I want to encourage people to read Miki Kashtan’s piece in the current issue of Tikkun, and then if you can to come to our February 15 daylong conference “Support Obama to be Obama!” in San Francisco where she — among several outstanding others — will be one of the presenters.
I woke up this morning thinking of Miki’s piece “Wanting Fully Without Attachment,” and an old credit card slogan wafted into my head, which promised us that “It Takes the Waiting out of Wanting.”
If the entire downside of consumerism and Wall Street greed and irresponsibility could be captured in a phrase it might as well be that one. It was used by Access (now part of MasterCard) way back in the 1970s (in the UK, I’m not sure about the States) when the banks were first trying to put credit cards — which until then had been a convenience of the wealthy — into every wallet and purse. Teaching us to want more is critical to the whole modern economy, but supplying credit so we can have it now and pay later has been the seductive titillation.
Hard on its heels a counterphrase — “It Takes the “Must Have” out of Wanting” — appeared in my mind to describe Miki’s approach. I added the “how to” in the heading above because Miki combines a theory with a psychological method. We need “how to” guides that actually work for us day by day.
My newspaper this morning gave me hope. And brothers and sisters, that doesn’t happen very often. On the front page, taking up about one third of the sheet, there was an article entitled “Trying to open the ‘inner eye.’” It was a piece that described the new Center for Conscious Living, an offshoot of the Church of Religious Science, which the pastor said is “reinventing the idea of church, with ‘stand you up music,’ meditation, singing, chanting and ‘an inclusive message of self-empowerment.’” Above this article, the top story was about our governor’s clean energy plan, in which 25 percent of the Wisconsin’s energy must come from wind, solar, biomass, or other renewable sources by 2025. My friend Jack Kisslinger, whose website is called Planet for Life, tells me that 25% might be a good number, but it has to be 25% of reduced overall energy consumption. So the governor’s goal is at least a step in the right direction. These days we’re at less than 5%!?! But the miracle is that some of Wisconsin’s business leaders are lining up behind the governor, including executives of Johnson Controls, an auto parts and building products manufacturer. All of this combined with the EPA’s stricter standards for smog-causing pollution made me ebullient.
I’ve been really angry at the Obama administration lately, so it was nice to agree with them for the first time in what seems like months. The last straw for me was Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, coming right on the heels of his announcement about expanding the war in Afghanistan. Until then had I tried to see his incrementalism as “realism.” But Rabbi Michael Lerner‘s editorial in the latest Tikkun, “Afghanistan: Obama Capitulates to the War Makers,” says it all. I agree with Rabbi Lerner that Obama’s announcement represented “a decisive endorsement of the strategy of domination.” And then Obama’s Nobel Prize speech tried to justify his decision by saying that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes, that “Evil does exist in the world.” When Obama used that final phrase, I stopped listening to him. Christopher Hedges‘ article in the same Tikkun, “Celebrity Culture and the Obama Brand,” describes the shift in my opinion at that point: “President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another.” I stopped believing in Brand Obama.
It’s hard to be optimistic given the world situation these days. But I believe that the three stories that filled me with hope today are related in a way that may not be immediately apparent. Without more spiritual exploration, people in this country will have trouble opening their minds to the changes in store for us. And those changes are going to be very fast, whether for the better or for the worse. As I said in a post several months ago,
“The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.”
– Claude Lévi-Strauss
But are scientists asking themselves enough questions about scientism? We have asked a science graduate (of MIT) who is interning with us, Sarah Ackley, to write a series of posts on this question, not straightforwardly channeling Tikkun‘s editorial stance but wrestling with it from her own point of view. I told her I would try to set the scene. I should say up front that I have come to think that this is one of the two or three most critical intellectual issues of our time. But I didn’t think so before I came to Tikkun and I don’t expect others to come any more quickly to this view than I have done.
I don’t recall hearing the word “scientism” before reading Michael Lerner’s books in the last few years (and I find science prof Lawrence Krauss writing in my favorite science mag in 2008 that he had only heard it in the previous two or three years so I’m not alone). But consulting Wikipedia I discover that it has been used “by social scientists like Hayek or Karl Popper” and “sociologists in the tradition of Max Weber, such as Jürgen Habermas.” Wikipedia says this is what it means:
Reviewing the references to scientism in the works of contemporary scholars, Gregory R. Peterson detects two main broad themes:
1. It is used to criticize a totalizing view of science as if it were capable of describing all reality and knowledge, or as if it were the only true way to acquire knowledge about reality and the nature of things;
2. It is used to denote a border-crossing violation in which the theories and methods of one (scientific) discipline are inappropriately applied to another (scientific or non-scientific) discipline and its domain. An example of this second usage is to label as scientism any attempt to claim science as the only or primary source of human values (a traditional domain of ethics) or as the source of meaning and purpose (a traditional domain of religion and related worldviews).
Our friend Dr. Abby Caplin emailed us this yesterday evening:
Can it get any worse for Jewish women?
Yes. It can. It did.
Last night I opened an email from my friend Shulamit. As I read it, I felt that same sick feeling I wrote about when I learned of Nofrat Frenkel’s arrest on November 18, 2009 for the “crime” of wearing a tallit (Jewish prayer shawl) at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
This time Anat Hoffman, the director of the Israel Religious Action Center/Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism, a founding member and leader of “Women of the Wall” (WOW), was taken to a Jerusalem police station on January 5, 2010. She was interrogated, fingerprinted, and informed that she might be charged with a felony for violating rules of conduct at the Western Wall: offending the “sensibilities” of ultra-Orthodox extremists who believe that the Western Wall is their personal synagogue.
I don’t know about you, but in my book, when ultra-Orthodox Jewish extremists decide to bully, curse, and throw feces at women trying to pray, my “sensibilities” are offended.
Here’s a video clip interview of Anat Hoffman after her interrogation:
Disturbingly, her case is being referred to the attorney general for prosecution.
Angie, as well as two other Pagans — Andras Corban Arthen and Phyllis Curott — are on the 35-member Board of Trustees of the Council of the Parliament of World Religions. They’ve worked diligently to build bridges to other faith traditions since they were elected to the Board — Angie in 2002, Andras in 2006, and Phyllis just this year. As a result of their efforts, Pagans (in which I include Wiccans like myself) are finally coming into our own. I know it’s been a difficult road, and there’s still room for improvement.
But when people develop meaningful personal relationships while working together — as Angie, Andras, and Phyllis have with the Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, American Indians, Protestants, Jains, Baha’is, Zoroastrians, etc. on the Parliament’s Board — they begin to see each others’ religions through the lens of their respect for that other person. That’s a very good thing for Pagans, since so many misconceptions and prejudices exist about us among mainstream religions.
In the past the spectrum of disrespect for Paganism has extended from branding us as Satanists to dismissing us as superstitious. From the perspective of Abrahamic traditions, Paganism has essentially been viewed as a heresy. Thus the Greek Orthodox walk-out. But at this Parliament, Pagans made it very clear that we’re aligned with other indigenous religions. Wiccans and Pagans practice the remnants of the pre-Christian, indigenous religions of Europe. Like other indigenous religions, we practice an Earth-based Nature religion. And like other indigenous religions, ours was persecuted by conquerors, who forced us to go underground during the Christianization of Europe.
An unnatural economic and psychological disaster has struck America
If you just thought it was about you, or your boss, or Bush or Obama, read psychotherapist Harriet Fraad‘s diagnosis of what ails us. Fraad identifies five major social trends that transcend our personal lives and our Washington administrations.
Celebrity as Idolatry
Pulitzer journalist Chris Hedges, in his incisive, uncompromising style, eviscerates the celebrity culture of our day, and asks what our global celebrity President has done for us. Michael Lerner says that Obama’s Afghan War policy will not work.
Wake Up!
It’s not only gloom in this issue of Tikkun. Harriet Fraad points to what we can do about our collective depressions. Rep. Keith Ellison, one of the leaders of the House Progressive Caucus,is upbeat about Obama. Catalan philosopher Jordi Pigem urges us to wake up and use the economic crisis to good effect. Christian theologian and historian Gary Dorrien argues that the proponents of the Social Gospel had many things right and we can learn from their approach.
To read these articles, visit the magazine racks at your local bookstore. Or buy a single copy here or subscribe here.A few of the articles can be read on the web already, here. The rest will go up when the next print issue comes out on March 1.
On Learning on the Clearest Night Only 6000 Stars Are Visible to the Naked Eye
If seeing only 6000 stars with the naked eye
awestrucks us to topple
in drunken ecstasy
Or piss looking up in devout praise of being,
What would happen if we could truly perceive,
comprehend and experience
the zillions
of stars galaxies universes
pastpresentfuture?
And if, as scientists agree, we only use
10% of our brain’s potential,
Then the astonishment we sense
is only 10% of the astonishment
we could sense,
And so it would seem that what seems
like dots of light twinkling
in pretty patterns
moving across the black
is really enough to shatter us
like goblets when the soprano
hits the highest note.
And if the 10% of the brainpower we do use
is ignorant of 99.9% of the totality
of the Universe,
perhaps a li’l vino in our goblet
ain’t a bad idea—
Perhaps a flask of wine
in deep wilderness night
is more powerful
than the largest telescope.
Hendrik Hertzberg, in the New Yorker, has described left criticisms of Obama as “pathetic.” According to Hertzberg, quoting Obama, we are about to pass “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act … and the most important reform of our health-care system since Medicare passed in the nineteen-sixties.” But the left just doesn’t get it. Spoiled children, nothing is ever good enough for them. They didn’t get the public option so they want to sink the whole thing. As usual, they don’t understand the “limits” that are so apparent to wiser minds.
These sentiments are so familiar as to be dreary, but they are accompanied by a new and original explanation of the left’s blindness, “the pathetic fallacy.” “All violent feelings have the same effect,” John Ruskin wrote. “They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things.” The left, in other words, is blinded by anger. Aside from the fact that Ruskin’s term “pathetic fallacy” has nothing to do with anger (it concerns the confusion between nature and human emotion), I will respond to this argument under three rubrics: 1) the relevance of anger, 2) the left’s critique of Obama and 3) the left’s critique of the health plan. I will then return to the heart of the matter: the “limits” on what Obama can do.
by: Dave Belden on January 6th, 2010 | Comments Off
Reviewing Robert Bergman’s photographic portraits in the January/February issue of Tikkun, Peter Gabel writes:
These breathtaking works of art… bring us face to face with other human beings. But unlike most face-to-face encounters in which the outsides of two faces are visible to each other from within each viewer’s subjective isolation booth, the encounters made possible by Bergman’s photos provide sudden moments of the discovery of mutual Presence, in which we are pulled out of our customary withdrawn state, the key symptom of our illness, and into a sacred contact with the humanity of the other behind and through the image of the face itself. I call these works breathtaking because they unfailingly cause an interruption or disturbance of my breathing as I experience the shock, and the relief, of being brought into an experience of mutual recognition with one after another of the human beings Bergman portrays – and I believe they will do the same for anyone who contemplates them at full size in the gallery. In each case the trappings of a social identity are there that convey a definite impression of a particular life’s circumstances – of one or another legacy of suffering and solitude and also of resilience, determination, and effort – but the accumulation of past influences is in every case transcended by an uncanny illumination, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that conveys a sense of universal vulnerability and at the same time invincible spiritual strength.
You will have to move fast to see these portraits on the gallery walls: they are up only until January 10 at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and until January 9 at the Yossi Milo Gallery on West 25th Street in Manhattan. A third exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art’s P.S.1 art center in Queens, NY, closed yesterday. But to give you a taste, we are pleased to present a selection of the portraits on the Tikkun Art Gallery.
Truly healing and mending the world can seem like an overwhelming task, beyond the capacity of everyday folks. It’s easy to feel that only big actions — starting an organization, a publication, a nonprofit, or a school and reaching at least thousands — counts. In today’s post, I’d like to say a word in favor of one-to-one generosity because recently I experienced several instances that were balms and blessings.
Case One, the Restaurateur
Over winter break, my family and thousands of others attempted to visit the Academy of Science. It should have been a tip-off that vehicles lined even the furthest edges of Golden Gate Park, so, after learning that we’d have to wait three hours or make alternate plans, we began trudging back to our distant, expensive parking lot. Along the way, my husband noticed a vegetarian Indian restaurant with a buffet lunch.
I wasn’t hungry myself, so we debated whether or not the proprietor would believe we weren’t pulling a fast one — a party of three paying for two all-you-can-eat meals.
“We might as well ask,” I said, expecting a not-unreasonable rejection. We entered the little hole-in-the-wall where the woman behind the counter greeted us in a kind and quiet manner, devoid of salesmanship. I asked my question, and, without weighing it, she assured me my non-customer presence would be no problem. I didn’t have to present an argument or plead my integrity.
Long ago–actually not that long ago, less than two centuries–the peoples of the North American Pacific coast knew how to maintain salmon stocks and share them so everyone had enough. They had the technology to wipe out the salmon as well as we do. They restrained themselves. More on that below.
Today, those of us who eat fish wonder what salmon is safe to eat. The current answer from Seafood Watch is that
Wild-caught salmon from Alaska is considered a “Best Choice” and is certified as sustainable to the standard of the Marine Stewardship Council.” … Pacific salmon in Alaska is among the most intensively managed species in the world, with excellent monitoring of both the fish populations and the fishery. Alaskan salmon dominates the West Coast salmon market. Over the past 20 years, Alaska has landed roughly 10 times as much salmon as California, Oregon and Washington combined.
The problem with salmon that is farmed in nets open to the sea is that “The wild salmon are exposed to sea lice, viruses and bacteria from the farmed salmon that are treated with antibiotics and delousing chemicals.” This depletes the strength of the wild salmon and is thought to be one of the reasons behind the collapse of salmon stocks in the Pacific Northwest south of Alaska.
A radical change in the social infrastructure of any society must be preceded or accompanied by a change in its consciousness. I first posted this article analyzing the content of Jackson’s videos on Daily Kos and ePluribus Media after his death in July of 2009 .The start of the new year seems a good time to repost here at Tikkun. Perhaps this diary will add to the ongoing dialogue sparked by Avatar about the role movies play in the evolution of our collective awareness.
Jackson frequently invoked two powerful archetypes central both to the experience of PTSD, and to the evolution or maintenance of empire: playful Hermes, puer aeternus, child genius, trickster, thief, messenger, god of healing, the lyre and all that is liminal; and the more menacing Dionysius, lychenthrope, trickster, Lord of the Animals, Beast Within.
I waited out most of the 1980s in Japan, and had not seen any of Jackson’s videos before his death. I am prone to obsession with symbolic content. Before leaving for Japan, I watched An American Werewolf in London at least 20 times. Once I belatedly started watching Jackson’s videos, I could not stop. They were filled with archetypal content.
I posted Sunday about reading Malcolm Margolin’s book “The Way We Lived” over the break. Here’s another passage that challenges our assumptions about the way the world is. We write a good deal about how our fears skew our vision in Tikkun, but for me Margolin’s take on this connects especially well to a review I did of Joan Roughgarden’s new book “The Genial Gene.” What she talks about there is a deep bias in the modern biological sciences in favor of seeing competition even when the scientific facts point more strongly towards cooperation. Margolin’s whole book is about how one diverse set of peoples in what we today call California lived with different basic assumptions about the nature of the world. This quote starts with Margolin’s commentary (two paragraphs) and continues with a reminiscence from Lucy Smith, a Pomo woman, about her upbringing.
Many Relatives
To modern people, educated in European modes of thought, competition is what defines relationships. People, plants, and animals compete, both with their own kind and with other species, for scarce resources, evolving over millennia in a harsh world that rewards the fittest with survival, punishes the weak with extinction. Modern political, economic, psychological, educational, and biological sciences are all to a huge extent based on the idea that competition lies at the basis of life.
California Indians, and most other traditional people, certainly recognized that competition existed, and that it was important. But they did not elevate it to the status of prime cause. Rather, they felt, in a world in which everything was alive, in which everything had a place and a role ordained from the beginning of time, it was not the competition between beings but rather their interrelatedness that underlay the functioning of the world.
Juan Melendez, human rights activist who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent over 17 years on Death Row, at a 2006 meeting in the eventually successful campaign to end the death penalty in New Jersey. Photo by John Goodwin.
Another major step forward, and this one is significant for the long term. From yesterday’s NY Times:
Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.
There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.
by: Dave Belden on January 3rd, 2010 | Comments Off
Moss-covered winter oak in Annadel State Park
Thanks: Alana and I (the two staff here who do the print magazine production and Tikkun Daily) have both been away the last ten days and it’s been wonderful to see Tikkun Daily continuing on without much attention from us. Thanks to all who posted and to interns who helped behind the scenes before the break. Special thanks to Hamza van Boom who monitored the comments to remove any abusive ones during the critical five days when neither Alana nor I could even do that. (Last week Alana was at work attending a conference, but found she had no wireless access from the conference floor where she was staffing the Tikkun table.)
Song and dance:My wife, Debi, and I took a couple of nights away in Sebastopol, an out-of-the-way bohemian town about the same distance (in driving time and property values) north of San Francisco as our pre-Tikkun home on the edge of the Catskills was from New York City. We felt totally at home there. On New Year’s Eve we went to a music evening in a big community center with several bands and a “love choir” — a good fifty or so people who meet weekly to have fun singing — mostly songs about love and peace. These were also people who just loved to dance so we, especially Debi, were in heaven and the amount of celebration and joy was lovely to see. We left well before midnight, of course.
What are we to make of this strange tribe, the American? During the day, in their conscious minds, they actually believe that the 1000 military bases they have built throughout the world, the huge nuclear arsenal, the attempts to militarize space, the half million men and women in arms, the aircraft carriers, the drones, the nano-drones, and all the rest are there to “protect” them from the 1-2000 person ragtag band of al queda and affiliates. They cannot imagine any other way to deal with conflicts abroad except through expanding their military. They believe that people don’t like them because they are “free” and not because they are bullies. And they imagine that by hiring a good talker as their front man, no one will notice that their pugilistic culture has not changed.
Then they go to dark palaces, put on three-D glasses, allow themselves to sink into a fantasy state and witness the truth that is denied to them every day in their conscious public sphere. As if in a mirror denied, they there see themselves as the over-muscled, hulking, racially tinged, exploiters that they are, destroying nature, stomping underfoot people who are physically weaker than they are, people who fight back with bows and arrows, but are often spiritually superior. In the dark, they see the indisputable reason they have militarized large parts of the globe: to control resources, notably energy, and not in order to “protect” their own people.
Yet these same people whose conscious minds are so full of fantasy and delusion, but in whose unconscious minds the truth blares out so clearly and unmistakably, these are the same people who reject Freud – and for the same blind, technology-worshipping reasons that they feel gives them the right to exploit others. They are so sure of themselves, these delusionals; what are we to make of this strange tribe?
My fellow Americans, and men and women throughout the world:
Like all people of good will I condemn the actions of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Killing innocent people to make a political point is repulsive to me, whether it is done by individuals or by governments, as I will explain. As President, I am also ordering a full-scale review to be sure that everything that can be done to prevent terrorism is being done. However, I have been rethinking this question and come before you to say that heightened security is not enough.
The first day of the year is a heavy-lidded sleepy day deprived of rest the night before. Fireworks of all sorts disturbed the peace. Church bells rang. We beat the pots; the racket intended to frighten evil away from our door. The sparkling night before, we prayed or partied and celebrated an old year turning new. We laid awake listening to the noisy night. Then, a winter sun rose much too early to remind us that there is still much to do. Wake up.
I’ve spent the last two weeks in a funk, listening to the debates about the future of health care reform. I am pleasantly surprised by two phenomena: 1] public dialogue around health care is both vibrant and incredibly substantive ; and 2] conservatives have absented themselves from discussion.
I grew accustomed to palliatives and drivel during the Bush years. (Remember when plastic sheeting and duct tape were promoted as public health policy? In the event of an epidemic, we were instructed to wrap our homes in plastic!) I am surprised at the enthusiasm and diversity of our civic dialogue. This is a huge positive change and a sign of our improved civic health.
On the other hand, the Republican Party has descended into utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy. They have determined that the only quick route back to power is to prevent legislative action, then brand Democrats as ineffectual. Their most fervent followers believe America is a white Christian nation under attack. As a result, they are opposing anything and everything. Jack Kemp, the Party’s self-described “bleeding heart conservative” passed away in May after a decade of political exile. As long as the far right wages primaries against Republicans who fail their ideological “purity test,” there will be no new Jack Kemp, no ideas, no discussion within the “big” GOP tent. Alert Democrats can capitalize on their failure to build.
Building the Ship of State
Actual dialogue has been confined to two progressive factions, and it is fueled by a structural question. Out of what material do we build our ship of state?
