12-28-2018, 12:52 AM
(12-23-2018, 01:16 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I admire Alan Watts, who said that all societies require an out-group, or an enemy, or else you don't know who you are. You identify yourself in contrast to the others. But, you must not destroy your enemies, otherwise you destroy yourself too. A society without an enemy might become complacent, not knowing its role or identity. We must respect our political opponents, as brower said.
I define myself in alliance with and in opposition to several other worldviews around today. They are somewhat represented by people who post here. Some may be allies in some sense and opposite in another, or in fact all of them may be.
Democracy requires an opposition, but the Opposition must respect democracy. Fascists, Marxist-Leninists, and theocrats like ISIS or Iranian Hezbollah, all of which seek the annihilation of democracy and get it once in power, do not form a suitable opposition. The Tea Party has morphed into the Trump cult, and one can question whether it has any respect for democratic norms. Politics that show contempt for rationality are in contempt with the rational processes with which suitable solutions for existing problems can arise.
We need real conservatives, and not fascists like Trump, to serve as a default when liberalism goes awry. An example of liberalism going awry was the idea that oppression creates criminality when other factors (character faults, not all of them economic in cause; being in a criminal culture; parental neglect; familial and institutional abuse; lead exposure) are even more dominant. Blaming poverty (and poverty is a bad situation worthy of amelioration in its own right) is to ignore that people even in the worst slums can be good people. One cannot ascribe 'oppression' to Ted Bundy, John Gacy, Richard "Night Stalker" Ramirez, or Wayne (Atlanta Child Murderer) Williams. The civic organizers such as a young Barack Obama knew enough to ask where the drug traffickers were were wise to ask locals where the drug activity was and how to avoid it.
Attributing criminality to poverty may have given many people cause to seek to end poverty, but it was a weak link. If poverty is heavily connected to ethnicity, then that attribution can as easily induce racist attitudes. We are going to need some economic restructuring to alleviate regional poverty which may be even more difficult to resolve than consequences of racist practices of the past. For much of the Mountain South that could imply a 21st-century equivalent of the TVA. The Hard Right does not offer that.
I define myself in alliance with and in opposition to several other worldviews around today. They are somewhat represented by people who post here. Some may be allies in some sense and opposite in another, or in fact all of them may be.
Quote:The Enlightenment has been recognized as an 18th century movement out of which the USA was born. It was correctly seen in the recent second turning, however, as inadequate and superficial. It has been modified and added to, first by an expansion as brower mentioned as "social democracy that extends liberalism to the ideal of equal opportunity to its fullest." Second, by the greenpeace and spiritual revolution of the sixties, The Enlightenment was seen as a disenchantment of the world, robbing it of its deeper dimensions of meaning and reducing it to a shallow rationalism. The New Age alterrnative sees some revival of esoteric traditions from the Renaissance and ancient philosophy and from the Oriental religions, plus aspiration of human potential and new methods of self-transformation. Whereas The Enlightenment eventually reduced the view of humans to automatons miraculously endowed with reason who need to subdue a stupid universe, the New Age sees humans as conscious spiritual beings first, connected to a superconscious cosmic consciousness revealed to many people through revival of the ancient traditions and experience expended through psychedelics. This greenpeace view also includes a new respect for Nature as alive and not stupid, and the necessary foundation of life of which we are a part rather than something to be subdued by technology to serve rational beings miraculously emergent from the stupid mechanical universe. These are the greens.
The New Age has much cultural baggage, and I must advise you (Eric) that the Millennial Generation does not go along with it. That generation is too rational to accept something that does not process easily. Occam's razor compels us to seek the simplest explanation for natural phenomena and historical patterns. Let's remember that after the callow hedonism of the latest Third Turning, the rise of the Religious Right, the Tea Party, and the Trump Presidency the cold application of reason will solve much. Morality is all that keeps some of us from using rational power to do horrible things to people, but even religion can go awry when (and I am speaking of the political proclivities of evangelical Christians on the whole) self-righteousness comes with neither empathy nor scruples.
The historical cycle has an unsettling way of making cultural baggage irrelevant. The Millennial Generation probably sees the environment differently than you do. It does not consist of druids who see consciousness in trees, flowers, and ants. It sees Nature as a refuge from the ugliness of consumerism, urban sprawl, and bureaucratic organization. This said, the Religious Right and the Tea Party are losing people other than core support itself aging. Don't count on people in their sixties today like ourselves having anything more than a fossil relevance thirty years from now.
Quote:There are some like me who may have some awareness of the New Age, to some degree. Most who post here today are not in this camp, but remain in the Enlightenment camp, with the social democratic addition which favors welfare and social programs and a government that helps the people. These are considered blues today, or Democrats. Mikebert is representative of this type, and brower and David Horn also but with perhaps a green tinge. Bob is a blue with a red tinge, perhaps. Bill the Piper holds to the Enlightenment view quite literally, and sees the salvation of humanity in the evolution of technology that the Enlightenment has spawned in its mastery by reason of the stupid universe. The blues in general usually accept the Enlightenment view, but some may embrace greenpeace priorities as well. So whereas greens may see themselves as allies with blues on the political level, and opponents of blues on a higher spiritual or philosophical level, they respect the blues as allies.
But blues and greens today are opponents of the reds. There are two types of red. First is the Libertarian view, either within the Republican Party or in the Libertarian Party. These are Enlightenment types, but without the social democracy that was added to it. Self-reliance and the free market are its ideals. Galen is an extreme example of this type.
Libertarianism will fail because it is utopian. The profit motive and consumerism may be necessary, but they are far from sufficient. I would never disparage the consumer economy even if I hold many of its manifestations in contempt. Consumerism and a market economy are far better than any command system, whether the plantation order or the New Serfdom of Stalinism. Even so, Man is more than his primitives drives, some of which are material indulgence and display (the two usually form a unit), the sex drive, and other expressions of myopic hedonism. Libertarianism seems to reduce Man to homo oeconomicus, a vile and destructive -- and ultimately dehumanizing stereotype.
Quote:Then there are the paleo reds, like Classic Xer, and in earlier times here represented for example by JDFP and JPT. They do not entirely accept the Enlightenment view, because they are conservative Christians. But they adopt the classical liberal or libertarian view, and use it to support their paleo view. Their worldview is a throwback to pre-Enlightenment views of the creator God and humans as His creation, and Jesus as our Savior. They do not quite accept the view of the Enlightenment physicalists that we are beings of reason who emerged by chance through mechanical forces from a stupid universe. They have a spiritual view in common with the New Age, but limited within the Christian dogma of humans as mere creations of a God as described in the Bible.
They are traditionalists, but in a country in which many traditions conflict, an call to one tradition at the expense of others is a call for suppression of others. Besides, some people might find a tradition not the one that they grow up in preferable to the one that they grew up in. When I was introduced to the San Francisco Bay Area at age 16 (junior year in high school) I found the rural Midwestern heritage that I was brought up in lacking in any coherent tradition. The people that I got along best with were either Jews or Asians. If I had remained in the Bay Area and gotten married there I might have to explain why I did not have a Bar Mitzvah or why I can eat dairy products to my child or children. But that is not the story of my life.
Quote:The blues may have united as Americans with reds in the past, and seen the Communists as the enemy. They were a group who took the addition to the liberal view as providing social welfare to a totalitarian extreme, imposing it on the people by force. But since they see Communism as defeated and having crumbled of its own weight, now the opposition to them is the Republicans. The Republicans however do not see the Communists as having been defeated, but now see them as the Democrats, who are the blues and are not real Americans. Ironically though, they have now taken on the same color once assigned to the Communists.
Before the Commie threat -- the shared danger of a Depression that could have led, with less competent and less principled leadership, to famine and social breakdown. In the last 4T America did not get out of an economic meltdown as it did out of the 1929-1932 meltdown. The economic ethos of the Gilded Age and its last hurrah in the 1920s proved unworkable. There were people much on what FDR called the 'lunatic fringe' who believed that the only workable economy was one that put profits first and recognized workers as nothing more than expendable tools. Such people wanted the reality of Nazi economics without the absurdities of antisemitism and the ominous militarism. The world that they wanted would have brought back the seventy-hour workweeks and forty-year lifespans for industrial workers that required that children abandon school for toil in factories and mines if they were unlucky enough to be around when their parents wore out or died of industrial accidents.
It is to great shame that the American Right has adopted the favored color of Commies (Nature abhors a vacuum, I suppose) and worse the unscrupulous self-righteousness, the gun cult, and the Orwellian rhetoric of Commies in the name of a reactionary agenda that would replace the welfare state with an economic jungle.
Quote:So we have these contending worldviews, and so how are they to be viewed? Can we of one worldview know who we are, or even exist, without the others?
I look upon those of other worldviews as in need of awakening, rather than people to be defeated, normally. Others may see me and those of my worldview as superstitious, and thus in need of education and redemption from such things as belief in astrology or from human potential techniques that are too self-centered according to them. New Agers on the other hand may not always be political enough even for me, if they see human salvation in these techniques and spiritual wisdom instead of politics.
I have come to the view, however, that the Republican Party, the reds, has today lost its moral compass and is in need of defeat. The blues and greens would then become the opposing parties, while the reds would fade away as irrelevant and a relic of the past. I have hope, though, that the reds too are just in need of awakening, rather than defeat through war or political battle alone. I see them according to my New Age view, however they may see themselves. I myself may not be able to awaken them; it is for them to awaken, some of them at least, and it is up to the blues and greens to provide all the people with the views that will bring us forward and awaken and enlighten the people. All people in the USA are Americans, and have potential for enlightenment and awakening alike, and can unite again at least enough so that we may work together, once the Republican Party as it exists today has been relegated to the past where it belongs. That's how I see things now.
We are in a Crisis Era, one in which spiritual awakening is practically impossible. There might be foxhole conversions, but those are hollow and transitory. Many American soldiers (I refer to Catholics) made vows to God in a tight scrape that if He got them through it they would become priests. Few became priests. They might better serve God as tool-and-die makers who have large Catholic families. (Change stereotypes to fit other religious traditions). Maybe there were too many people experiencing the foxhole conversion.
The time for an Awakening is about twenty years after the end of the Crisis Era, when a fresh set of young adults emerge without memories of the dangerous Crisis era and see themselves with less stake in economic and political orthodoxies that the winning side imposed or protected. It is still possible that the winners of this Crisis Era might impose a conformist, reactionary, repressive, hierarchical, and inequitable order much like that of Spain after its Civil War. In such a case, America will need an Awakening just to eliminate the scorpions in its collective soul and the cobwebs in its collective mind. I hope for better. But our chances to experience an Awakening anew are practically over unless we reach our 80s or 90s.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.