
Whether Calvinism or Social Darwinism, these are a set of assumptions that today’s conservatives are in many ways engaged in if not driven by.  Today’s maldistribution of wealth only gives evidence to the dangers of these assumptions in action that immediately began with the White House of President Reagan followed by that of George W. Bush (if not also Clinton).   The issue is what is the validity of a two class society where those in the middle are going to find that they need rights and therefore are not privileged?
This confirms that an up-to-date and a more efficacious conservative movement is in need of reconstructing with  new perceptions if not a revolution in understanding.
One last comment regarding our present lexography should be noted: the terms liberal and conservative are more confusing given the circumstances we now find ourselves as we finish this decade of a new century.  Rather it would be more helpful to note that one is right, far right, extreme right or left of center, wherever that center may be.
Political conversations depend upon the words we use and the meaning we imply not fixed ideological positions that take us over the brink.

By Vwadek P. Marciniak

The following is drawn from Sean Healy’s Boredom, Self, and Culture (1984) using quotes from him while concepts analysis and interpretations are this writer’s responsibility.

“The center will not hold,” as William B. Yeats stated, while vidiots sit in front of the tube stunned by the department of redundancy department enveloping us in order to leave one so redundant as to look to redundancy for answers.

Is there a more boring topic to analyze than boredom? As J. Heller put it, a world empty of “meaning seeks to escape from the infinite boredom of its meaninglessness by the magic of words without flesh, and forms without content.”

If you feel jaded or are sitting with cabin fever are you bored? An article in Reader’s Digest a few years back on “How to Cope with Boredom” read in part: “Despite its extraordinary variety of diversions and resources, its frenzy for spectacles and it feverish pursuit of entertainment, AMERICA IS BORED.” Continuing, it stated that “The abundance of efforts made in the United States to counter boredom have defeated themselves, and boredom has become the disease of our time.”[89]

Are there paradigms for such grit? We throw “boredom” around as though it was a child’s toy without concern for meaning or appropriate application. Words too often can create more problems than resolutions and boredom can fit that niche. Placing it in historic context, therefore, is one issue here confronted. What follows may be aggravating and pointless but words need space to face meaning for our times.

Early hermits in Lower Egypt used a term like “noonday devil” while fourth century Greeks referred to the “tedium or perturbation of heart”.[16] During the Middle Ages sloth as well spiritual laziness came close to our understanding. Around the thirteenth century the root for the French ennui appeared while Petrarch suggested “melancholy” for what he perceived as “hatred and contempt” being part of the “human condition.” This was a pre-cursor of the English “bored” when Robert Burton wrote in 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy.(18-19) Shakespeare used “weary” some twenty times.

The French jumped on this issue earliest with ennui which in a seventeenth century French/English dictionary was listed as synonyms with “annoy; vexation; trouble; disquiet; molestation; sorrow; grief; anguish; wearisomeness; tediousness, irksomeness; importunity; a loathing, …; discontentment, or offence, at.”[19] Where is there clarity for understanding?

In France the “inner, deep-seated changes in the psyche during the early seventeenth century, occurred.”[20-1] Pascal wrote of “the state that defines man’s structure” in noting “ennui had become no longer a problem of existence, it had become man’s problem.” His contemporary, la Rochefoucauld, observed that hanging at court was an endurance of boredom. Voltaire found ennui the most horrid of conditions, and spoke of it as being “the abyss of eternal nothingness.”(23) France being at the beginnings of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment, was on the cutting edge that some might wish never occurred. A comforting faith driven religion was being replaced with a faith in divisive and confusing reasoning where each would create their own path to understanding.

Blaise Pascal, one of the first modern writers to expatiate on boredom, suggested that “justice does not lie in these customs but resides in natural laws common to every country” where the joke “is that man’s whims have shown such great variety that there is not one.”(77) The more exciting aspect of Pascal’s position was that he was not speaking of the “actual condition of his fellow men of the seventeenth century, but as a prophet (an early-warning system to put it in modern terms), acutely sensitive to changes still so subtle and undeveloped as to be quite invisible to be undetectable by the vast majority of those around him at the time.”(54-5)

It was at the University of Paris where late Medieval intellectual advances challenged tradition notwithstanding objections from the Church. There was an explosion of population, growth of cities, revival of trade, and the circulation of new ideas (a smaller version of what we now see), both exciting and profoundly disturbing. Intellectual growth can create contempt, especially for a declining church where this new faith in reason was finding fruitful soil.

Later we have Flaubert offering not only suggestions for this anxiety but who also was one of the first to draw a distinction “between occasional boredom and more chronically fixed boredom which he referred to as ‘modern boredom’ or what might be labeled as ‘hyper-boredom’ a ‘deep-seated agony recognized only by its effects.’” The idea of some form of painful circumstance, something of an existential experience, began making an early appearance.(28)

It was “Baudelaire who most acutely captured the morbid richness of l’ennui moderne. He too points to the blankness of the state and to its sweeping extent …. he is in himself one the great prophets of the malady” since raising this above all other vices or painful conditions.(29)

We arrive at the English word bored around 1766(24) when an English philologist noted that what we have is “the curious class of verbs and adjectives which describe not so much the objective qualities and activities of things as the effects they produce on us.”(24) While accurate it also demonstrates a fundamental problem when discussing bored, a subjective experience looking for an objective definition. As for leisure as a cause, it suggested “For the vast majority, the tediousness of life is experienced as boredom (or boredom 2), the common or garden variety that tends to afflict any leisure class.” Since contrived busyness is tied to leisure it lies at the heart of this manifestation.(66) And for the “British Isles we discover those who tended to be morose, sullen, phlegmatic, and generally private, in contrast with the forms it assumed on the Continent, where it had fast become fulminating, virulent and destructive”(27)although this delineation between cultures is more apparent than real.

Entering our own era, Kierkegaard offered that “Boredom depends on the nothingness which pervades reality.”(15) He further suggested that boredom is the root of all evil,(26) demonstrating how lost one can get in trying to pin down this all too common condition. On more solid ground he noted “that everyone who feels bored cries out for change…. One tires of living in the country and moves to the city; one tires of one’s native land, and travels abroad;…”(26) This is a classic example of not only seeking busyness but equally avoiding productive work because we’ve arrived where nihilism, nothingness, is a void today’s mind all too willingly grasps.

For Emile Durkeim, suicide reveals this deep crisis in modern society. This sense of something not holding together was also recognized by Flaubert who recollected “how he and his friends had ‘lived in a strange world … we swung between madness and suicide.’”(33) As the song states: “Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes.”

Some could suggest that a person bored by work is too busy most of the time to realize it and therefore it is not leisure but its recognition that creates boredom. But we could echo Baudelaire in saying that “one must work, if not for taste then at least from despair, or, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.”(86) Work unlike leisure or busyness offers creative opportunities for expansion of the self beyond the world of the bored.

Lewis Mumford suggested that “those who have great wealth, that minority with privilege, commanding all that the heart desires, could be classic examples of those who suffer from chronic disaffection, malaise, anxiety and psychotic self-destructiveness.”(96) While this may appear rather cavalier, when things do become too easy there is more room for boredom thanks to technology.

This raises an interesting issue of how much and of what importance the development of the modern self has or has not contributed to this pervasive sense of boredom now running rampant. The answer is no more clear than defining what it is to be an individualized self. The appearance of the modern individual has contributed to the birthing of the contemporary self where increasingly the center of the universe has found its discoverer. It is not the ego which asks “look at me” but rather one’s inner becoming where there are beginnings of opportunities that only end when the curtain is drawn.

The individual is now where today’s boredom can find comfort, blossoming unless the self creates an openness, that place where freedom finds fertility. The difficulty for most is that this is a huge personal burden that one would just as soon ignore. To look in the mirror and see the beginning and end of all of the best and worst looking back at you is not a popular sport. Yet this authentic privacy stands against that which is more than an escape from a public commune that we all belong to. Beginning alone is an early positive step—when properly embraced—towards the eventual communion with fellow travelers. Thus the self-conscious being is freed (not politically liberated)to enter the next expansive opening.

To note: “… there was one characteristic common to all instances of boredom, present and past, namely the loss of personal meaning, whether in relation to a particular experience or encounter.” This loss could be occasioned by the absence of something comforting like religion, for where doubt and hypocrisy find a berth so might boredom. And today’s idea of human nature does not offer supportive roots for a place in a community beyond doubt. Where was “some objective reality corresponding to the term ‘human nature’” when the line between objective and subjective is blurred. Having “inauthentic selves, to be untrue to their perception of their own nature as human beings”(101)is deception and boredom awaiting us. This is just one more reason for suggesting that individuality is where a self finds authentic expression which is far more complicated and difficult than one may wonder. Today we find an increasing collapse in modernity and its blind optimism in the rational and progressive nature of humankind. Since this pattern of a breakdown of the older order has taken hold, the counter- culture developed a youth driven revolution for those unwilling to be bored or conform, often two sides of the same coin.

Many drop-outs, literally and figuratively, do so because of a boredom with our systems - schools, industry or corporations. The certitude inherent in religious faith is now replaced by a faith in a collective reasonableness that has lead to a post-boredom where space and time is now torn apart beyond our traditional expectations. Two phenomena confront us as we transmigrate through and beyond the modern world. We have the evolving modern and high-tech maturation based upon the developmental roots of the late enlightenment. Now comes the surreal and fresh arts referred to as “absurd,” new physics beyond order and unheard of destructive planetary wars as well as the view of a rationally ordered world now seen as challenging. Consciousness within a growing self should now begin to find some central birthing.

We note that “The difficulty of finding an answer is only compounded when, on closer inspection, it becomes evident that it is actually not rationality as such that lies at its root but the immense and it would seem irreversible growth in consciousness and self-consciousness (reflexivity) which is dialectically related to that rationalism.”(166) Also it is that “greater consciousness and deliberation had ‘completely upset the balance between conscious and unconscious forces operating in our society,’”(108) The more actively we apply conscious states to given circumstances the more one exercises a self outside the mainstream of traditional assumptions.

Sometimes we must reach beyond the familiar in risking our understanding in order to embrace a new road. While no certain definition fits terms like boredom and consciousness, the more forceful element, the voice of post-modernity further adds to this confusion. Elements of post-modernity include that no inherently rationally organized universe exists, that art defies simple definitions given our inherent uncertainty; we now have extreme meta-fiction, fragmentary, full of a discordant genre mixture, lacking any hierarchy of discourse, and we now possess self-contradictory and unresolved uncertainty as a basis for living. There is a beginning and end but what is between is the existential burden of what is partly an absurd existence. It has even been suggested for boredom that “the world is eaten up by boredom … you can’t see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice.” This same commentator also noted that boredom “is like a fermentation of a decomposing Christianity”, what could be called a legacy of a materialistic and mechanistic world.

When signs of post-modernity appeared we hear Kafka’s voice offering feelings of “absolute indifference and apathy.” It was as if “A well gone dry, water at an unattainable depth and no certainty it is there.” Here we find something more than boredom as “Nothing, nothing…. The present is a phantom state form…a Nothing, nothing. Emptiness, boredom, no, not boredom just emptiness, meaninglessness, weakness.”(35) And Beckett’s Waiting for Godot offered boredom as a central point of interest.(35)

The population today is more than 300 million versus some 92 million a century ago; average age now in the 70s versus the 30s, while relationships to speed dramatically altered our sense of time and space. Our agrarian rural society is now urban where living, sleeping and eating is performed by the power of mechanical time which is fixed outside London by an atomic clock. While divorce is common and wars are as insane as one can make them, the planet is smaller, polluted and dependent on electronics, our new deity. Dissonance applies in music, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and even in some ways politics. This is not the time to be looking for order or a sense of harmony but one for hiding. Erich Fromm, in Sane Society stated: “one of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with one’s self and one’s life.”(55) What then is the choice?

The following by Rollo May adds that “while one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the emptiness of boredom to a state of futility and despair” which is followed by a sense of “nausea, disintegration, and to the terrifying situation in which even ‘evil itself bores.’”[86] When Mersault in The Stranger was asked if he regretted committing murder he responded that “what I felt was less regret than a vague boredom” (”un certain ennui“). Today we embrace phrases like “bored to death”, “crushingly bored” or “out of one’s mind with boredom.”

This was expressed in part by Alan Watts’ “divided mind,” suggesting that as “long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration, and disillusion. Suffering is piled on suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom.”(63-4) Mersault noted that they are “not having any feelings, of being blocked emotionally, being frozen, of feeling the self to be unreal, in a word, apathy.” All these are “affective states and states of mental inhibition.”(49) Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur has a salesman leaving a ship again and again and again. As Susan Sontag explained it, the brutal nominalism of the artists as minimal has replaced the place for detailed and lengthy visual explanations of what is perceived. The world like art is reduced to the point of lacking definable clarity.(71)

Only when man is seen as Dasein, as a being whose essence is a function of Being-in-a-world, is there found a resolution of the riddle as to what is the crises for a generalized ennui.(64) The German term Dasein implies man in context.(64) William Barrett’s Irrational Man stated that “words like dread, fear, guilt and boredom are not merely mental figments, but… modes of man’s Being-in-the-world”[72], a none enviable position. Heidegger offered that this mood that assails us “comes neither from ‘inside’ nor from ‘outside,’ but arises out of the Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being.” As with anxiety, boredom has no special object.(65)

If a prime function of culture is to provide meaning, and if the incidence of boredom (the result of an unaware realization of the collapse of meaning) greatly increases, then it follows that there is something gravely amiss within such a culture, something seriously disordered at its deepest and least accessible level. We may wonder about the act of living while not understanding it with no heaven or hell, or reason or progress. Thinkers like Rilke and Nietzsche were early in pointing to our being worn-out of things and of the words attached to them, a process that has accelerated enormously since.(68) “As has been made clear, the sheer number of things has depreciated any particular one of them” while “our reckless destruction of things has sundered us from them in spirit.”(68) The irony of all this is that things are no longer precious (however expensive they may be). For Rilke, the sharing of lives, the preciousness of our lives and of others has been diminished.(68)

We have gained much outside around us and lost much inside us. We run away from ourselves with useless busyness. So much of our social activities are nothing more than an avoidance of our threatening boredom and the fear of it. And one may add that “as the meaning continues to be eliminated from the world and from man (meaning in the sense of an answer to Heidegger’s question, … `why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?’)” what is called hyper-boredom, “will become increasingly powerful forces in Western culture.”(69) The “Great Chain of Being” has been reduced to a heap of links unattached to one another or anything other than redundancies. (70) Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse stated that “there are times when a whole generation is caught between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself, and has no standard, no security, so simple acquiescence.”[60] Only with individual and personal work do we find dignity.

We live in two worlds beyond a faith in religion, one a belief in the tradition of utilitarian modernity and the other an unknown post-modernity appearing on the horizon. This idea of transition between these two epochs can be found as early as in Hegel: “The spirit of the time growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world.” He died in 1831 while the Great War did not begin until 1914 when technology became the dog and human reason the tail—simple rationalizations. Little wonder that the idea that “frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown,” has “betoken that there is something else approaching.”[61] For those of the world of hyper-boredom, “they have merely let the sense of vacuity ensuing from the collapse of the ‘traditional paradigm’ break through.”(88) An early poet of our era, T. S. Eliot, suggested that “We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men/ Leaning together/ Head pieces filled with straw. Alas!”(90)

As our sources have noted: “boredom is the inevitable accompaniment of the absence, or even serious uncertainty about the stability and reliability, of values, purposes, meanings and commitment.”(91) What is there when there is nothing but the “nihilism of the masses; the largely unconscious, unacknowledged sense that the bottom has fallen out of the world.”(91) Boredom exists because “our present temporarily schizoid existence” is centered “in the two cultures—vacillating between dead purposes and deadly devices to escape boredom,”[77] one leading to the other!

We’ve arrived full circle where modernity bumps against the wall of this strange and ill-defined post-modernity that demands more of the individual, that inner self trying to create focus where once it was a given. There are forces to face and keep in mind that delineate these two eras as Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (p284) suggested that we now need a “new theory of personality” to take account of the novel type of man already coming into existence. He further admits that “the multiplication of life styles challenges our ability to hold the very self together.”[43] Distractions are comfort blankets to hide beneath when boredom knocks at your door.

Self is what has let go of the familiar collective that hides the pain that rains when the ego is the star attraction. The self is the existential becoming rather than traditional religion or some rational ego dominating force, a recognition that only between birth and death is where one’s own loving works. The self cannot be discovered, it can only be created by effort.

This changing horizon also offers freedom from the burden of uncertainty and its fear in a world no longer providing meaning with its response of boredom. This is not just a subjective reaction since the world of mechanics and consumption is boring (except for workers).(93) Selves live by judgements of correct and incorrect rather than ancient metaphors of right and wrong secured in righteousness that can transcend fearful moments and leave boredom for the boring.

But then this is only a beginning.

PAX/LOVE

“The only Thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  — President F.D. Roosevelt

by Vwadek Marciniak

The new millennium sits uncomfortably on our doorstep while offering expanded insights from complex philosophical perspectives to diverse cultural analysis. This a glorious beginning for students of history, philosophy, literature, art and our social condition. Welcome to the funny farm of the bizarre.

If we go back to the road that brought us here we could find many elements we might not want to own up to and yet find trapping us. Without dragging us too far back we could trace the madness that took hold with Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and now continues in various degrees in places like Serbia, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Welcome to the mad century even in the new millennium.

The issue of intelligence versus stupidity or sanity versus insanity appears to dominate the global picture. Polarization has become the norm. We could discus Korea or Vietnam to no avail as we could discuss the number of countries that have recently appeared and are now members of the U.N. And there is urban decay with collapsing school systems while universities become trade schools for training rather than institutions for higher learning.

Where is the mental and emotional stability out there? Our economic system has been consumed by greed. Michael Moore’s latest movie makes this point clearly. In this and the past millennium we have had wars upon wars we do not pay for because the rich, especially since their Reagan’s tax cuts with the abbreviation of tax rates, have no intention of paying for wars they make a profit from. For the rest, they earn less to take home - if they still have a home. What has become all too normal is the use of lies to expand people’s anxiety and thus gain further power and control.

A little background might offer context, especially when considering how often it has been in the West that political and economic bitterness has led to major disasters and transformations of historic significance based on irrational fear, noting that today as many as forty million may be born anxious, ready to be pushed over the edge. (R.M.Henig, N.Y.T Mag.10/4/09)

In the Seventeenth Century the English were the first Western civilized country to behead their legitimate king only to allow the monarchy to re-appear a decade later. The French followed at the end of the Eighteenth century only to re-establish the crown early the following century. Anxiety followed by popular bitterness often leads to a level of fear and anger that can point to disastrous results. Fear on top of anxiety is the operational psychological tool for those wheeling and dealing power. Without this sense of latent and activated feeling of fearfulness much of the worst of our historic past could not have occurred. Turn to the Boston Tea Party where colonists’ fears about taxes paid to England helped begin a revolution that contributed to the eventual demise of the British empire. Our own civil war was predicated on a fearful assumption that President Lincoln would be a disaster for the slave owners in the south.

More recently we discover the beginnings of the Second Chapter of the Great War with Germany’s attack on Poland on the pretense that Poland attacked Germany first, causing fear among Germans which was created by this successful lie that ended in an unsuccessful war. In this century we had a our own cause celebre of fear, 9/11, which was expanded to include a theory that there were threats from Iraq which supposedly had weapons of mass destruction and left us with a need for a destructive and pointless war. After Berlin we have Washington D.C. as another peace maker.

At times it would appear that instead of operational political voices being concerned with the three principles of governance - Policy, Politics and Power - those voice are slipping into a crippling two - Politics and Power. I am sure that if we could find a better way to waste money and power we could invent it by using the basic rhetoric for creating anxiety, fear and mass hysteria.

The issues of fear and the root of anxiety can appear relatively minor although still of little value especially when tied to lies. We should question what was gained by Father Caughlin’s irrational attacks on F.D. Roosevelt’s presidency, or McCarthy’s attacks on Eisenhower with the aid of the extreme right led by the John Birch Society accusing him of being a communist sympathizer? Attacks on President Clinton and Bush served no purpose other than to keep a small group excessively wired with increasing deception, anxiety, fear and even hatred for some.

Today’s economic conditions have deteriorated given the polices begun by president Reagan and carried on by those who followed, Democrats and Republicans. Incomes are now driven for and by the wealthy while credit rather than manufacturing dominate, waiting a short time to explode as a bubble. But this is not the real issue which is pointing deceptive fingers of fear at whomever one can blame and then letting it get so out of hand we begin to wonder how much we wish to follow the earlier English and French models of frustration, hatred, madness and sometimes destruction. History has much to teach: one reason this topic is so unpopular in this country is because looking at lessons learned from the past is not always pleasant.

A key component for deceptively driven fear are serious changes, especially those directed at some massive unknown, even when there is a desperation out there for a need to improve our economic and cultural circumstances. Entering the unknown breaks down a sense of control and thus a sense of secured freedom. Something unknown, other than our positively colored memory (or history), is followed by that overwhelming and comforting power of an optimistic present, one offering the promise of a predictable tomorrow and anticipation for a better future. The real problem with this abstract explanation is that it doesn’t factually fit the basic psycho drama of most people’s everyday lives given their tendencies to hold optimistic perceptions as a source for tomorrow’s certainty. Look at the number of people who still cannot accept that they might or even have lost their job!

We already have a future to fear in the form of technical changes from electronic computers, the internet, handheld devices and a plethora of explosive information, so much of it wrong for this confused society lacking critical skills to edit through this maze. Anxiety inheres both in people biologically and culturally. A recent article in USA TODAY by Theresa Howard(10/1/09)noted that “The Anti-Defamation League, which monitors hate speech on the Web, says complaints are up this year more than 200% through July, to 1,152 complaints. `This whole era of cyber-hate is one of the biggest challenges we face,’ says Deborah Lauter, civil rights director of the league. `We’ve gotten to a place where we made it unacceptable for haters to hate in the public space.’” Little wonder “they turn to the Web, where they can be anonymous.” New technological is always unfamiliar and potentially dangerous.

The philosopher Hegel once suggested that it is the image of our future that dictates our perceived past in the present we now live in. We see this application in how people assume a future predicated on their understanding of past memories. But here is the problem: memories we now know are very unreliable in that they offer us wishful thinking. We often think of our past in ways that conform to what we anticipate it might bring - “I’ve been lucky, I may win the lottery”; or “people always said I had a nice smile so I know I could make it in sales”; and again, “I have always been flexible, even adaptable, and therefore should get that promotion upstairs.” We create myths by those images that we have lived by and in so doing ignore not only the variables of future possibilities but the here and now for all that it might offer. Our memory is a convenient tool of escape: “A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interests in the present” as George Santayana so clearly expressed. We do not want to threaten images of the future with any alteration of our inventive and comfortable memory of days long gone. As Caesar stated it: “Men quite gladly believe what they want to believe.” And as the philosopher Francis Bacon added: “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true”.

We construct an assumptive past, a certain history, in order to offer a convenience of assumptions for some mythical future to alter the coloration of our present. Little wonder that Americans hate to study the past; it would undermine the lies now lived. Fear drawn from apprehension and bitterness is always potentially dangerous if not a basis for disaster. There is no room with the economic, political and military crises we now are exploring for anything but the coolest heads combined with reflective thinking. Convinced that abortion is evil a man chooses to go to a church to shoot and kill a physician who performs abortions.

Little wonder that this era demands humor on a large scale. It was George Carlin that suggested that American’s favorite passtime was bending over and grabbing their ankles, to wit, I would add that it should read grab their ankles and then say thank you. From Carlin to the “Cuckoo’s Nest” we witness the recognition of a breakdown of anything we could call an order of sanity on a massive although entertaining scale. We see a man shoot a black guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington to make some point…?

Perhaps we should look into the poor mental habits of those problematic areas of economics, drugs and political policies, not neglecting issues of education and the environment, especially the latter with forest fires and melting ice caps that expand the evidence on how we are incapable of honoring our insights or sanity. The nut house is for those in lock-ups and not for those with radio and televison shows - except in the U.S.A. Did hate, in general, and on the radio or T.V. have anything to do with Timothy McVeigh destroying lives at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma? It is too easy to move from being stupid to mentally unbalanced, even crazy at various times given the circumstance of some irrational fear pushing one to anger then hate that can open the door to an unbalanced paradigm.

When the English were beginning to face their monarchial crisis the brilliant physician, William Harvey, a contributor to the scientific revolution, noted “he had met with more disease generated from the mind than from any other cause.” Not surprising a “similar observation was to be made about the French Revolution.”[p.9H.IO] How many have crossed the line today and where are we going? Is this what is wanted for this country with wars, economic collapses and shortness of civility? Changes, past and present, requires dreamers and leaders not negativity.

Perhaps a more revealing expose of this nightmare would be to look first at the role of fear, its potential to lead to anger, then hatred and often some degree of mental instability.

Fear is the most powerful emotion according to University of California professor of Psychology, Michael Fanselow (Las Cruces Sun-News of Oct. 31 09). “When it comes to ruling the brain, fear often is king, scientists say.” From the same paper(Sept. 7 2009), in a column by Claudette Oritz, it was suggested “we do have a lot more fear. Fear is capitalized on in our country, It sells. We pay.”[p.120] How bad can it get? This same writer noted that when attending a gun show in Denver she found two books for sale entitled “Basement Nukes” and “Life After Doomsday.” To her credit she also noted that “…laughter helps chase fear back into its natural boundaries.”[p.120]

So what would an analysis of fear offer us? Of the types, two stand out. First we have the occasional and brief where a gun may be drawn or a car slides off the highway. These are usually short and to the point - sometimes only seconds long. The other is more complicated since it is an accumulated fear often based on anxiety accumulating to higher and higher states of anguish and terror driving the mind off the road into a mountain of panic. This was the kind of fear that many Europeans for good reason experienced during the Second Chapter of the Great War. These kinds of crises can push those more susceptible beyond simple fear. The Great Depression pushed some in that direction as has the Great Recession. There are no easy fears to deal with because they can lead to even deeper and more problematic emotions. For many, 9/11 still marks such a demarcation as well as an expansion of this fear’s hand maiden, ideology.

Where there is this fear and ideology there also can follow serious anger where hate sits in the back room waiting to open the door. This anger is equally a relative term and, again, in one sense can be but a brief moment, not of great concern except where accumulative. Like fear, anger held onto too long, in distorting attachments, can lead to more serious and even criminal activity. The prisons are full of those who moved beyond a small momentary feeling of anger. When hatred enters the picture any sense of rational thinking is out the window even when there are no windows.

It is short trip, hardly a sneeze, to go to war and eventual annihilation. Look at the beginning of the Thirty Years War or more recently consider some U.S. soldiers who fought natives in our western lands.

What happens if we travel from fear to anger to hatred? Mental instability is not far from a simple case of some petit negativity driven to fear and all that might follow. Being nuts comes to dominate, whether for a moment or longer, with roots often in the lands of economic and political crisis where the most unstable can become potentially dangerous, no longer part of a civil dialogue but rather a bitterly driven disagreement.

One can march on Washington, New York or even Athens as some of us did for peace and an end to atomic threats. The difference between the past and contemporary marches is that these are filled with a diet of hatred for the president expressed on a level of anger that is only heightened and vented. We should be glad we see no guns emptied at Town Hall meetings.

We are walking a line where the unknown has never been a greater mystery, especially when it comes to domestic economics in a global economic world. Stresses are huge for many if not overwhelming for some, and with good reason since this economy we inherited in the late 1940s with roots in the Nineteenth Century is now disappearing. This is especially difficult for those who have no other living models other than increasing consumption to the point of addiction and for the younger who cannot imagine another life style; this is a major cultural crisis introduced yet unexplored.

Mental instability whether calling it nuts, crazy or insanity could well be the roadway we are laying for tomorrow. We have witnessed since the Bush/Cheney bankruptcy through war on top of Reagan’s reforms for the rich and his credit dreams, a collapse of a manufacturing order that once seemed comforting. Get a job, get married, buy a house, have children, get promoted then retire on easy street - a dream expressed in movies and TV for many years now disappearing. There is no blame since this dream could never have lasted in any case. These historic changes and challenges with little imaginative leadership give no cause for optimism. The unknown may be great for a hip counterculture and a curious postmodern mind but what about the average Jane and Joe?

Looking at other causes for fears with at least theoretical responses we discover billions of dollars wasted based on a fear our society is addicted to, that of illegal drugs and its users. Not tobacco, no, not booze, caffeine or sweets, no, only those illegal today. This ironically may prove to be the easiest problem to deal with while at the same time offering a blessing for the strained economy. In the Guardian (9/3/09 p.1) the author Simon Jenkins stated that “The greatest social menace of the new century is not terrorism but drugs,… It fills jails, corrupts politicians and plagues nations. … It is utterly mad” Did he find an answer, yes, but in another land where “Last week the Argentine supreme court declared in a landmark ruling that it was ‘unconstitutional’ to prosecute citizens for having drugs for their personal use.” The court further asserted that “`adults should be free to make life style decisions without the intervention of the state.’” If we look at the logic behind this failed if not peculiar war we discover that “The underlying concept of the war on drugs, initiated by Richard Nixon in the 1970s, is that demand can be curbed by eliminating supply. … This concept marries intellectual idiocy… with practical impossibility.”[p.2] We did this in outlawing booze and now find that “Making supply illegal is worse than pointless. It oils a black market, drives trade underground, cross-subsidizes other crimes and leaves consumers at the mercy of poisons. It is the politics of stupid.” This is as generous as there is in stating the case.

But the deeper, more lengthy and challenging problem is the ending of and transferring from the old economic order to something yet unknown while allowing for a promise of economic survival. The fear implodes upon all, even the rich and powerful who normally pedal such fears. How the tables are turning. An introduction go the issues is found at what Paul Krugman noted in his NYT piece (9/6/09) in explaining “How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?” His comments are simple and direct: “…they turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts.” To clarify, “…, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior,…” The point drawn is that people do not live by the assumptions of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment which had it all wrong - people are not inherently rational as fear only makes too clear. Most newspaper and magazine articles along with cable and radio network news are not necessarily here to support this revelation but rather have a tendency to cover up the grasping wealthy in this outdated system.

Looking for exceptions we find the following: “The incomes of the young and middle-aged especially men - have fallen off a cliff since 2000, leaving many age groups poorer than they were even in the 1970s,” as a USA TODAY analysis of new census data found.[9/18-9/09] We also have “People 54 or younger losing ground financially at an unprecedented rate in this recession, widening a gap between young and old that had been expanding for years.” Older workers are not retiring which is not promising for the young. Then there is the story in USA TODAY (9/21/09) telling us that “More skilled immigrants are giving up their American dreams to pursue careers back home raising concerns that the U.S. may lose its competitive edge in science, technology and other fields.” Now “`what was a trickle has become a flood,’ says Duke University’s Vivek Wadhawa,…” One can add as the article states that “the U.S. economy will suffer without there skilled workers.” - Anyone for watching Catch 22?

Add to this the housing crisis, increasing unemployment, much of it permanent and a health care disaster where we see the slaughter of so many at a cost that continually expands while we do nothing and end with this picture, this horror movie we would just as soon miss.

What is needed, it has been suggested, is a more earth driven economy. As Berry Wendell suggested in his September(09) “Progressive” article(p.18): “I would put nature first, the economics of land use second, the manufacturing economy third, and the consumer economy fourth.” The world driven by materialistic and pointless consumption is coming to an end. As one other commentator put it, the “…last thing we need is to re-employ the flawed economic thinking that brought us to this point.”

While the data is huge on this last subject we should also note one last comment on fear and hatred which has been directed and well covered by the media where it was announced that “On Saturday the 12 of Sept. 2009″ a crowd of Tea Party followers marched on Washington to complain about Obama on a variety of items from Birthers to health care to communist. One sign read:

O pressive

B loodsucking
A rrogant

M uslim

A lien

We are still engaged in a shrinking-stinking ideological race war with hatred to match. The same can be said of the anger at Town Hall meetings - expanding divisions galore. Still if you are going to have anything resembling a democratic society you need people and groups of people in the streets marching and at meetings asking difficult questions of those in power, even if one does not always agree with their varied points of view.

We have a long way to go but first we must define the problems and let powerful negative emotional responses abate regarding these misunderstood and confusing issues now coming into the open. Coming together may be too late - but we still could explore new approaches to political and social order, and expand our collective political, economic and cultural horizons.

PAX/LOVE

Neither!

“A great part of the mischiefs in this world arises from words.”[1] People who need absolute certainty turn to ideology. Those who don’t, turn to philosophy.

The fundamental difference between holding a philosophical position versus an ideological one is that the former always remains to some extent open-ended while the latter is inherently closed. While traditional liberals and conservatives can and do debate issues, neo-cons, fascists, communists et al. can only relate potentially to others who possess the same prejudices. This is where important political issues are framed by simplistic conclusions that are beyond debate—the ideologue is not only preoccupied in being right but also in being self-righteous. I am right, you are wrong; I am good, you are evil; I speak the truth while you are a liar! And so it goes. These extremists with their closed dogmas can tell you if a particular news medium is liberal simply by noting their disagreement with it—call it the Jesse Helms school of political theory.

The idea of a struggle between powerful absolutes—either right or wrong (or good vs. evil) has proven too appealing, foolish and very destructive for those who hide behind these historic ideological walls. All we need is to look at is those (righteous) terrorists who are so absolute in their perceptions that the many who commit suicide are convinced that they have the one and only right answer. They and they alone have intimate ties to Truth.

For students of political philosophy, the immediate beginnings of conservative philosophy began with Thomas Hobbes who, in the early seventeenth-century, having had witnessed the hints of early individuality, argued for a strong central government. It was his perceptions of the individualized brute (first drawn out of the Renaissance) that frightened him because it implied social chaos. A century later, Edmund Burke, developing this conservative viewpoint, added a defense of the power of religious prejudices. His theory was that human nature—being brutish—cannot be trusted because it can be corrupted by sin. Thus, the argument was for a powerful central government encouraging religious bias in order to keep us on an even keel. For Burke, this was the counterweight to the French with their “destructive” Revolution which he abhorred.

In the nineteenth-century the father of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, offered the argument for smaller government where the people should be given necessary information to make intelligent choices. Here the brutish nature of mankind was overcome with the potential of expanding literacy and the exercise of reason in guiding people and government in a positive direction. It should not be surprising that William F. Buckley, the founder of the “conservative” journal, The National Review, suggested that his mentor was Mill and not Hobbes or Burke.

While the dualism of birth and death is a basic human condition—our singular certainty—its validity applies only to our birth and our demise; only the very first and last breaths are absolutes. There is no question that this discovery of our terminal condition is the foundation for our concept of “certainty.” This fundamental characteristic of our existence not only marks us as uniquely distinct creatures but also grants us the burden of our responsibilities: We know our terminal situation. However, it is this certainty that leads to dualism. Philosophical differences add to our thinking, whereas ideological responses only lock us into that narrow paradigm that I am right. The fact is that philosophy and language change over time, but not those inherent absolute dualistic struggles that mark the thinking of ideologues.

It is worth noting that we believe that persons with bi-polar disorder should be medically treated while those who take their dualistic pre-disposition into an ideological camp have unfortunately, proven to be acceptable. Perhaps comments regarding some psychological sources for driving one’s mentality into a dualistic or ideological pattern may offer some enlightenment.

Fear is known to be one of the most fundamental emotions for all animals, especially those who are aware that they are terminal, as, for example, those growing old and sickly. Fear does not stand alone, however. Disregarding mental disorders, fear is a given. A frightened mind is juxtaposed to whatever or whomever one most fears and it will seek to hide or find some form of comfort. This juxtaposition of fear and righteousness can often lead to expansion of that frightened state so powerful that one will build an ideological wall to hide behind. There is comfort in a group-think that demands that we must reduce our thinking into a dualistic modality. This is a step that inherently and quickly transforms into an ideology where you either belong to the group or else you are ignorant, if not, a dangerous enemy. Acquiring this mind set of a central concept of certainty has proven to be an insurmountable conundrum, even for those making possible this discussion. Unfortunately, from this discovery of our terminal condition, we have constructed and colored so many of our social and cultural ideas of what is perceived as being significant for our security and/or welfare.

This mental and emotional trap can take government control with religious dominance and even flirt with theocracy. Giving into fears can do that, as it did in ancient Rome as it fell. These utterly baseless beliefs can be a cause-célèbre for public policy decisions as expressed in dumbed-down science, education by testing, restrictive health-care options for women and the terminally ill, dividing nations into those who are “good” and and those who are “evil”; war mongering, economic abuse and the denial of basic civil protections.

This trap often manifests itself most clearly with those labels of liberal and conservative. While it is possible to reach a correct decision, choice or conclusion, it is only correct and nothing more. A correct position does not allow, in retrospect, for it to be a right choice since right implies an absolute that correct does not and which, incidently, can only exist in the past.

The Republican Party is dominated by the righteous, those calling themselves religious; according to one poll 82% of the party claims this self-righteous position of absolute faith which should always give pause to any reflective citizen. But the problem goes much further. Perhaps it would help if we explore the roots of these terms.

Correct, an ancient Latin term, is drawn as so many Latin words by the combination of two other words: the first com- meaning together, while the second, regere, meaning to lead straight or direct. While this dictionary definition is only an indication, it is important to consider that this ancient Roman word grew from the most sophisticated ancient civilization, classic Greece; for antiquity this was about as open and flexible language as could be found in any ancient society. Their linguistic adaptability can be seen in the adoption of such diverse cultures as Hebraic, Macedonian, Egyptian, as well their various religious beliefs.

Right is quite different in its origin as well as our understanding. Right is not the ancient multi-syllabic Latin but the single syllabic Germanic (recht) which was, for these later peoples, not uncommon. This was a direct and simple word that belonged in a direct and simple lexography for a primitive warrior people. Not surprisingly, therefore, it had something of a different interpretation than simply straight or direct since it fully implied direction, most notably as associated with travel; it also applied later to the law as well as other fixed functional patterns. The Romans created the earliest Western concept of law but it did so with a sense of flexibility and diversity while the more tribal Germanic peoples (a basis for common law) needed a more absolute reality, being more nomadic.

The problem with the word “right” is how easily it can lead us to become righteous which often ends with self-righteous and arrogant. An example of self-righteousness leading to arrogance would be when Mr. DeLay of Texas (et. al.), attempted to keep a mentally dead woman artificially breathing. A preponderance of evidence that she was brain dead had no bearing on DeLay’s actions which reflected the party’s righteousness and desire for some form of absolute purity.

This is not to say that the use of the word right may not occasionally be appropriate in a limited manner, but when politics is the issue, the danger can be very serious. Imagine two powers facing off on the battlefield, weapons drawn, millions of lives and fortunes on the line when leaders sit down to discuss how to avoid massive destruction. As the saying goes: “When words fail, wars begin. When wars finally end, we settle our disputes with words.”[2]

Now imagine they predicate their discussion as follows: “We are correct in our positions.” It is not necessarily a problem if the other responds with the same: “No, we are correct.” Without question there is room to negotiate. But now the same scenario but this time the line reads: “We are right in our conclusion.” All it takes is for the other side to respond with: “No, we are right!” And if one is arrogant enough they can proceed unilaterally to enter into the land of slaughter (as the White House has done in Iraq) predicated entirely upon deceptions and opportunism. Combine greed with self-righteousness and you have the making of a huge disaster—i.e., our present economic crisis.

It is common knowledge that G.W. Bush did not speak to an audience unless that group has been properly filtered so that only those who already agreed with him were allowed to attend. This raises another possibility: those who see themselves as most right cannot tolerate any diversion from the party line. The results at home and abroad are often nothing less than a disaster! War and peace should not be the result of one or the other of the parties being right but rather the result of either the presence or absence of a middle position that is derived from negotiations. The two parties can claim the purity of their respective positions and rattle sabers but in the real world they must establish an acceptable comprise that saves face for both and avoids disaster. If this principle had been followed in 1914 the 20^th century might not have become the Century of Annihilation with two chapters of the Great War followed by a great deal of nonsensical foolish and brutal excesses offered as an afterthought in the form of a Third Chapter (Wold War III as Nixon referred to it). Bismarck understood the potential for this type of disaster when he was fired by Kaiser Wilhelm: he knew his old boss was a simple-minded fool.

Von Clausewitz once observed that war results from a failure of diplomacy, “War is not merely a political act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means,” appealing enough to attract those who are absolutely right enough to charge into this tragic trap.

At issue is the contrast between a philosophic position and an ideological position, the former working for an accurate if not always correct analysis while ideology possesses absolute righteousness on its side. Perhaps the best means of delineating between the two is noting that ideology, unlike philosophy, is a closed system of assumptions where those inside are always right while those outside are perceived as categorically wrong. In contrast, philosophies, such as conservative and liberal, are open-ended and can change with the times or circumstances and be freely discussed and debated.

What else besides fear could be the attraction for such an ideological approach? For one thing, the appeal could be that it is simplistic, or a less complicated path, and avoids those mental difficulties in facing complex issues needing serious consideration. No one has ever said that thinking is a task for the lazy or frightened. For many, using a multi-syllable word like correct is less appealing than using a single-syllable word like right with all its implied power. Who has not fallen into that trap? Anyone who has taught can attest to this kind of rhetorical and grammatical laziness and fear.

Machiavelli a half millennium ago established the fundamentals for modern political philosophy and later political science. In doing so he noted the importance for political leaders to appear righteous. What is central, however, is that they act in a practical if not sensible manner. Appearance is fine but destroying the state is not the goal of a political leader.

Being right could be considered a one-way trip, a trap where ideology rather than philosophical positions that are dominated by correctness. The latter at least implies multiple options. This is often called pragmatism with lip service to principles. However, when you have an American president who suggests that the word entrepreneur is not a French word (read foreign and unpatriotic) you cannot expect an understanding of pragmatism beyond opportunism. Laws are changed when judged to be incorrect. But what happens when you introduce the Law as an absolute? Capital punishment reveals a great deal more than most would want regarding the kind of society in which we live. We should never give in to simple answers or even falter, for the risks are far too great, personally and collectively, to play such righteous games.

Right does have an historic cultural positive connotation; for one can sit at the right hand of the King or the Law but someone else can come along doing the same in replacing you. Flexibility is a key component when confronting reality.

Unfortunately, there is a deep appeal to abdicating the personal responsibility for carrying one’s own living on one’s own back: Let someone else do it, someone else has the answers, someone who is right and thus a savior from the certainty of our terminal condition. But there is “the truth” of un-lived lives since questioning and wondering, the key components of a lived life, are absent. While this might occur on occasion in the Medieval or Christian era, in the end such worlds have proven to be too stagnant and too untenable an approach for any expansion of living, governing or growth where daily changes inhere in an increasingly dynamic world. Fortunately, the western world has never been truly “right” though often correct. The danger today is self-righteousness and delusional neo-cons who took over the running of this country into the ground using fear and hate for supposed righteous ends.

The biggest danger lurks in becoming righteous, for this is the camel’s nose entering into dangerous and unknown territories. The righteous becoming self-righteous is followed by an arrogant stance where the righteous can become part of a fanatical purity of beliefs. It is a simple step from this to a 9/11 or the tradition of the Crusades re-born in our era. Those of the Nazi era knew they were absolutely right, but this never solved a problem, it only exacerbated it. This is little more than childishness since as a member of the righteous elect you are above human law and reasoning; to reason always implies the give and take of discovery - philosophical positions rather than ideological death traps.

Consider: it is suggested that there are not two sides to a coin, a common mistake of simple logic, itself a mental game about which one always should be cautious. For a coin to have two sides it actually must have a third where heads and tails exist only because of the metal in between making possible that dual distinction. There is always a third position no matter our trying to avoid it. The dualism of birth and death only can make sense when living exists between birth and burial. To be right or wrong implies a choice which in itself is a third position. Even physical problems such as mental illness are normally matters of degree from minor to extreme. After all, even those who give into greed can become ideological in turning it into greeditis which we have recently witnessed.

We have seen those painting themselves into a corner with impossibly slow drying paint—perhaps centuries of drying out.

The real tragedy in this approach is that where ideology reigns with its extreme mind set, there is a fundamental human characteristic conspicuous in its absence: our curiosity, the basis for imagination.

If one aspires to live a unique life they must find their own way through a could’ve into an unrealized should’ve finding a base for a would’ve in a world where the dollar too often determines the quality of life.

As for the question in the title the more appropriate answer should be “correct or incorrect.”

1. Edmund Burke Quoted p. 212 of Richard Lederer The Miracle of Language

2. Wilfred Funk p. 220 ibid Lederer

3. Johann von Goethe p. 221 ibid Lederer

Shadia B. Drury. “Fascism American Style.” Free Inquiry, vol. 29, no.3.

“I argue that unless we understand fascism as a radical form of nationalism that springs from the human love for the true, the good, and the beautiful, we will fail to recognize it as the perennial danger of political life in democratic societies….  This radical nationalism valorizes militancy, struggle, and death for the nation.  Fascism is not for sissies.  it is not soft or comfortable; it is not free or easy, It demands hardship, toil, death , and self sacrifice.”

Also includes a differentiation between nationalism and patriotism by Irving Kristol.  (!!)

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=drury_29_3

Interesting article about Frederick Soddy’s (1877–1956) early 20^th Century theories combining economics and thermodynamics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12zencey.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Obit of Robert Delford Brown, the originator of the “happening.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/arts/design/05brown.html?scp=1&sq=happenings&st=cse