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<body> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBScript"> </SCRIPT> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mysounds.js">  </script> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mycolors.js">  </script> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">AUTODOTES</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">Self-Cures and Home Remedies in a World of Words</font></p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">1992</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Copyright, 2001, Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">(Copies of this text may be printed for research or classroom use only)</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <p align="center">This is another Lewis Micro-Publication</p> <p align="center">For further information, please contact:</p> <p align="center"><a href="mailto:lewismicropublishing@lewismicropublishing.com">Lewis Micropublishing</a></p> <p align="center"><font size="5">Contents</font></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Autodotes.htm#World" target="main">The World</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Autodotes.htm#Art" target="main">Art</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Autodotes.htm#Writing" target="main">Writing</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Autodotes.htm#Anthropology" target="main">Anthropology</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Autodotes.htm#Academia" target="main">Academia</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Autodotes.htm#Authority" target="main">Authoritarianism</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Autodotes.htm#America" target="main">America</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Autodotes.htm#Militarism" target="main">Militarism & Pacifism</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Autodotes.htm#Earth" target="main">The Earth & Nature</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Autodotes.htm#Being" target="main">Being & theWay</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Autodotes.htm#Last" target="main">Odds & Ends</a></p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5"><a name="World">THE WORLD</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The world has become, as far as we are concerned, an increasingly and almost exclusively human world. Humankind emerged from a world dominated by Nature, and human civilization became predominant in place of Nature. As human civilization has developed, Nature has been steadily reduced to a sterile remnant of what it once had been. Whereas previously human civilization was always surrounded by and encapsulated by the wilderness, it is now human civilization, which surrounds and encapsulates Nature. Nature survives only in the interstitial cracks of human civilization.</p> <p>Because the world is predominantly human, it must now be measured in terms of its human dimensionalities rather than in terms of its natural vistas. It is an artificial world of man made asymmetries, straight lines, sharp angles, and continuous curves rather than the natural bilateral symmetry, jagged edges and chaotic twists and turns of natural design. Because of its humanness, it is a world to be measured in terms of its social differences and human living spaces, and in the many ways in which humankind has adapted the earth’s natural environments to its own needs and how it has adapted itself to the resulting world.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is futile to try to turn back the pages of history to a pristine period before the predominance of human civilization in the world. Our natural reaction to the civilized abominations of our own doing is to seek a primordial world—a perfect, unsullied paradise—which is both before and beyond the eruptions of human time. But any such deliberate attempt to return to a world before time and outside of the confluence of human history is, at best, bound to end in pathological isolation and social sterility, and, at worse, in unnecessary destruction and disaster for the human world as a whole. The most we can hope for now is to try to brake the forward momentum of modernizing historical change long enough to cause a general shift in its overall directionality in a way that will prove less costly and devastating for the natural world. Many human actions and activities which were unconsidered and done with complete abandon just a few decades ago are now becoming increasingly taboo and even immoral from a human and natural ecological point of view. There has been a steadily rising human awareness, almost a world collectively conscientiousness. This increasing awareness of the state of the world are the necessary corollaries of our own human sense of history. We can no longer freely trespass upon the natural world with the impunity and immunity of its indirect consequences and unexpected reverberations that our forbearers of civilization had. We are becoming increasingly subject to the consequences of our own machination in a fragile, delicately interdependent world.</p> <p> </p> <p>The human world is one characterized by its lack of balance, its substitute artificiality, its social and natural asymmetry, its historical linearity and lack of evolutionary ecology. The natural world is composed of a delicate and intricate web of living and evolving interdependencies. It is an elaborate system of checks and balances and of mutual systemic controls, which evolved over many millennia—gradually and toward increasing stability. Natural selection worked against the long-term survival of evolutionarily extreme forms and designs, which tended to threaten or upset the balances and controls of life on earth. Exceptions to the rule were either modified or eliminated. Evolution has long had an inexorable kind of selective, systemic rationality—a natural logic of its own which promoted the survival of the whole and many over the interests of the part and the few. As humankind wrests control from the natural world, it would serve as well to heed its ages old, worldly wisdom. We have developed a civilization, which increasingly beyond our control in a world that is increasingly under our control. The choices have long been recognized and available to us, and yet we have consistently failed to meet the challenge which our own human survival and nature has posed for the world. The man made logic of our own world system of civilization is proving to be fundamentally ‘patho-logical’ because, in its own pursuit of development it systematically destroys the basis of its own growth and survival.</p> <p> </p> <p>We live in a human world of mass production and mass consumption, mass media and mass ideology, mass bureaucracy and mass organization, mass money and mass psychology, mass education and mass mobilization, mass needs and mass solutions. Our mass oriented world is fundamentally impersonal and alienating of individual subjectivity, systematically substituting artificial symbols for natural needs and inclinations. The individual is confronted existentially with the success imperative of ‘participate or perish’ in the mass orientation of the world. Few if any alternatives remain viable to the individual rather than this imperative for participation, which are not becoming increasingly co-opted and restricted by the mass orienting World System. Almighty Money, and its pursuit, is becoming the secular symbol of this mass oriented system in place of the emblem of God, which has been declared dead. Money buys the passport of entry into the System. It is the ticket for citizenship and participation within the World System. It is a paradox that though everyone is engaged equally in the pursuit of Money within the System, the poor only become poorer and the rich get richer—the only things that their hard earned money can buy for the poor people are the very things that the rich profit from—while the entire energy and lifetime of the many poor is virtually consumed in the processes of production of those very things which they spend their money on and which earn a profit for the wealthy, who in turn produce virtually nothing in he world except word, waste and human want.</p> <p> </p> <p>The pathos and the fundamental irrationality of our World System is not too difficult to discover. In spite of the tragic prospects of a world population bomb, international family planning and birth control policies remain poorly underdeveloped and even in many cases, blatant disregarded or even resisted in practice. Though pollution grows at a daily rate in every aspect of the earth’s environment, the basic processes producing this pollution remain unrestricted and even accelerated in their developmental promotion. The earth’s finite base of nonrenewable resources are being quickly consumed, and for the most part, unrecycled, while viable and more healthy alternatives have long been known to exist, and the technologies to develop and exploit these alternative resources long available. Those few resources, which are considered renewable, the water table and the forest stands, are being consumed faster than they can be renewed. Perhaps the earth’s most valuable and precious resource of all, life itself, is being rapidly obliterated in its biological, evolutionary potential and in its ecological coordination. All this in the pursuit of money and the corrupt kind of power which only money can buy. These trends in the development of the World System are continually basically out of control, and ultimately only a very small minority of humankind are actually benefiting from these net development. The ultimate madness of the mass oriented system is that even those who most benefit from its development, will also be the very ones who have the most to lose from its inexorable breakdown. The madness of such a World System is its mutually assured destruction—a destruction of the whole world, which no one, no matter how wealthy can escape.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is something of a unhappy coincidence that the impending World crisis lends itself readily to millennial and apocalyptic prophecies. It is almost as if such prophetic visions were ideologically self fulfilling or were based upon some fundamental, predictive understanding of human nature and human history. It is unfortunate because it is liable to be these very analogies which will bind us to the realities and prevent us from seeking reasonable solutions to our world problems.</p> <p>But there is more than a single grain of truth to these prophetic histories in that it is the very values which they preach—frugality, humility, spiritual purity, faith and devotion, as well as brotherhood, love and charity—which are likely to be the most needed virtues, and least common vices, in our global climax.</p> <p>Though Protestant and puritanical, such values are not necessarily laconic and militaristic. People preoccupied with the production of weapons, with the power of weapons, with the arts, sciences and strategems of war, have little time left over for the development of the arts and science of life and living. It does not need to be reiterated that the production of weapons in the world has contributed nothing of net and lasting value to the welfare of the world, but has only led to unnecessary destruction and waste.</p> <p>To combine a Protestant and puritanical spirit with a pacifistic political orientation is a much-needed formula for salvation in an increasingly human world. We have only to witness the modern miracle of Japan to see how well such a formula works.</p> <p>It is imperative that we begin teaching our children how to value life and living, and how to make the most of peace, rather than making of peace merely the preparation for yet another bloody, useless war. If we do not begin soon, not only can we blame ourselves, but our children will blame us as well.</p> <p> </p> <p>We must recognize and acknowledge the intrinsic merit of the cultivation of any and all forms of artistic production, as well as the intrinsic value of improvement of human development, no matter how subjectively and qualitatively defined, and no matter how poorly measured by quantitative indices. It is a paradox that the vast amounts of human time, energy and money wasted upon the production and improvement of weapons contribute virtually nothing to the improvement of the general quality of life of humankind, while next to nothing is left over for the cultivation of human arts which take nothing from life and living that it does not give back in a qualitatively improved form. It is only the military minded and money mongering who fail to see anything valuable in human arts which cannot be counted and which cannot be used as a means of controlling, exploiting and destroying others. It only speaks of the warped values of a modern humanity who sees art as a waste of time and weapons only as a means for making money and protecting property.</p> <p> </p> <p>Because it is becoming an increasingly human world, its dimensionalities must be increasingly measured in terms of the general human condition and of the consequences of human stress and response, initiative and reaction, within the world. Old formulas of human nature and of a kind of social Darwinism must be given up in favor of newer formulas which do not equate the patternings of human history with the dynamics of human evolution, and which do not confuse the causes of cultural change with the consequences of biological predisposition and genetic heritage. It will do us little good to see the modern developments of the world as a by product of human evolution, and it may well be the case that these kinds of ideology even promote and legitimate the kind of status quo and may prevent the positive kinds of historical changes which may help to resolve our modern world crisis. We can ill afford to continue promoting ideologies which hold that human historical developments in the world are basically predetermined by human biological and evolutionary destiny. If anything, historical civilization had lead to the destruction of human nature and its own evolutionary base.</p> <p> </p> <p>The frustration of human creativity must eventuate in human destructiveness. The frustration of human love results in human hate. The frightening aspect of modern machineries of destruction and death are not that they depend upon human aggressiveness and hate for their functioning, but they are largely impersonal and indifferent in their design and operation. The tyranny of modern evil is not the same kind of rational tyranny, which depended upon the promotion of basic human aggression and hate for its function, but it is a tyranny of the fundamentally alienated and anomic. Its irrationality is its very rationality. A person can be a creative lover of humankind and yet still feel compelled by reason to push a button that leads to the distant destruction of a faceless human enemy. The role of aggression and hate remain mostly only symbolic and ideological in the cultivation of popular support for modern machineries of death—it is at best a displaced aggression and distant hatred, indirect in destruction.</p> <p>We are faced with a fundamental existential alternative for the future. If creating order from chaos and pattern from randomness is what is constitutive of life, and making the ordered chaotic and random is what is constitutive of death and destruction, then creativity is ‘anti-entropic’ and life giving while destructiveness is chaos producing and death making. It follows that a creative world is one in which more is produced from less, and something comes from nothing. A destructive world is precisely the opposite, where less is produced from more, and nothing comes from something.</p> <p>We have a choice to become creative in our world, or to remain destructive of it.</p> <p> </p> <p>Though we must act in the world, we can never know all of the consequences of our actions. Nothing that humans do is ever completely condemnable nor completely condonable. There is no human motive, which is pure and unmixed. There is neither all good nor all bad in the world, but that people make it seem so. Because we must act even though we cannot ultimately know either the causes or consequences of our actions, we must not be too quick to presume to know or judge the actions of others in the world. It is in the recognition of the inherent possibility of our own evil in the world that we come to understand, and to ultimately forgive the evil of others.</p> <p> </p> <p>Poor motives are frequently thinly disguised, and it requires little insight of wisdom to see through the veil to the human substance beneath. Under the skin beneath the veil there is always a veritable mine of human potentiality and virtue.</p> <p>Imaginary visions of human possibility always hide in the shadows cast by the light.</p> <p>Between the black and the white is an infinite field of gray composed of a rainbow of color.</p> <p> </p> <p>Those who are blind to their illusions are susceptible to the illusions of others. Those who are convinced of their importance, superiority, and power of others in the world. In this way we can say that in a world so composed of illusion, the blind lead the blind, and the one eyed would surely be king.</p> <p>When people learn to see themselves for what they really are, they then inevitably become ashamed of their own nakedness. It is always sobering to laugh at the irony of the common nudity of the human condition. Beneath all our clothes and all our illusions, we are all primitive children of nature.</p> <p> </p> <p>The nearly overwhelming sense of security and solidarity of a mass oriented society is that everyone seems to be doing the same things no matter how foolish it may really be. This is an utterly false and dangerous illusion that justifies the method of social order by the blind madness of the crowd. Principles of social organization can be simply reduced to the problem of crowd control. It is obvious where such principles come from—the social psychology of crowds and theory of behavior modification. He masses of people across the world are rendered increasingly susceptible to the inducements and incentives of the System, at the same time being rendered increasingly predictable and controllable as well.</p> <p>Human civilization emerged emerged from the darkness of the natural order of things. It dawned with the light of a new age. Civilization came to superimpose a human made order on top of the natural scheme of things. Analogies to these metaphors of darkness and light are the corresponding metaphors of night and day, the sun and the moon, sleep and wakeful activity, birth and death, the blindness of vice and the virtue of vision, the darkness of ignorance and the light of understanding. Frightening unknown creatures of the imagination stalk the night by the light of the glowing moon, while it is the human being toiling beneath the bright sunlight who commands the day. Upon these basic metaphors and their somewhat fortuitous association we have built a world civilization. What difference might it have made if our mythos began instead as ‘in the beginning was the circle of fire.’</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5"><a name="Art">ART</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Sublime beauty can be found in the commonest of things and in the plainest of faces. To discover aesthetic feeling and character even in human ugliness and natural decay is an art in itself. From such a superlative standpoint, the cosmetic, the refined and sophisticated, the conventional and the ‘beautiful’ frequently appear contrived, superficial, meretricious, and even grotesque and perverse in their artificial exaggeration of the natural forms, lines, textures and colors of the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>I have long striven to bring my art into everything I have done—in my painting, my poetry, my other writing, in my anthropological research and understanding, in my teaching, in my wood working, in my social relationships and even in my worldly adventures. Things are hardly worth doing if not done well with an eye to balance and form and with the extra care and attention to minor details. It is a paradox that some of my most rewarding aesthetic experiences have been in figuring out special ways to help or to make others happy in the world. In whatever I choose to do, the challenge to produce something interesting, and perhaps even profound, is always an intrinsic part of the problem.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is a grand paradox that will not allow itself to die to consider that Vincent van Gogh was perhaps the poorest, most persecuted, and yet most productive of artists to have ever lived. Now, barely one hundred years since his tragic suicide at thirty seven years of age, one of his lesser paintings will see at an auction for millions of dollars, and a whole multi million dollar industry has grown up around his family name. And yet while he lived and worked, the world denied to him even the most basic support. Van Gogh gave so much to a greedy and ungrateful world, and now even many of his biographers and fifth generation analysts would deny him even the most basic sanities and human sensibilities and sensitivities which made him such an uncommon artist. He was not so much anti social as he was alienated by a world which denied him a life while capitalizing upon his art. The lesson taught by Van Gogh’s tragic life is that we must honor the living as much as the dead.</p> <p> </p> <p>A genuine artist transforms everything and anything she/he touches. A great name can even turn the crudest of crap into gold while an unknown name can quickly render the finest and most expensive of materials into worthless waste. But neither fame nor fortune can guarantee an object of art against the acid test of time. Reputations wax and wane with the changing tides of fashion and currents of culture, but among some of the greatest pieces of art of humankind are many made by anonymous hands. The highest reward of great art is always in its making.</p> <p> </p> <p>The relationship between money and art has always been something akin to prostitution. Propaganda is the inevitable product of such artistic prostitution—all art produced for such a purpose may be masterpieces of the art of propaganda, but are rarely much more than minor and mediocre works of art. Such art capitalizes upon the brevity of the critical Moment, and pays the price by its ephemeral transience in the world.</p> <p>While all artists need money by which to work and live, genuine art is never produced primarily for the purpose of making money. It is a happy balance any artist can strike between a means of making a living and an end for which to live.</p> <p>Even artists must struggle and juggle the contradictions of the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>I was once told by an authority that art was a difficult row to hoe in the world. For a few, it is the only row to hoe.</p> <p>To ask an artist to live without art is like asking anyone else to live without air to breathe. Art is the food of the soul, and the human soul is the center of the artist’s being. Happiness is the heart of the possessor.</p> <p> </p> <p>People who claim that the artist is essentially useless in the world unless famous or fortunate fail to appreciate the vital role that art plays in the world and the crucial connection that has always existed between art, culture and human awareness and adaptability in the world. Art may often be trivial and superficial, and artists banal and crude, but art and artists are never useless in the human world.</p> <p>Though humankind can learn to survive in the world without art, and even learn to be happy in spite of art, it is bound never to live well in such a world without art.</p> <p> </p> <p>Humankind evolved to be artistic—creativity is the touchstone of human nature. Art is what separates humankind from the other animals in the world. It is not surprising to see that art had an important survival function in both the human and natural worlds.</p> <p> </p> <p>One of the greatest tragedies of the human world is that, in spite of so much civilization, more people do not learn to become artists in their lives.</p> <p>It is a capacity most humans share, and yet which seldom becomes cultivated to its fullest potential. Many social constraints frequently work to frustrate and interfere with this fundamental human capacity, in order to channel its basic energies and abilities into more controlled areas of activity and to induce greater conformity to social norms of belief and behavior. There is always an aspect of unpredictability and danger associated with artistic creativity which is often considered threatening to the status quo of social order—particularly if such an order is especially conservative and resistant or reactionary to change. This aspect of the association of art to liberal change, unpredictability and innovation tends to cast the artist in an ambivalent and somewhat liminal position in the normal social order. This has not always been the case—artists have been frequently aligned with and supported by, and therefore co-opted by, the most conservative and dominant interests of society. Great art has often been the dependent stepchild of a proud and ruthless despot, but the basic function of art to anticipate and make aware change in the world has never been altered or co-opted by any political interest except as propaganda.</p> <p> </p> <p>If propaganda has been the corruption and pollution of great art, critics have been its parasites. While the usefulness of art in the world can never be doubted, the necessity of the function of artistic criticism can always be questioned. History has remembered many great works of art and many great artists, but no critics or works of criticism. If propagandized and politically co-opted artists have become professional prostitutes, then the critics have been their whore-mongers and pimps. It is a paradox that the artist is always her/his own worst critic, and that all-authentic art is also implicit criticism.</p> <p> </p> <p>Perfectionism is the poison of authentic art. It is a paradox that while all authentic art attempts to improve itself, it never answers the claim to perfection. Irremediable perfectionism leads to frustration and stagnation of artistic growth. It is a symptom of artistic immaturity and regression.</p> <p> </p> <p>The artist is like a fruit tree, not to be judged by the merits of any particular fruit, but by the entire compendium of the artist’s life work—by the number and size of the seasonal harvests. Each individual work, like any particular fruit, must be judged against the overall size, variety and yield of the artist’s entire production. The artist must learn to cull the lesser fruit and to concentrate upon the better fruit, and it is the most any artist can hope for to have a long life with many full and productive seasons.</p> <p>A single masterpiece never an artist makes, but an artist must make many masterpieces.</p> <p> </p> <p>Few firm lines can be drawn different forms and kinds of artistic activity and between art and many aspects of life. A creative artist is by definition a syncretistic synthesizer of many diverse elements of experience and life. Artist excellence in one area or domain tends to generalize itself to the artist’s entire life and to lend aesthetic awareness to many other areas of activity. Similarly, an artistic society will tend to demonstrate talent and genius in a relatively wide arc of cultural activity. Restriction and boundedness is antithetical to an artistic way of life. This tendency must inevitably sometimes comes to odds with the professional need to focus and concentrate one’s expertise upon a relatively narrow and well defined domain in order to achieve the standards of excellence characteristic of great art. The mark of a true artistic genius is her/his basic versatility—to work with excellence in a variety of different media, through professionally restricted to just a few.</p> <p>An artist is rarely just as asshole.</p> <p> </p> <p>The amount, variety, and relative quality of art can be taken as a useful and valid measure of relative health and adaptive achievements of any human culture and all human civilization. The progress of human civilization can be indexed by number and productivity of its artistic genius. No society too preoccupied with the basic human biological survival can find the spare time and energy to produce great art. The great cave paintings of Lascaux can be taken as the first evidence of human civilization in the prehistoric world. We recognize the European Renaissance for what it was, as a great dawning of human civilization at the end of a long dark night of the middle ages,, by its blossoming and flourishing of great art. The huge stone megaliths of Easter Island are a strange archaeological testimony to the power and vitality of artistic production in determining the course of survival of its Polynesian people. It an be taken as an important symptom of our modern malaise if fewer and fewer people can either find the time, means or energy available to pursue art even as just a part time avocation.</p> <p> </p> <p>A world in which success is built upon the strict separation of work and play,, the dichotomization between professional and personal, the alienation of human labor from the products of that labor, the cooption of human time, energy and freedom, intellect and the values for the purpose of exploitation, and the repression of the subjectiveness and will of the individual for the ‘objectivity’ and sake of the System, the artist who manages to make work play and play work, who fails to separate personal interests and tastes from professional prerogatives, who is supposed to do what she/he likes and like what she/he does, who is intimately attached via her/his labor to the objects of art which they produce, who resists, and must resist the monetary cooption of their time, energy , liberty, ideas and values in order to avoid the exploitation of their labor, and who revel in their own and in human subjectiveness and in their individual willfulness, can only be regarded with deep suspicion and, at best, great ambivalence by other, more ‘normal’ members of society. At worst the drive of such normative constraints may lead to the recrimination of the artist and the repression of all art which is not mandated by service to the System and thus propagandized. It is not unusual if artists are made to suffer severely for their lot in life, and that they should be more sensitive to this suffering and in tune with its social causes and consequences more than the normal run of the mill. Unmitigated and chronic feelings of guilt, shame, persecution, and of anxiety and hysteria have their source in the ambivalent status role of the artist in human society. T seems that little can really be done to alleviate such symptoms and suffering short of the basic reorientation of our modern System away from mass production and toward the kind of handicraft production from which all art comes.</p> <p> </p> <p>Ours is a modern society, which does not value too highly the kinds of interests and involvements which fosters the cultivation of art. Instead our society places a premium upon socio economic achievement and status which translates into ones occupational position and sociability within the System. For any authentic artist, where one stands within the world hierarchy of widget or wug production and consumption is at best secondary to the existential and historical problematics of creativity and culture.</p> <p> </p> <p>The eye of the artist is to see in each and every image of the world its own momentary and its revealed potential for eternity captured in the subtle and sublime interplay of light and shadow, in the tonalities and values of local colors contrasts, and atmospheric effects, in the synaesthetic effects of surface textures, intersecting lines, curving depths, and sharply cut corners, in directional movements and flows of design patterning. The hand of the artist transforms everything it touches into something vibrant with life animating, vitalizing, transmitting, moving the inert. Art expresses motion in stillness, sound in silence, light in darkness and life in the inanimate and lifeless. For the authentic artist every moment, every scene, every sound, every act, every word, is pregnant with the vitality of life, and the whole world presents as endless array of possibilities waiting to be born. In this sense, we may speak legitimately of the inherent awe and wonder if art in the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>In all art, simplicity is the quintessential of virtuosity and the only permissible style of conveying the sublime, the subtle and the profound. Even sophistry and unnecessary complexity weaken the form, take away from its strength, and render its feeling and movement superfluous. It follows that simplicity can be the source of grand sophistication and sublime complexity, while the sophistication and complexity of design and execution can sometimes reveal great simplicity.</p> <p> </p> <p>In great art, the medium is always metalogical with its message, form follows function and function fits the form, design determines the execution and the execution determines the design, and the unique composition of its elements always and only points indirectly to their ultimate significance and purpose. The profundity of great art is its embodiment and expression of grand paradox—its depths are reflected in the shallowness of its surface spaces.</p> <p> </p> <p>All authentic art is in some strange, unfathomable measure, and in some secret, mysterious way, prescient of the near future at the moment of its origination. We welcome new art when we open our doors to the changes that the future has brought, and new art becomes acceptable only after past tastes have been replaced by future appetites. In this way, art has always had a wonderful affinity with the mystical and the prophetic, and artists share similar attitudes, orientations, life styles and world views as visionaries, seers, fortune tellers and shamans. The authentic artist has sharpened awareness and an attunement to the environmental and with the larger world that is lacking in the less sensitive, the more mundane and convention bound. It is the very sharpness of the artists sensibilities and keenness of this kind of awareness which drives the artist to create new forms which are more consonant and harmonious with the changing world as they experience it. It is through such creation of new and novel forms that the new ways of seeing, feeling, sensing and acting in the world is made available to the less acutely aware and those of duller sensitivities.</p> <p>The function of art is to mediate change in the world by incorporating it into more conventionally and culturally acceptable forms. It follows that indirectly the function of art is to preserve past forms in viable new shapes.</p> <p> </p> <p>All art works within some convention, tradition, or cultural constraint—even if only in reaction, rebellion or in destructive denial of such constraint. Without attachment to any constraint, art is impossible, and what would pass for art is only counterfeit and trivial. The creation of new forms of art lead inevitably to the establishment of new conventions, the founding of new traditions and the inauguration of new cultural constraints. What is born in freedom and in the breaking with constraint, leads to the restriction of freedom and the broadening of constraint. The dialectic between art and the society, in which it is situated and supported, is the dialectic between the liberal and the conservative, the marginal and the conventional, the peripheral and the central. What begins in art ends in cultural constraint. The revolutionary and new of one age is the conventional and old of the next.</p> <p> </p> <p>No portrait is painted that does not present the disguised face of the artist. Every painting, no matter what the subject, contains the imprint of the artist’s unique individuality and the impression of her/his personality. In however subtle a manner, lifeless symbols and emblems are anthropomorphized with human traits and characteristics, and everywhere the painter cannot but help leave her/his signature in paint.</p> <p> </p> <p>Without art by which to frame our experience, the human being is little better than an animal or a machine in the world. More than anything else, besides perhaps Religion, it is art which humanizes the world and which makes the human being worldlier.</p> <p> </p> <p>Great Art, like great Religion, springs from the spirit of humanity and has its common source in the soul of the individual human being. Art and Religion are the best expressions of humanity and human identity in the world.</p> <p>Show me an authentic artist and I will show you a basically, incurably, honest human being. Authentic art always depends upon the virtue of honesty to always see through the veil of illusion to the substance beneath. Art which relies upon the illusion and trickery of deceit is nothing more than mere propaganda. Authentic art always enlightens the human world—to express and experience the world as it really seems to be by dispelling the deceit which keeps human experience shrouded in the shadow of darkness.</p> <p> </p> <p>There has always been a very close connection between art and religion, and this connection has been foremost symbolic and mythological. Art creates the symbolic forms which religion then infuses with sacred significance and spiritual purpose. Art always borrow from religion those mythological archetypes and elements of sacred significance by which to create its new forms and symbols. It is to be expected that religion frequently tries to appropriate the role and power of art for its own services, and that artists frequently revolt against the symbolic and social dominance of religion in the pursuit of their art.</p> <p> </p> <p>Truth and Beauty lies closely connected deep within the human consciousness. It is in this connection that we can refer to the basic archetypes of the collective unconscious of humankind. That which is most sublime also seems to be most true, and that which most aesthetically gratifying tends to be ethically the most rewarding. This association between aesthetic sensitivities and moral sensibilities is always close and inseparable in the human world. We tend to regard that which is ugly as bad, and that which is bad to be seen as ugly. Without normative astuteness, there could be no aesthetic appreciation or ethical evaluation.</p> <p>Learning to sense the basic beauty of the natural world is unavoidably learning to understand the basic goodness of that world.</p> <p>We live now in a human made world in which these two basic senses have been separated and effectively sundered. This split between the aesthetic and the ethical has been necessary in order for the inference and intermediation of social control and the socialization for conformity in the world. In our world it is no longer given or necessary that the things we do well must also be basically good, and that our goodness must always be done well. Thus we make modern weapons, which are exquisite from the standpoint of pure, aeronautical design, and we construct public housing facilities and slums without the slightest regard to their basic sanities or spiritual attractiveness. Our world has become fundamentally perverse when we can find beauty in things essentially evil and ugliness in things basically good.</p> <p> </p> <p>The only thing worst than poor art is the intolerance and the discrimination against poor art. The artistically astute will find such art vulgar, irritating and even insulting, but never threatening enough to warrant persecution and destruction. In this regard artistic freedom is absolute, and requires absolute tolerance. The scaring of objects of art is the equivalent of the burning of books and murder of people. It represents the denial and the loss of freedom of expression, and the exercise of this freedom, which art stand for.</p> <p> </p> <p>The barbarians who toppled the statues of the Roman world were soon to make those same figures their own sacred idols,</p> <p> </p> <p>There is always something deeply symbolic about the violent misappropriation of art. It is almost as if the beauty of life were trying to be expressed in terms of the ugliness of death, and natural creation was transformed by destructiveness.</p> <p> </p> <p>The source and energy of art is the same as for human aggression. It is as much emotional as intellectual, as physical in origin and end as mental. Art is fundamental, ineffable expression of the power of human being in the world. Artistic production is a form of empowerment in the world, and artistic representation symbolizes in basic form the importance of such power.</p> <p>The appreciation of art has its sympathetic appeal in the same source as its production. Art is not merely intellectually interesting, it is intriguing, satisfying, and moving to the person’s entire sense of being. Artistic appreciation shares its source in the same universal sympathies of being which makes humankind unique and different from all other creatures of nature.</p> <p>It is this mysterious power and these strange sympathies which makes human nature so unfathomable and so paradoxical.</p> <p> </p> <p>One cannot analyze an object of art into its design elements or its basic materials in order to understand the source of its power over the human imagination. The power of an artwork is always synergistic and must always be grasped from a holistic standpoint. It is the unique combination of diverse elements and the interrelations which they represent in the world, which confers upon a work of art its special character and capacity to be more, and less, than it seems to be.</p> <p>Similarly, one cannot simply analyze the life of an artist in order to discover how and why the artist works and creates art. Each artist represents a unique pattern of personality traits, talents and idiosyncrasies, which are integrated in sometimes-contradictory fashion into the being of the artist and reflected in the many peculiarities of their unfolding life style. These patternings are virtually unfathomable from any but a holistic and synthesizing point of view.</p> <p> </p> <p>We can live without poetry in life but we cannot live well without it. The poem frames our world with aesthetic wonder, and fills all the spaces between our words and deeds with a sublime sense of awe.</p> <p> </p> <p>All symbolisms in art derives ultimately from nature. The basicness and power of the natural symbolic archetypes of human consciousness—the circle, the snake, the bird, the fish, the human figure itself—all have a deep seated hold over our minds and a deeply rooted influence upon our history. They serve in our lives as a constant reminder of our own autochthonous origins from the earth and our common identity with the natural world.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5"><a name="Writing">MY WRITING</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Writing is the crowbar of the mind, prying open the problems of the world, letting in the light of knowledge and letting out the hidden elements of understanding.</p> <p>I use my words more like a crowbar in the world than a sword or a foil. My writing lacks the skilled refinement and finesse which is the mark of a good writer. I must depend upon the brute strength and basis vocabulary to move, bit by bit, inch by inch, the mountains of the world. Because words do not usually flow easily from my mind, my writing is usually difficult, strained and consuming much time and energy. I must count the rewards for my writing not in terms of money earned, but only in terms of the number of mounds of meaning that’s been moved.</p> <p> </p> <p>I would trade off my whole compendium of poetry for a single simple poem that’s profound enough to be published and read in the world. I must content myself with quantity rather than quality.</p> <p> </p> <p>Better a single word to summarize a thousand pages than a thousand pages to summarize a single word.</p> <p> </p> <p>Excessive verbosity, verbiage, loquaciousness and ‘logorrhea’ is the mark of mediocrity in writing—the sign of uncertainty and the lack of credibility, that the writer does not really know what she/he is talking about, and it is talking more around the point than to the point.</p> <p>Written words must be morel like deeds than mere words—they must act upon the imagination of the reader rather than just communicate intentions or meanings. Words must get things done with the least amount of excessive effort. Only in this way will an author be taken seriously enough to be read with any interest.</p> <p> </p> <p>Words written for mere self-expression go out but do not ever come back to close the hermeneutic circle. Such words may communicate, but seldom do much more than this in the world.</p> <p>Written words must move mountains, not make mountains out of molehills.</p> <p>The world is so replete and inundated with written words and printed trivia that few people can afford to take the extra time required to sort through the junk to find the jewels of literature. People can hardly be blamed from editing from their existence so many mixed up messages which their minds and insult their intellects. Our world suffers as much from the word pollution of the Mind as it does from any other kind of ecological contamination.</p> <p>It is wise to wonder whether the vast majority of printed or published material is worth the paper it is printed upon, especially when the few remaining trees of the world’s forests are becoming so precious.</p> <p>There is little intrinsic about my own growing mound of printed paper which represents the compendium of my writing that should set it apart from this mountain of mental verbiage. Because of this, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify my writing purely in its own terms, especially when its investment grows more onerous and less rewarding with each additional page.</p> <p>Making paper mountains may only be biographical and historical compulsion. But even so, it remains a very human preoccupation and what but history and biography itself would pass judgment upon what will soon pass away and what will long remain. My small mound grows daily because soon I can find nothing better to do with my time.</p> <p> </p> <p>My poetry is closely like my painting, so close as to lead me to believe they have a common connection in my creative and active imagination, and fulfill a common normative need in the expression and external production of my human beingness in the world.</p> <p>The purpose of both poetry and painting is not to persuade the human mind, but to induce the human imagination to experience new states of being and new possibilities of becoming in the world. Poems and paintings enrich our experience of the world much more they cost to produce. Poetry and painting is not merely intellectually interesting, but imaginative intriguing and even spiritually stimulating in life. The power of the poet and painter is to convey the same experience and sense of fascination and wonderment of the world to the reader or viewer.</p> <p> </p> <p>If I can with my words just open one other mind, jarring it loose from its prejudices and preconceptions to let in the light of the wider world view, like a crowbar that pries loose a bent and rusty nail, than my paper mountain will have been worth the waiting.</p> <p> </p> <p>The air is free and printed words are relatively cheap—perhaps this is way so little money is to be made in writing.</p> <p> </p> <p>Better one word of truth than a thousand of deceit.</p> <p>The true meaning of a text can never be read directly from the words, but must be found somewhere between the lines, between the pages, between the covers, and between the shelves. To live entirely in a world of words is to live in a stuffy, interior world of illusion without a window to open to let in fresh air and sunlight and without a door through which to pass onto the wider pathways of the world. One must learn to read with one eye upon the word, and one eye upon the world, and with one’s head in the clouds but one’s feet upon the ground.</p> <p> </p> <p>Better to be completely illiterate than to lead a life of boredom stringing together trite clichés. Words can imprison the mind as much as they can liberate it.</p> <p> </p> <p>There are no words, which do not reveal as much as they conceal, which do not tell lies as they speak truth. Words are always half true and half-false. They are always the vessels of ignorance and prejudice as much as they are the vehicles if wisdom and enlightenment. This is their paradox and their power.</p> <p> </p> <p>I started writing because I felt I had something important to say when nobody else was listening to me. It was my method for dealing with the madness of my loneliness in the world and became my madness for methodically treating that loneliness. Now, thirteen years and twenty odd manuscripts later, I’m still writing and people are still not paying much attention to me. I guess its time to try to publish something.</p> <p>What I would give for the volume of poems that I have dreamed of only to awaken and arise to suffer a loss of words, or that I have put away for a later date only to become forgotten and irretrievably lost. One must learn to grasp the moment of inspiration, or else relinquish the preoccupation of plying poems composed on the fly.</p> <p> </p> <p>If talking it all out is therapy for the soul, writing it all out is therapeutic for the mind—relieving it of the mental morass of confused conceptions, contradictory notions, and nonsensical meanings. Writing clarifies and sharpens the intellect, exercising the brain’s analytical and imaginative powers, jogging the memory and one’s power of reason. It is little wonder that writing can often be frustrating and difficult experience.</p> <p> </p> <p>Writing mediates the gap between the word and the deed. Writing may either prove to be a precursor to action or a substitute for it and an excuse for inaction.</p> <p>One person’s fact may be another’s fiction, and there is nothing in writing it in words doesn’t make it seem so.</p> <p> </p> <p>If I had a dollar for every page I’ve written, I would have enough to at least put a down upon a small house. As it is I must content myself with feeling at home with my typewriter. It is better if one’s words dwell in the world than to have one’s world dwell in words. Better to live in the words of the world than in the worlds of the words.</p> <p> </p> <p>I prescribe heavy doses of writing for anyone who feels the least bit foolish, ill at ease, or confused with the world. There is no quicker or more complete remedy for the inanities of the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>Writing has always been for me something of a transformational experience. I emerge from the wilderness of a new manuscript somewhat altered in character than how I entered the forest. It is something like a journey in which there is never any returning. It is never a journey without some cost or trade off in terms of one’s time, energy, flexibility, and alternative opportunity in the world, and too much such transformation inevitably leads to burn out of one’s resourcefulness and involvement.</p> <p> </p> <p>Words are the trees of the forest of the world, and books are like maps, which chart the pathways in small sections of the wilderness. The wilderness of the world is vast and its trees are too many—writers are but helpless wanderers of the woods, marking out different trails between its many regions.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is fitting that my stormy creativity should at last come to rest upon the rock of writing. More than in any other form of creative expression, writing provides an anchor to the restless world.</p> <p>My first manuscript was written on the top of a wooden footlocker in an open squad bay. It was a very difficult and frustrating process at first, but soon became an obsession that consumed all my extra energies and spare time. No one during that year bothered to ask me what I was writing about. It must have seemed to the lifers such an incredible absurdity that they could not but doubt its values. For me it was a separate reality, an escape from the intolerable stresses and strains of the moment.</p> <p>Now I can complete a manuscript in several weeks and though it consumes the main part of my time and energy, I have extra to spend on other things. Writing does not come now as hard as it used to be. But few still bother to ask me what I’m writing about, and I think most must still not believe in it. It remains a separate reality from which I can regularly escape from the vicissitudes and problems of everyday life.</p> <p> </p> <p>Writing creates a world in which I have supreme mastery. The author always has the final word, and it is this absolute authority which is both the corruption and the power of writing.</p> <p> </p> <p>Ours has long been an age of literacy. We are creatures of the written and printed word. Our signatures carry the legal authority of our whole life, and is the basis for all legal transactions, the possession of property and public authority and identity in the world. Whatever the many implications of literacy for the transformation of the human mind and world, we cannot now easily escape the consequences of these historical transformations.</p> <p> </p> <p>As long as humans remain human, there will always be interesting books to be written and read.</p> <p>Books and words have been the building blocks of human civilization and the flagstones of the way of human history. Without them we would have neither history, civilization not humanity in the same sense that we know them.</p> <p>My will to write, and my many unpublished manuscripts and collections of poetry, have always symbolically represented a kind of intellectual and spiritual declaration of independence in the world.</p> <p>My writing has been a way of silently but positively asserting my will and my own way in the world—speaking our silently without fear or recrimination or retribution or persecution for my words and thoughts.</p> <p> </p> <p>If we value the freedom of speech as the guarantee of the freedom of thought, then we must value equally the freedom of the press as the only guarantee of the freedom of speech and thought.</p> <p> </p> <p>Politicians will always depend upon the publication and dissemination of propaganda by which to persuade and warp the will of the people to the politician’s own ends and against the people’s own best interests.</p> <p> </p> <p>People may burn books but their fires can never be destroy the truths which the words represent, nor take away the freedom of mind such books symbolize and which led to their creation in the first place.</p> <p> </p> <p>Though there are copyright laws and patents pending, no human being or corporate group has a monopoly or a corner on the market of the human mind. The idea that ideas and thought can be a privilege of private ownership the same way that material possessions are is inherently antithetical and destructive to the very freedom of mind upon which the creation of new ideas depends. Such practices can only be regarded as fascist and anti-intellectual in the final analysis.</p> <p>The virtue of the human mind is that it is ultimately and necessarily free from social control, and the written word is both the primary instrument and expression of that freedom.</p> <p> </p> <p>I had a kind of writer’s block for a few years. I felt as though I couldn’t write well what I wanted to say, and whenever I actually started to write, I felt as if I had nothing at all to say. Neither the thoughts nor the words to express them by were available when I needed them, though I had off moments of literary inspiration. This was a maddening, frustrating, stultifying and ultimately deadening experience, but I continued to force myself to write as much as I could stand, in spite of many interruptions and existential interims in my life, and though finishing a piece frequently proved even more difficult than starting them, and many things were left unfinished, I eventually broke free of this bloke and gradually loosened up enough to feel at ease with my writing and only then did writing begin to be a genuinely enjoyable experience for me.</p> <p>Looking back upon this period, I am not sure what the sources of this block really were. One important factor seemed to be a susceptibility to a kind of authoritative criticism and influence in my writing as well as in many other areas of my life, by people I then regarded to be my significant others, but who proved in the long run to be my ‘fair weather friends’ and acquaintances of circumstance and convenience. I could call them, in hindsight, more like Minotaurs of the academic labyrinth than real intellectual mentors. Needless to say, these people are no longer a part of my life, nor are the kinds of intellectual-emotional-social interdependencies which our relationships represented. Breaking free of my writer’s block had something to do with breaking free of the kinds of social bonds in the world kept my sense of self identity in the world as a writer bound to other people’s petty prejudices and preconceptions. It is unfortunate that in Academic arenas of authorship, such dependencies seem to be the norm rather than the exceptions to the rule. My best writing has never been academic.</p> <p> </p> <p>My writing over the years has only improved by small increments and has moved only gradually in some directions while in others it has changed only slightly if at all. I sometimes read some of my earliest stuff and am struck by its freshness, directness, its unsophisticated strength and vitality of style. I must admit that a great deal of my writing has been roughshod and only first draft, and often not written with the view of the readership in mind. My writing has represented for me more of a personal, psychological odyssey through my life than any kind of social trip in the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>Birds of a feather flock together….different strokes for different folks….the pen is mightier than the sword….between the cup and the lip there is many a slip….etc. etc.</p> <p> </p> <p>Books are just like tools. Everybody wants to borrow them but no one likes returning them. I have lost many books and a few tools this way.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is necessary that a writer be well read. A person who always writes but rarely reads is one who remains unable to read her/his writing in the way that others will read it. It is like a person who believes she/he is experiencing the world by sitting in front of the television set. I've learned my lessons the hard way. Reading remains the only counter balance a writer has to keep from going too far. There are so few good writers in the world because there are so few good readers.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5"><a name="Anthropology">ANTHROPOLOGY</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Anthropology is by definition the holistic study of humankind. The drawing of disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries in the specializations and territorial demarcations of professional interest is antithetical to the general and synthetic basis of the whole field.</p> <p>There is something wrong with such a field when its professional members no longer identify themselves primarily as anthropologists with the implication of disciplinary holism and breadth of interest, involvement and intellectual understanding, and instead become identified as being primarily one sort of specialist or another. This has been neither a necessary nor a desirable stare if affairs, though wholly understandable from standpoint of its structural relationship with its domain host society.</p> <p>Professional anthropologists would do well to remember their lessons in introductory anthropology.</p> <p> </p> <p>I have been pursuing the study of professional anthropology for almost ten years now and honestly feel little further ahead that when I began, even though my understanding of the world has perhaps increased enormously. I have never been in any anthropology class in which any other student has ever out performed me or shown more or better knowledge of the field than myself, and yet I have over the years consistently seen other, younger students getting ahead with their careers while I seem to be running in place. Many people ask me why I keep investing my time, energy and money in the pursuit of a profession, which has given so little compensation in return. With a wife and a child to worry about, I can no longer give them any honest excuses. In this matter I can only ultimately blame myself, though I do not thereby condone the values of American society, the politics of Academia or the professional prerogatives of the anthropological elite who are for the most part conservative, classicist and ego-centric in orientation. If there is a great hypocrisy with the world, then it begins with the basic lack of honesty with the self. Honesty begets humility and is immune to the disease of hypocrisy.</p> <p>My minor contributions to the field on their own, and my devotion, authenticity and sincerity of commitment to the pursuit of anthropological understanding in the world no longer require the legitimization of the professional in group or the justification of the power elite. I would continue to pursue my own anthropological interests, via my writing, as both a scientist and a humanist, whether anyone else calls me anthropologist or not.</p> <p>The most pressing problem in the world today are primarily human problems, and the most intellectually challenging puzzles and paradoxes which confront human understanding today are basically and irreducibly problems of human reality. On this anthropological ground, I stake my claim as an anthropologist.</p> <p> </p> <p>After making A’s in four field methods courses, several general theory classes, and two or three history of anthropology seminars, not to mention the host of other, interrelated topics, I seem to still not have gotten it all right. I’m beginning to wonder whether I ever will, or even if there really is a right way of going about being an anthropologist.</p> <p> </p> <p>The most important thing I have learned from my anthropological studies has been to recognize amongst all the differences of humankind the same basic common ground and sense of identity and dignity of each human being. Professionals within the field hardly impress me at all anymore, with their long list of publications, their self-centered sense of smugness and self-importance, and their lines and their sea stories. It is the common person, in whichever cultural corner of the world, with their basic dilemmas and basic interests and involvements, which I find most interesting. These things are not found only in a book or in photography. They are to be found only in other people. How much basic equality can an anthropologist establish with other people of the world if they do not confront or resolve those structural asymmetries in their own lives?</p> <p> </p> <p>If you want to get rich fast, go to law school and become a lawyer. The world can always use another lawyer. But if you want to remain poor and persecuted, then become an anthropologist. Though anthropologists have always desperately needed the world, the world has seldom the need for an anthropologist.</p> <p> </p> <p>I’ve met many professional anthropologists who think they are perfect, at least in private, and who would like to believe the are God’s gift to humankind. They can become quite frustrated when they come to realize that hardly anyone around is paying much attention to them, and that they are probably are not, after all, God’s chosen on earth. I used to be a true believer—a committed anthropologist—until I passed through its back door one too many times. The view from the rear does not look as pure and sacred as the perspective from the front. The biggest career disappointment of a professional anthropologist is not that they have failed to solve any of the world’s problems, but that the world has failed to solve any of their problems.</p> <p> </p> <p>The nemesis of Anthropology will be weighed not in terms of its failure to provide any important answers or solutions to the problem of human reality, but in its failure to ask nontrivial and interesting questions about that reality.</p> <p>As to the anthropological question whether there are really any significant barriers of difference separating one person from another, or cultures, or nations, or different periods of time, I must say that there are a few if any that are not made by humankind itself. The most important lesson to be learned from social anthropology are that rules were always made to be broken. No human made rule would be worthy if it could not be honored in its breach. But the paradox of anthropological knowledge does not end here—this is where it begins.</p> <p> </p> <p>Yuppie anthropology has become the pursuit of anthropology for other ends. While it may have the virtue of lacking the commitment of the ‘authentic’ anthropology as an end in itself, it suffers the shortcoming of prostituting the study of anthropology to whatever circumstance of convenience, which comes along. What used to be a well regarded neutrality of anthropological science, is quickly becoming a vested interest of scientific territoriality.</p> <p> </p> <p>Between biology and technology little remains left over for plain humanity. Between the brain and the computer, there is little room for the mind and its culture. For the true scientist bent upon closing the gap between nature’s secrets and technologies power, the interests and problems of the human being cannot but be seen as an obstacle interfering with progress. The interests of human science of anthropology will not be well served if all of human nature and culture is reduced to severe logic of genetic determination, or if the mind and its social history merely mimicked by computers and ‘systems’ of structural explanations. While biology and technology may be nothing but a matter of machines and genes, human anthropology has always been something more.</p> <p> </p> <p>Show me an anthropologist who has all the answers and I will show you a veritable menace to the profession. Anthropological administration adds nothing to the stock of anthropological knowledge but takes away a great deal of human freedom. The net consequences of anthropological administration is political economic mediocrity.</p> <p> </p> <p>The Mind of anthropology and the anthropological Mentality are not the same—the former is the collective genius and understanding of the common problems and paradoxes of human reality, while the latter represents the simple solutions of a rabid intellectual extremist who foams at the mouth at the thought of her/his own ego in the world. The Mind of anthropology is to be found in the field among the peoples of the world, while the anthropological Mentality can be found dwelling securely in the departmental forums among all the professionals, hypocrites and pseudo-intellectuals.</p> <p> </p> <p>Professors of anthropology no longer bother with me because I no longer supplicate their egos. Students no longer talk to me because they are too preoccupied with supplicating their professors’ egos. Though I remain marginally attached to anthropology, I am no longer strictly identified either as a ‘student’ or as a professional. I don’t know when the transition actually happened. It was when I lost faith and trust in the authority of all too human anthropologists and in what too frequently passes for ‘friendship’ between students. It has struck me as a double paradox to become a stranger among professional strangers who are supposed to have as their primary objects getting to know other people in the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>I can no longer identify myself as one particular kind of anthropologist or another, not even as strictly an anthropologist. The general domain of anthropology has itself become too confining for my breadth of intellectual interests. The mind is inherently interdisciplinary and humankind is inherently cross-cultural.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is not too long before one outgrows even the generality of anthropology, feeling some of the frustrations of its intrinsic and extrinsic limitations. One eventually begins to wonder whether there is not possible a more general, embracing and realistic point of view to be adopted beyond the merely anthropological.</p> <p> </p> <p>The principal anthropological fallacy seems to me to be the paradox of inferring a probable presence from a definite absence. Statistics seems to come to the rescue in this problem, but its concreteness of numerical quantification always conceals the initial and final arbritariness of its qualitative and normative evaluation. All areas of anthropology founder upon the problem of bridging this critical difference between what is and what isn’t but may possibly be. Whole anthropological mansions are built and entire intellectual and anthropological empires are carved out from the world upon the basis of what amounts to the ‘astonishment’ of the anthropological imagination which must always fill in the gulf between the fact and its fiction, the ‘datum’ and its idea, empirical reality and rational truth. Whatever the relative distance between the known and the unknown, it cannot be but spanned by at least one leap of faith. Between the said and the done there is always a virtual infinitude of anthropological possibility. If anthropologists took no risks, they would achieve no gains.</p> <p> </p> <p>The more I learn about anthropology the less I know about the human world. The net outcome of an anthropological education can only be a tremendous appreciation for the variety and versatility of humankind, and a correspondingly tremendous intellectual humility towards the always encompassed, but never encompassing horizons of one’s own ignorance and prejudices. In this regard it is striking how anecdotal so much of the ‘evidence’ in anthropological discourse really is, and how cliché and trite many of its ‘paradigmatic exemplars’. Humankind would do well to be spared the intellectual hubris and arrogance of the anthropological know it all.</p> <p>I am more and more astonished by the analogous parallels between the culture of anthropology and the anthropology of culture. One must have lived and worked as an anthropologist for at least a year in some departmental setting to come to fully understand and appreciate how like other human beings anthropologists really are, and how tribal like and petty such settings can become in terms of their factionalisms over limited resources, their status hierarchies and clicks, their gossip networks and background machinations, and their rituals and myths. The student of anthropology becomes twice born as an adult child in a strange and alienating cultural world—once in the field and once in the department. This is so often so much the case that it is to be legitimately asked if the escape to the field which is so much the source of anthropological romance and reality, is not also sometimes an escape from the escape that becoming an academic anthropologist signifies in relation to the wider real world. Becoming a life long professional stranger in different world is possibly an adaptive response to the failure to become very familiar with one’s own world. Anthropology has always been an acceptable and alternative avenue for the strange and unfamiliar.</p> <p>If this is sometimes so, then it may also be legitimately asked whether the emphatic desire of some anthropologist’s to make the strange familiar and to bring the whole of anthropological enterprise into the more familiar regions of science in our own society, do not really represent the unconscious wish to become more normal and familiar with the world. As such it is possibly a wish to return to the repressed by the repressed.</p> <p> </p> <p>The history of anthropology has always been constituted by an academic, question and answer dialectic between the thesis of collectivizing tendencies of science to see the human world organized upon a common set of universal laws and the antithetical and contra-posed relativizing tendencies to emphasis the many differences between people and to play down the similarities. It has been the basis of this rational dialectic, which has led anthropology to develop as a coherent and relevant field of human understanding. It has long been unfortunate that so many professional commitments and involvements for the advancement of mutually egoistic and egotistic interests has tended to popularize the profession to one extreme position or the other, instead of cultivating the kind of attitude and ability to step outside of the entire dialectic itself while keeping one foot each on both sides of the dividing line. It is the fact of the dialectic itself, and not the involvement in either of its extremes, which makes anthropology interesting and authentic in the world and which links it critically to other general order intellectual paradigms like philosophy, science, art and religion.</p> <p> </p> <p>The biggest threat to the anthropologist’s sense of professional objectivity is her/his own most personal sense of human subjectiveness. Maintaining the veil of anthropological authority in the world depends upon the illusion of such objectiveness achieved by implicit denying and explicitly controlling the subjectiveness of those people whom the anthropologist studies and upon whom the anthropologists is supposed to be an expert authority. Cultivating such an illusion and maintaining the anthropological veil is much simpler if the only evidence is material artifacts and biological traits and if the people represented are not allowed to speak for themselves and talk back to the anthropologist. It sometimes seems to me a much wiser course to simply make a science of subjectivity instead of trying to transform subjectivity into an objective science. For so many people who seek simple solutions and pat answers to the complexities inherent to understanding human reality, this would render anthropology seemingly too soft, to loose and too much like a humanity rather than a science. Such a threat of subjectivity is a threat to their sense of authority in the world and a threat to the kind of physical science upon which such a sense of authority is based.</p> <p> </p> <p>I personally have never once doubted the profound relevance, which the study of anthropology constitutes for the world, though I may have always misunderstood the relevance. The question of its possible irrelevance in the world has never once vexed me. It is paradoxical that so many professional anthropologists who seem bent upon demonstrating that anthropology is in fact a hard and respectable science, so often strike me as unconsciously doubting the intrinsic relevance of anthropology and thus in their chronic insecurity searching for some pat formula, some model, some structure, some law of discovery, that renders the anthropological profession as predictable, paradigmatic, and puzzle solving as what the profession of physics has come to epitomize in the world. They are engaged upon a never ending quest for an anthropological El Dorado or Fountain of Youth, some elemental touchstone which will demonstrate unequivocally to themselves and to the rest of the world their authority as a science and thus their profitability from that science. They seek some solution to the perennial and common human problem of selling themselves, and their profession to the world in a way that the world wants and is willing to pay for. It is a grand paradox that those who would seek to render anthropology most certain, secure and scientific in the world are those who may hold the belief in its ultimate irrelevance closest to their hearts.</p> <p> </p> <p>Beware the rise of an anthropological aristocracy. These are the few who seek to turn their profession into a guild or a union and to prescribe for everyone the rules of conformity and the price of admission. They are elitist, hypocritical, pseudo-intellectual status mongers who would do virtually anything to get ahead and who remain hung up on the horns of their own authority complex. None of us can but help spill over into the authoritarianism and asymmetries of the field, or end up distorting practically anything and everything, which comes back from the field as an authentic article of anthropological faith.</p> <p> </p> <p>Otherness is a condition of not knowing ourselves well enough.</p> <p> </p> <p>There is a way of seeing others—of looking squarely into their faces. It is as Vincent Van Gogh must have seen others—every line, every feature, the very character and soul. One does not come by this way of seeing easily. It takes strength to penetrate the veil, courage to face the darkness, especially when the face is in a mirror.</p> <p> </p> <p>First impressions often prove to be the final impressions, but usually for reasons converse than might at first seem. Knowledge may be power. It may be power to create or destroy, to exploit or to make equality, to constrain or to liberate. The paradox of anthropology is that it offers both these sets of possibilities in the world. To promote anthropological wisdom in the world is to promote greater realism of worldview by which to temper our ideological precepts and prejudices. It promises a better understanding of our world such that it will become increasingly difficult to promulgate illusions which profit only the few, while it may facilitate the advancement of more optimistic values which will increasingly benefit the many.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5"><a name="Academia">ACADEMIA</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Academia is a paradise of mixed blessings. It has always demonstrated that nothing that is perfect can ever be had without some human cost. It is as much the neurotic's escape from human reality as it is the center of the intellectual pursuit of the ‘really real.’</p> <p>Academia is a place where people gang up on one another and where the loner is bound to become a loser. People form cliques and small parties not merely for the pursuit of mutual intellectual interests but for the pursuit of power and for the sake of mutual protection. There are always more than a few academic sharks on the prowl of university corridors preying upon hapless and helpless victims. It demonstrates how great and ideal humanity really is in Academia when everybody watches but nobody comes to the aid of the victim. Unfortunately, I've been both victim and witness.</p> <p>The values of academic competition and success can only lead to an ethos and pathos of success rooted in an obsessive fear of failure. In such an atmosphere, one person’s success becomes interpreted as another’s failure, and in order to better one’s chances of success and to assuage one’s anxieties over the prospects of failure, many people become very adept in making other people’s losses their own gains.</p> <p> </p> <p>In Academia, there are people in positions of authority whom one will never meet but who can and will make completely arbitrary decisions regarding your future success or failure within the system. A person can be shot down without much cause by someone completely anonymous for a reason that has little to do with that individual’s life. People can invest many fruitless years of their life within the Academic System without ever being told that they never had the slightest hope of success from the start.</p> <p> </p> <p>Class structures Academia as much as Academia reinforces the class structure of our society. Academic equality, opportunity and fairness become empty rhetoric when one takes into account the influence and implications of class in the ethos and pathos of Academia. The ideal of Academic social mobility becomes then an exception rather than the rule for the lower classes, and the benefits of receiving a higher education becomes the prerogative of the wealthy and well connected. Academics, if they are any good at being what they are, know what class they owe their allegiance to and who's who among themselves.</p> <p> </p> <p>Academics have been quick to point their fingers in blame and easily criticize virtually anything under the sun that suits their convenience. A great deal of their liberalism and radicalism amounts to so much false consciousness, and in the last analysis becomes mere hypocrisy when one considers their cooption within the System and where they get their pay checks from. The espousing of values contradictory to the predominant society can only be allowed in forums where they make no difference in the world and where they can be shown to be false anyway. If all professors genuinely practiced what they so often preached, few would survive very long in the Academic marketplace or in the world beyond. This academic dichotomization between the said and the done even becomes more contradictory when some of the most popular and liberal acting professors turn out to be some of the most fanatical upholders of the status quo of the Academic System. Almost a decade of successful academic work has only led to increasingly reinforce these beliefs, and almost no contrasting evidence has served to disconfirm any of these views.</p> <p> </p> <p>If Aristocratic values, class snobbery and feudal relations survive in modern industrialized societies, then it is in Academia where they may be found most to flourish. In this regard, Academia represents one of the most conservative social institutions of human civilization. Even military machines must of necessity reform and renovate their social organization in order to keep pace with the development of modern warfare. Democratic values have hardly entered into the way things get done within Academia, and academic authority, even if severely circumscribed and limited by even more autocratic administration, nevertheless remains virtually absolute and autocratic.</p> <p> </p> <p>Academia remains a realm of social contrasts and ideological contradictions. It combines the best and the worst, the most open and the most close-minded, the most liberal and the most conservative. Great talent, virtue and humanity is to found alongside of mediocrity, hypocrisy, minionship and fanatical true believers. It is frequently the case that things, and people, in Academia prove to be the opposite of what they appear to be.</p> <p>It is especially true that in Academia, a book cannot be judged by its cover.</p> <p> </p> <p>The end of self-honesty and social humility is the beginning of hypocrisy and egotistical hubris. Academia is the proving ground of human character and spirit, where everything is only hypothetical.</p> <p> </p> <p>Any school is only as good as the people who compose it. Great resources, great reputations, great test scores and great plans can mean next to nothing if the average student remains disinterested, uninvolved and distracted in the normal curriculum. A school may be poor, lacking in renown, good students or high class administrators, and yet still out perform the best and accomplish great things if its faculty are able to tap into and mobilize the fullest potential and spirit of the student body. Nothing is more defeating of human potential and deadening of the human mind than the run of the mill and ‘business as usual’ routine and attitude in the classroom and corridor.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is proving to be a grand paradox of my life that though I’ve always hated and resented Academia, it remains practically the only arena of the world in which I have much hope of accomplishing anything significant. For me Academia has always been something of a love-hate relationship—rarely have I been able to experience its everyday ethos with neutrality and disregard for the things going on around me. Almost everyday I come home from school I’ve been extremely upset and angry at something somebody did or said during the day. Only on rare occasions do good things occur, and it is usually for reasons which I could never have predicted or planned for. I long for the day when I can sit through the whole class period without utter disinterest in what is going on.</p> <p> </p> <p>An ‘A’ professor is one who invites open discourse in the class, does not mind criticism or contradiction, and always takes the time to talk. ‘B’ professor expects all students to tow the same line, doesn’t really like too many questions, and always seem to be in a hurry. ‘C’ professors have a small following of a group of students, never quite remember your name, never have the time to talk, and seem to be trying out for popularity contests in the corridors. ‘D’ professors are young, bright, upwardly mobile, highly motivated, and seem to be trying to win a beauty contest. ‘F’ professors are divorced, frustrated and treat all students like misbehaving children. In my many years as a student, I’ve come across only very few professors whom I would give an ‘A’ to.</p> <p> </p> <p>In Academia, the nice person will finish last, and everyone else will come in second to last.</p> <p> </p> <p>During the last decade, schools have been organizing themselves increasingly along the lines of big business. For these schools, the goal of academic administration is minimizing costs and maximizing profits, and the job of education itself becomes of secondary importance. It is unfortunate that in a business world organized around a military industrial complex, the business models that the schools have adopted for their own administration come straight from the models of military organization. It is unfortunate that because Academics have usually not been in the military themselves, and usually despise the military, that they are blind to the parallels of some of their own practices. In this regard I found the student rating scale and evaluations and the file kept on each student by the department in one university to be very similar to the same kind of evaluations officers of the Marine Corps regularly made of their men of their command. After about four years of such evaluations, from at least half a dozen different officers, I came to conclude that the decisive factor of such evaluations was not my own behavior, which remained fairly consistent, but depended almost entirely upon the subjective opinions of the evaluating officer. Evaluations turned on whether that officer liked you or not, which in turn often depended upon how many affinities you shared with that officer and how much you kissed up to them. Now the same kind of thing has been happening in universities, with the decisive criteria of a person’s grades and evaluations being increasingly the subjective opinions of the particular professor. More than once I’ve attended classes in which I knew that no matter what I did, I would receive at best only a B because I crossed the professor on intellectual issues or there existed a basic conflict of personalities.</p> <p>It is unfortunate that universities should fall into a blind routine following a principle of organization coming from a domain of social order which has long been noted for its anti-intellectual orientation. The most that can be hoped for in such institutions is the cultivation of spuriousness, blind obedience and student sycophancy, and ultimately, the leveling of an insufferable mediocrity that holds routine operational efficiency as its supreme value. When professors become more concerned about dead-lines than with discussion of ideas, we have ended up by putting the cart in front of the horses in higher education.</p> <p> </p> <p>The most dangerous intellectual is the self-righteous reformer who has all of the answers to the world's problems but none of the worldly wisdom to get us there. Academics may be more enlightened than the lay public, but they are certainly not necessarily more emancipated.</p> <p> </p> <p>Nowhere else is the dichotomy between the mind and the body, knowing and being, ideal ends and practical means, the said and the done, greater than in Academia. As as nowhere else, it is in Academia that the intellect and ideas of mind become systematically and purposefully separated from the real world context in which intelligence and such ideas have their primary reference and ultimate origin. In Academia good thinkers and true believers do not necessarily have to be great human beings.</p> <p> </p> <p>Academic organization is not that much different from military organization in its promotion of conformity and preservation of the status quo. The main and most basic difference is that where military organization promotes conformity of the body and turning off the mind, academic organization is oriented toward promoting conformity of the mind and turning off of the body. Besides this basic contrast, the only other essential difference seems to be that military organizations must occasionally fight wars, while in Academia it is just an everyday battle of the ego. The thing about aggression is that the student just doesn’t know quite what to do with it at the end of a long school day or at the end of a long week or a long semester or year, just as a soldier doesn’t know what to do with his mind at the end of an exhausting day of drill, exercises and field operations.</p> <p> </p> <p>It used to be that higher education was an important investment in one’s future. In contemporary American culture at least, it seems that education has become just one more thing to be consumed. We can always use our diplomas as bumper stickers on our shinny new cars that we use to drive to the end of the unemployment line.</p> <p> </p> <p>American Academia, like most sectors of American society, has become characterized by an increasingly top heavy administrative super-structure that accomplishes nothing except increasing the controls and constraints upon people’s freedoms and which costs a great deal to maintain. Education for independent thinking cannot but become compromised by such unbalanced administrative overhead.</p> <p>Thoughts cannot be spoken freely in open forums when everyone is afraid of her or his job or grade. Fairness becomes a fiction of those who fail.</p> <p> </p> <p>I have been on five different university campuses in different parts of the country during the last five years. In all five I saw the same things occurring—less money in the budget, increasing costs of tuition, the building of parking lots and new expensive facades of buildings by private contractors, and the taking over of vital academic services by national chains and the private sector of the economy. In all this ‘development’ very little has been done to develop human potential or new teaching techniques which will better tap into the unlimited potential of the human mind. The universities may be improving physically in their appearance, but mentally they are quickly becoming an administrative quagmire and a professional nightmare. The education of the intellect cannot profit by becoming big business.</p> <p> </p> <p>Like the military, Academia is quick to punish and often painfully slow to reward.</p> <p> </p> <p>Educational equality has been compromised for the sake of enhancing political economic efficiency of what amounts to pen pushing, paper piling self-legitimization, instead of meeting the very real and substantial needs of the ultimately incalculable human mind.</p> <p>The paradox of this is that educational efficiency has been traded off in the name of greater social equality, which rhetoric itself is based upon the blanket administration of double-standards.</p> <p> </p> <p>My accumulating GPA has been my piling up of special credits to get into Academic Heaven rather than the piling of money to buy my way into the establishment. I’ve been waiting at the gates for several years, and no one has yet come to open them for me.</p> <p> </p> <p>In education there is always some point of diminishing returns beyond which the extra effort and investment has decreasing net effect. The trouble has always been trying to figure out exactly when this optimum point is reached, and if surpassed, whether one should continue playing one’s hand or just retire from the game. In Academia it is all or nothing.</p> <p> </p> <p>I have found little to compare to the experience of sitting in class after class, day after day, hour after hour, semester after semester and year after year just waiting for it all to end. Students sit silently, directed towards the head of the class or in a circle towards its center, constrained in one place so that they can move about very little, if at all, and can only speak when spoken to. More often than not lectures are half-baked and boring to listen to. I have found little more effective than this except perhaps television, and increasingly, the Internet, in systematically eroding one's active involvement with one’s effective environment, encouraging passivity and stultifying the creative imagination.</p> <p> </p> <p>The best thing that can be done is to open up all key administrative positions to periodic general election by the faculty. Only in this way can the real academic interests of the students and their professors be best served, and the cooption and direction of school policy from above be effectively prevented. It is a paradox that our society has rather middling managers who earn as much or more than most national presidents and high level government officials. The answer to improving the quality of our education and the freedom of our society has always been in achieving more democracy and not less.</p> <p> </p> <p>American academicians and administrators would do well to pay less attention to the welfare of the ‘student body’ that has always managed to take care of its own needs, and to give more interest to the condition of the ‘student mind,’ the needs of which commonly go increasingly unsatisfied.</p> <p> </p> <p>The most rewarding intellectual experiences I’ve had have been when I’ve been in a genuine dialogue with professors or other students on ideas and things of the world. I have learned as much from such discussions as from any monotone lecture or stuffy textbook. The interests of the young students are not well served if they are not permitted enough quality time in interpersonal contact with their professors. Administrators impose superficial cattle classes and distance education with an eye to account books, but do not weigh the immeasurable. The measure of the quality of any education is directly proportional to the amount of time each student gets to spend talking with her/his professors. Not much is going on if everyone acts like they are too busy to take the time to talk to one another.</p> <p> </p> <p>The social needs of students are inseparable from their intellectual requirements. If a student’s body and emotions and psycho-social identity won’t co-operate with the Academic system, there is little the student’s brain or behavioral discipline can do to control the situation. Growing up, becoming an adult and seeking wisdom in the world has always had its own independent schedule that must be heeded regardless of the Academic deadlines. The most successful and highly rewarding students are those who are able to put the maturation of their social and personal life on hold long enough to get their degree in hand. More than anything else, this requires that the student have come from a background of socio-emotional and economic security and stability that fosters a healthy and unthreatened sense of ego identity to be developed soon enough to keep the student in check and on schedule until they are able to finally finish their degree.</p> <p> </p> <p>The best students are returning "nontraditional" students who have been in the world and have some measure by which to weigh the teacher's words.</p> <p> </p> <p>Professors should be allowed to pick their own courses and schedules, and should not be subject to a popularity contest.</p> <p> </p> <p>The virtue of having to teach is that we are forced to learn—often for the first time.</p> <p> </p> <p>The academic priesthood is but one pathway to enlightenment. It is frequently a very straight, narrow and hypocritical one. There has always been another avenue to seeking wisdom in the world. This is the way that is seldom straight, never narrow and always full of disillusionment, but it is always open and unending. Needless to say, the two paths rarely intersect and learning to walk along one road in life tends to make one ill suited for traversing the alternative route. The paradox is that the road less traveled is the most rewarding intellectually.</p> <p> </p> <p>One should not underrate the role of serendipity and intuition in the quest for understanding. Our noses follow our pathways of intuitive interest and curiosity as much as our interests are led by our noses.</p> <p> </p> <p>The mark of didactic education, whatever its external trappings, is that it teaches its students to say nothing rather than to risk making a mistake that will bring punishment. In any such system, students are encouraged not to make mistakes, and not to learn anything by making mistakes. In our own Academic system, the encouragement of conformity of belief and behavioral obedience goes far in advancing a student ahead of the class. Perfection of performance is rewarded in competitive contexts versus the acquisition of new skills, and the fear of failure is frequently the primary motivation for getting anything done. It is to be wondered that, given such an ethos, our own Academic system has advanced very far beyond a prescriptive, didactic approach.</p> <p> </p> <p>To know is something of an illusion concealing all we don’t know. Learning always dispels that illusion of our own ignorance.</p> <p> </p> <p>The more I learn the less I know. The more I know the less I learn.</p> <p> </p> <p>The hardest part about living is not knowing that we will eventually die, but in not knowing how best to use the limited time we are blessed with in life.</p> <p> </p> <p>Everyday I sit in class, I learn something a little more about the world I didn’t know before. Every school day is a lesson in my own ignorance and narrow mindedness. Everyday I sit in class, is a day I miss in the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>Thoughts are absolutely free until they are voiced. Once spoken, thoughts become imprisoned in the words that speak them. Words are the chains of the free mind. That is why a loquacious professor is often one who thinks the least.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">A<a name="Authority">UTHORITARIANISM</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>It is a small person who counts success by other people’s failures, and their strengths by others weaknesses. These same people will regard others success and strength as their failure and weakness. Unfortunately, the world is not lacking in such small people.</p> <p> </p> <p>The slave owner may be harsh and unforgiving, or kind and generous, but remains still a slave owner. A slave may be a good worker or a worthless one, but still remains a slave.</p> <p> </p> <p>Fear is always irrational, though it may be put to extremely rational ends.</p> <p> </p> <p>First we fear, and then we fear our fear and feel guilty and ashamed because we are afraid.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is one thing to preach tolerance in the world according to one’s own standards of right and wrong, but it is altogether something else to become tolerant in the world of others standards. Each new generation on earth must learn this lesson anew, and each generation must be taught it over again by the next.</p> <p>The greatest human capacity that can be acquired is the capacity for tolerance of human differences in the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>Authoritarianism is the ‘dis-ease’ of authority. It is due to the inevitable human corruption of power in the world. All Authority casts a dark shadow of authoritarianism. Americans have never been immune from this disease, and it has frequently been of critical influence in the perpetration of injustice in all spheres and phases of social life.</p> <p>Humankind must take seriously the appellation ‘Homo auctoritas’ as indicative of a universal proclivity towards the power and corruption of authority in the world. If evil comes from the arbitrariness of Authority in the world, then no human being is completely free of its possibility, and even the notion of an Arbitrary God must cast such a shadow.</p> <p>Self-skepticism is the only antidote to such disease—the possibility of our own evil in the world must be discovered and recognized in everything we think, say and do. It is when we begin taking ourselves too seriously that we are led to trouble with others in the world. Being too serious about ourselves in the world leads to an incapacity to deal with others in a realistic way. The practice of regular self skepticism leads to becoming equally skeptical of others in the world as well—the proclivity to accept ourselves too seriously leads to our taking others in the world too seriously as well.</p> <p> </p> <p>The quest for perfection in the world must always end up in frustration. When the need and drive for Perfection becomes an obsession and a compulsion, it becomes dangerous. When we cease making mistakes by always doing the right thing, we cease to learn anything in life, and we become then anti-human by definition. The intolerance of imperfection leads to a need to stomp it out and deny it wherever it is found.</p> <p>Show me a perfect person and I will show you a perfect fool.</p> <p> </p> <p>One person’s vice is another’s virtue. One person’s failure is another success. One person’s weakness is another’s strength. One person’s folly is another’s wisdom. For each action, there is an opposite but equal reaction.</p> <p>When we fear failure we then need to find it in others we do not know. We then need to avoid getting to know those others who we treat as our own symbolic failures lest such knowledge refutes our own preconceptions. We end up avoiding what we fear and fearing what we avoid. We fear the unknown and end up avoiding it instead of taking the only route, which would ultimately dissipate our fears in the first place. We even go so far as to collectively set aside and systematically segregate certain categories or ‘types’ of people as socially sanctioned symbols of failure. Because we are taught to fear such people, we learn to see them symbolically in terms, which are dangerous,, dirty and unpredictable—terms, which then in turn justify their social discrimination and control. There is a self-reinforcing closure about this kind of belief and behavior in life, which remains effective until we experience such discrimination ourselves. When we must walk in the footsteps of failure, we come face to face with the projective possibilities of our own fear.</p> <p> </p> <p>Inordinate fear of failure leads to an obsession with failure, which begets a gambling compulsion—the uncontrollable need to take inordinate risks that are normally unnecessary.</p> <p>It is not coincidental that any society, which highly prizes and rewards well achievement and success at all costs, should beget a great many failures who have unwisely gambled away all their resources for the unrealistic promise of success.</p> <p>Unfortunately, the very values most worth living for are those that are also most worth dying for. It is a tragic irony of human history that so many have died for values and causes that prove to be hardly worth living for.</p> <p>It is not too uncommon or too difficult to face death bravely—but it has been unusual and extremely hard to go on living bravely in the face of death. The weal and wicked fight with weapons and fear—the courageous and faithful fight with words, freedom and peace.</p> <p> </p> <p>There is no person so perfect as not to be in need of some improvement. There is no human strength without its hidden weakness. There is no armor so complete as to be without its vulnerable spots. The best protection in life is the well kept illusion that hides the bestial nakedness of humanity beneath the veil of greatness. The best weapons are truth that pierces the armor of illusion, and honesty which lifts the veil of ignorance.</p> <p> </p> <p>As surely as the night must follow the day, and the moon must rise in the shadow of the sun, great weakness must accompany great strength, grand mistakes must follow great successes, great depths make great heights more pronounced. Without the darkness and shadow, life and light would be flat, uninteresting, and without the necessary contrast that gives it depth.</p> <p>Life is meant to be taken seriously, but never too seriously. When we begin to take things too seriously we lose sight of the fact that though life is serious business, it is also a grand joke we play upon ourselves.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is difficult to find it in ourselves the same kinds of negative qualities that we so facilely attribute to others, but seeing such similarities can be a sobering experience to the ego, and having the romantic illusions we ascribe to others fade and turn ugly can have a chilling influence upon our hearts.</p> <p> </p> <p>One person’s illusion is another’s reality. One person’s destiny is another’s fate. One person’s myth is another’s history.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is easy to envy what others seem to have and we do not. But to have compassion enough to find in each person what is most valuable is compensation for our jealousies.</p> <p> </p> <p>The fear of failure frequently leads to a Pyrrhic victory, for in our desire to succeed at any cost, we become willing to risk everything.</p> <p> </p> <p>When we fear, fear, we end up denying our fears, and in our denial we become trapped in our own vicious circle of deceit.</p> <p> </p> <p>We fear that which we do not understand, and because we fear it, we tend to ignore it, to avoid having to face it and get to know it. Then we fall victim to our own prejudices. We end up avoiding our own ignorance and blaming others for the fear that is in ourselves.</p> <p> </p> <p>The first lie begins a long chain of deceit, when we have to cover over one lie with another until we’ve forgotten what the original lie was. Lying is inevitably a self-defeating strategy. It many be effective in the short term, but it eventually backfires upon the chronic liar who must cover lies with other lies until reality is lost sight of.</p> <p> </p> <p>Lying undermines trust, which is the basis of mutual respect in interpersonal relationships. Without respect, there can be no love or friendship.</p> <p> </p> <p>Those who live by fear of the truth learn to become liar, and those who lie learn to live in fear of the truth. Fear and lying are always closely connected, where one is found, the other is sure to be nearby.</p> <p> </p> <p>Fear is the fate of the coward. The courageous cannot live well with fear and are too troubled by lying. They must sooner or later grab the bull by the horns and wrestle it to the ground.</p> <p> </p> <p>The world is full of fools. To be foolish takes no special talent or skill at all, but to call the fool’s bluff takes wisdom, and to free ourselves from the fool’s spell, takes strength and courage.</p> <p> </p> <p>We develop a need not to know that which we fear. To confront our fears face to face entails a challenge to our own sense of identity in the world. We would rather bury our heads in the sand and believe whatever lie and illusion we need in order to keep us from having to face, and learning to live with what we fear most.</p> <p> </p> <p>No other person can know better than ourselves what it is we most need and want in life. Sometimes another person can help us to see what it is in ourselves that we fail to see, but it is only upon ourselves that we must lay the heavy burden of responsibility for success and failure in our own life. It is all too easy and common to seek solutions to our own dilemmas from others, and then to blame them when they prove to be wrong.</p> <p> </p> <p>People see what they wish to see, and cannot be made to face that which they do not want to.</p> <p> </p> <p>Authority tends to blind people, creating its own aura of power until inevitable contradiction reveals the human being underneath the badge and uniform.</p> <p> </p> <p>When we hate, we become imprisoned by the thing we hate. In our attachment to hate, our hate comes to control our consciousness and undermine our own sense of freedom. To not like or care for something does not mean that one must hate it. One does not have to love that which one does not hate, or hate that which one does not love.</p> <p> </p> <p>We blame the world for our own weaknesses, and blame ourselves for the faults of the world. The only salvation is the release from our sense of guilt. But such release is not found in socio-pathic absence or freedom from responsibility, but in its saintly embrace.</p> <p> </p> <p>The sense of security in a mass oriented society is that everyone seems to be doing the same thing no matter how foolish and nonsensical it may really be. This is a false and dangerous illusion that justifies the method of social order and behavior by the madness of the crowd.</p> <p>The mass mind is an oxymoron—the crowd has only a herd mentality.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is never wise to underestimate the deliberate cunning of people who have the quest for power as their primary motive and ultimate goal in life. They will be the first to attack and the last to retreat, and will go to any end imaginable to accomplish their designs, and though utterly defeated, they will never relinquish their goals.</p> <p> </p> <p>I am proud to claim that I have never treated another person in the same ugly way that so many people have felt appropriate to treat me. I have come to have little patience for the kind of deliberate ignorance and prejudice by which others misappropriate one’s identity in the world for their own convenience. I no longer regard with great compassion people whose sense of success feeds upon the feelings of failure by others. It is saddening to know how many different kinds of people in the world do this very thing without a sense of self-conscious guilt or shame.</p> <p> </p> <p>People only feel ashamed or embarrassed when they are afraid of the consequences of their actions and the reactions of others.</p> <p> </p> <p>We choose our own values in life and then judge others in the world according to those choices, without realizing not everyone makes the same set of choices, or even that if they seem to share similar values, they may well have chosen them for very different, even contradictory reasons. People either choose the values they live by, or if failing to choose, then inevitably have them chosen for themselves by others.</p> <p> </p> <p>The fear of persecution is the source of guilt. Freedom of the mind demands freedom from fear and guilt, which depends upon not been threatened by persecution or violence. The only way to gain such freedom is by becoming non-violent and non-authoritarian oneself, and by seeking out and cultivating non-violence and non-authoritarianism in others. Fear, violence, guilt are all social chains which imprison the mind. A prisoner of the mind is still a prisoner even if the body is emancipated.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is unfortunate that authority and legitimacy is increasingly co-opted and mandated within the World System, and is measured in quantitative terms which frequently has little or no nothing to do with human qualities and virtue.</p> <p> </p> <p>The world will become more human and humane, more subjectively satisfying and less alienating, when there is less mass and impersonal exploitation and greater individual equality and interpersonal compassion.</p> <p> </p> <p>If we have a certain existential investment in our illusion in life, no matter how ill founded they may really be, we will tend to act in ways that will maintain our illusion in spite mounting contradictory evidence.</p> <p>If the investment in the illusions of our own identity is very strong or dear, then we may perseverate in reinforcing our fictions in such a manner unrelentingly, piling illusion upon illusion and denying anything which does not support our identity in the world.</p> <p>In such a manner, we will suffer an unending chain of crisis, each connected to the next, and how we manage to resolve these crisis, or fail to, will determine the net outcome of our realistic adjustment to the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>We take advantage of whatever opportunities we can get, even if it is often at someone else’s expense. We pay attention mostly to those who receive the same advantages as ourselves and disregard the rest. We call any person a fool who passes over opportunity for another’s sake, and honor as heroes those who take the most advantage of any situation.</p> <p> </p> <p>If aggression comes from and leads to the need to proclaim and reaffirm one’s identity in the world, then authoritarianism is a consequent and a cause of the need to control that aggression in the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>The illusion of authority is always some superhuman ideal, idea or idol. We cannot value the lives of others too dearly when we subordinate the value of our own. If we hold as most sacred that which is beyond our own lives and humanness, then we cannot regard the lives and humanness of others as sacred enough not to be violated.</p> <p> </p> <p>Predictability is the primary weakness of the authoritarian.</p> <p> </p> <p>The authoritarian is married to her/his unconscious obsession with authority. All other relationships in the world are secondary and subservient to this. The authoritarian is the most adulterous monogamist and monogamous adulterer in the world.</p> <p>Authority is the only religion of the authoritarian. It does not matter really what the symbolic trappings of the ideology and ritual really are, as long as they feel the perverted power and violent force that authority represents. One religion’s prophets and saints is another’s heretic and rebel.</p> <p> </p> <p>No human being is free from authoritarianism of others but remain blind to the possibilities of our own authoritarianism. This blindness is the very symptom of our own authoritarianism. When we say emphatically 'Screw Authority’ we are really announcing to the world a love hate dependency upon the very thing which we must so emphatically renounce and deny.</p> <p> </p> <p>Authoritarianism is the obsessive preoccupation with Authority. Can we have authority without authoritarianism, and power without moral ethical perversion?</p> <p> </p> <p>Authoritarians are blind to their own Authority. Authorities are blind to their own authoritarianisms. For them it is more a matter of routine and of regimen—a taken for granted matter of course. This transparency of authority and authoritarianism is rooted in the unconscious control which authoritarianism has upon our lives. We act without being fully aware of the unconscious causes and consequences of our actions. Because it is mainly unconscious, our preoccupation with authority becomes expressed symbolically and transforms our lives into a vicious circle of obsession and compulsion. We seek to find and control in our external world what we cannot face and control in our internal world. Because authoritarianism controls us, we seek to control the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is amazing how conscious like and deliberate what is basically unconscious authoritarianism can seem. This is so perhaps because unconscious authoritarianism seeks to frame and constrain the conscious mind which therefore cannot act independently from such control, but which must then act in such a manner that is consonant with and reinforcing of the unconscious. Though authoritarians are fundamentally closed minded, their unconsciousness can be read like an open book.</p> <p> </p> <p>A person can serve only one master, and can be master of only one person.</p> <p> </p> <p>Our World System had long promoted and reward a kind of political economic authoritarianism. Colonial fascism has always been the dark side of the coin of Imperial Capitalism. When we are successfully authoritarian, we call it ‘high achievement’ motivation and fail to acknowledge the dangers of its exploitative, victimizing, aggressive, competitive, and acquisitive characteristics.</p> <p> </p> <p>Authoritarians are quick to dismiss the liberal attitudes of others as a problem of authority. Because they themselves lack much imagination or the ability to entertain questions or tolerate doubt, they find people who have such capacities as a threat to their own sense of order, and people who exercise their freedoms as ‘breakers of the law’ and irresponsible. Authoritarians see their restricted version of authority as being necessary to their sense of the world and therefore as fundamentally unquestionable. Non-authoritarians regard such blind faith in Authority to be basically a personality problem of freedom.</p> <p> </p> <p>The most significant factor about modern ‘mass’ authority and authoritarianism in the world system is that it is impersonal. Victimization and violence have their own logic in the world which is not fully logical but pathological. The pathologic of violence and victimization is that the victim is regarded as guilty, responsible for the violence, the cause and not the effect of the violence. The kind of pathologic is the ultimate repression of one’s own responsibility and projection of guilt onto others.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5"><a name="America">AMERICA</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Being born an American may have been a mixed blessing, but a blessing nonetheless. Americans grow up under the deadening weight of crude materialism, and must later in life unlearn many of the trite truisms they were taught to believe in. Americans typically have egos several sizes too large, a bottomless stomach and an insufferable gullibility to swallow almost anything fed to them by others. Americans walk the way of the world only to wake up from their naiveté to learn that they are not immune to the evil of the world. Americans may have been spoiled by too much affluence, convenience and freedom to pursue their own pleasures. But Americans are not the only ‘ugly’ people in the world, and not necessarily the worst, the first or the last set of imperfect human beings to have come along. Indeed, in spite of their own attitudes of over achievement and others' criticisms of their life styles and their weaknesses, it is amazing that Americans have accomplished anything at all in the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>Most people do not learn to prize their freedom until after they have lost it. Many others never have had the freedom to lose. The weak and insecure would just as soon sacrifice their own freedom as well as that of everyone else for just about any spiritual illusion that promises their salvation. For them, freedom is not a prize to be won, but a prize to be paid for by the false promise of their protection.</p> <p> </p> <p>Freedom is having the opportunity to learn from one’s own mistakes while taking heed of the advice of others.</p> <p> </p> <p>We cannot be genuinely free until we have learned to grant to others their freedom, even if it means forsaking our own. Learning to give for other's sake is just the beginning of the long pathway to freedom.</p> <p>The first step taken, all else then follows.</p> <p> </p> <p>It has not been military might, political power, economic achievement or scientific or technological success that has made America a Great Society. It has been the promise of its freedom, human rights and equality that it has offered to anyone seeking a better life and to escape persecution. It has been this promise that has made the United States a model for worldwide emulation. And it has not been either a false or an empty promise.</p> <p>It has been unfortunate that so many new Americans have forgotten this fact in their pursuit of the unprecedented power, prestige and personal aggrandizement that success in the American system rewards. Young Americans cannot be blamed for having been raised with a false sense of values and unrealistic expectations and thus failing to adapt themselves to a quickly changing world. Nor can they be faulted for failing to carry the torch and catch the baton when their own leaders have extinguished the flame and lost their way.</p> <p>It is this fact of its freedom and its promise of equality that has long made America different from the rest of the world. It has been a difference that is rapidly diminishing, not because the rest of the world is catching up with the United States, but because Americans are falling behind in its own promise to the world.</p> <p>In this sense we can say that its Empire has come back home to America, and it has come to stay.</p> <p> </p> <p>America has never been a perfect society, but it has also never been a pig sty. The progress of enlightenment, social emancipation and the realization of human equality has been slow but steady—a step backwards for every two forward. Americans have rarely been as pure of heart as they would like to see themselves. Paradise cannot be had except at great human cost, and if it is founded upon the pleasure principle, it is liable to be a paradise for the few and a living hell for the many. It is fitting that America should move slowly and be short sighted in its prospects for paradise—anything too far and too fast is bound to end in disaster for everyone.</p> <p> </p> <p>America’s lesson in Vietnam, one that it has seemed to quickly forget, is that it is never necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. Freedom does not follow the path of bullets and bombs, broken bodies and burnt homes. The only thing found at the end of a gun barrel is fruitless destruction and the involuntary servitude to one’s own possibility of evil in the world. Too many paid too dearly for the mistakes America made in Vietnam for us to forget too soon the lessons that our own history has taught us.</p> <p> </p> <p>The road to freedom leads through a vast, drought filled desert. The promise of spiritual salvation from all human troubles hovers above the far-off horizon like a mirage of a blue ocean shimmering above the hot, dry sands. People thirst for freedom but do not know what will quench their thirst. The source of freedom flows deeply underground.</p> <p> </p> <p>The tyranny of aggression is that it compels the peaceful to defend their freedom. Though aggression is frequently promoted in the name of freedom, freedom is seldom won in the name of aggression.</p> <p>If the best defense is a good offense, the best offense if none at all. The prize can only be lost if it can only be won by war.</p> <p>Calling the vast American military machine the ‘Department of Defense’ barely disguises its offensiveness to the rest of the world. Freedom gained through ‘enforcing the peace,' whether this be a Pax Romana, a Pax Brittannica, or a Pax Americana, can only be freedom for the few at the expense of the many. At best it can only lead back to the corruption of the very society that created such unfreedom of violence in the first place.</p> <p> </p> <p>Common virtues have given way to contemporary vices. In the name of modernity and civilization, basic human values have been forfeited for empty symbols of strength solidarity, security and superiority. Fashion and status dictate people's behavior, and these are manipulated by the large commercial interests and by government itself. Americans have had their basic character altered and modified by a mass media and a warped, uneven and exploitative incentive structure, to become gross materialistic consumers and media junkies. We are brainwashed to feel guilty for being Americans, and compelled to rush to the shopping malls to temporarily alleviate our guilt feelings.</p> <p>Freedom and salvation will not be found in a Sears mail order catalogue.</p> <p> </p> <p>Americans value the possession of private property more than they value their own freedom or even human life itself. Inordinate physical attachment to physical things in the world is precisely the opposite of the definition of human freedom. Freedom is the license to spend one’s own time and energy in one’s own way—owing someone else lots of money or paying rent for the possession and use of property can only be a vital restriction of human freedom. Any freedom upon which our society is founded can only be in name only if its promotion is ultimately based upon practices and principles of possession, unbridled profit and private property that must lead fatefully to human unfreedom.</p> <p> </p> <p>The only ultimate bottom line is that there are no bottom lines in human reality. One must always beware those who claim to know and to have the bottom line—especially if they are trying to sell it to you.</p> <p>A man may only speak for himself, but no human can justly speak for any other. We must beware those white men who claim to speak for all white men, or those black men who claim to speak for all white men, or those black men who claim to speak for all blacks, or those women who claim to speak for all women. In any such claim exists a dangerous and tacit denial of the freedom for other people to speak, and ultimately, to think, for themselves.</p> <p>It is only the simple minded who seek simple solutions to complex human problems and who chronically claim to speak for others when they are only selfishly thinking of themselves, and who unconsciously and uncontrollably choose symbols of solidarity and strength over antithetical symbols of peace, compassion, love and tolerance.</p> <p>People, who are themselves exploited, must find someone else to exploit in turn. People who allow themselves to be used and dumped upon must in turn find someone else to use and dump upon. People who live beneath some shadow must themselves cast their shadow upon other’s lives. What goes around comes around, and we eventually reap what we sow. No matter how hard we may try or wish, we can never escape the lasting consequences of our own choices.</p> <p> </p> <p>To deny the role of class in American society is to deny the very basis of social inequality itself. In our ideology the very basis of social inequality itself. In our ideology of natural rights, we ascribe psychopathology to the poor and the failed, and psychological spirit and virtue to those who are most successful, all the while blatantly ignoring the background social context in which both success and failure are situated and configured. This being the norm, it follows that the predominant social collective consciousness is class consciousness—and unmarked but very deliberate awareness of an individual’s social background and relationships in the world, and these preunderstandings more often than not form the criteria of our attitudes, projections, opinions, beliefs, values, and judgments regarding both ourselves and other people in our lives. Class forms the basis of social significance and human valuation.</p> <p>It follows that class always tends to reinforce, and reproduce itself. People make deliberate decisions in relation to what will promote their own class interests over those of other classes and individuals who comprise these classes. He rich help one another to stay rich, and the poor keep one another poor. It also follows that upward mobility will be the norm for the upper class—that no matter how mediocre and average a person might be, if they are born into the upper strata of a society the availability of opportunity and of rich reward and positive social reinforcement will tend to keep them afloat no matter how personally failed they may really be. On the other hand, a person born into an impoverished class background may demonstrate superlative skills, steady and unbending drive, and superior talent and abilities, but will nonetheless be consistently driven downward in society by the many, more often overwhelming, checks and controls arrayed against that person’s chances for success.</p> <p>The undeniability of class inequality and function of class in perpetuating social structure in America makes American society fundamentally not very different from any other national or multi-ethnic society in the world. The elites of one country have more in common with the elites of other countries, in terms of their interests, prerogatives, values and views of the world, than they do with their own poor people. This commonness among the elites is recognized internationally as human virtue. Being born poor in a world of increasing social inequality is to have been born with a social disease—a ‘corruption’ of class.</p> <p> </p> <p>People, who live by appearances, judge others on the basis of appearance. To live by the principle of appearance is a sort of magical formula for social success—that like produces like. One must dress in the most expensive clothes, drive the most stylish car, and talk to all the right people in the right way, and social success will follow. The surprising thing is that this formula sometimes works. One can possess all the talent in the world, but without the appropriate style of social presentation, will be foredoomed as a social failure. But to live by the basis of appearance alone is an empty, shallow, and eventually self-defeating strategy of social mobility.</p> <p>Ignorance, prejudice, repressive discrimination and deceit, to the extent that these policies in life reinforce inequality and unfairness in social relations, will lead to success. But any such success will be ephemeral and short lived—those who live by the lie, die by the lie, as there are always bound to be competitors with superior advantage in the world. Honesty, though slow and inefficient, still remains the best policy, and tends to make one immune to the arbitrary vicissitudes of merely meretricious appearances.</p> <p> </p> <p>Class-consciousness is the normal form of social consciousness informing our experience with the subtleties of social difference, solidarity, and significance upon both conscious and unconscious levels of understanding and feeling. Try as we might, we really cannot escape its structuring influence upon our attitudes, values and worldviews, either in how we see and treat others, or in how we are seen by and are treated by others. It also tends to constrain in decisive ways how we see and feel about ourselves—tending to invade, interfere with and eventually take over and control our private, inner subjectivities. It is class, which thus tends to simultaneously and contradictorily both socially revitalize and collectivize everything we see and do in relation to others in the world. It is perhaps the ultimate paradox that because class consciousness is based as much upon the illusion of appearances as it is upon anything substantially real, it becomes both the dialectical antithesis to which false consciousness is compared, and a basic form of class consciousness itself. The complicating fact of the matter is that there are few if any non-arbitrary standards of alternative or genuine consciousness by which we can compare and evaluate the concept of class consciousness. We can claim that as a social phenomena it exists in the world, but we can ultimately never prove it and may only indirectly ever point to it and say—this attitude is true and this one is false.</p> <p>It is this paradox which makes such consciousness so easy to deny and to falsify.</p> <p>Charity and equality do not go very far in America. Few gifts are given which are not penny-ante, nickel and dime, token or without strings attached. The American Indians learned this lesson well in their transactions with the White Men, summing it up when they said ‘White Men speak with forked tongue.’ American society is the greatest consumer society to have ever existed. It typically aggrandizes Greed and makes of selfishness and egotism a reward virtue of personal success and achievement. The formula for success has been reduced to competitive striving for one’s own profit at someone else’s expense, and the American legal structure promotes and protects the property, profits and prerogatives and privileges of the wealthy while systematically discriminating against and dispossessing the rights of the poor. Americans love any and every winner, and hate a loser. As Edgar Allan Poe well knew, Americans especially despise the poor. The trouble with this twisted social values are that ultimately only one person can become a winner, and that person must live in a very lonely and empty world.</p> <p> </p> <p>Freedom must always be fought for, as there are always enough people in the world who are deliberately trying to take it away, the best of intentions notwithstanding.</p> <p>Beyond any other inventions or feats, human rights remain the most important contribution American society has made to the world. Few other societies in history have ever made the democratic doctrine of universal human rights the foundation stone of its social order. It is unfortunate that this foundation is being undermined and eroded by the pursuit of power, pleasure and personal aggrandizement. Foreigners in America frequently have low regard or little appreciation for such a doctrine so alien to their own hierarchical values, and Americans who grow up in the fold of freedom and the lap of luxury never suffer its loss enough to appreciate what they have.</p> <p> </p> <p>One important factor in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was its persistent failure to pay back the debt it owned to its own citizen soldiers who literally built Rome by their toil and sacrifices only to return from foreign campaigns and conquests to find themselves dispossessed and impoverished plebeians of the streets. The Pax Americana can learn an important lesson from this Imperial History.</p> <p> </p> <p>The real loss in America is in terms of its rapidly deteriorating quality of life. The limited availability or relative lack of opportunity among any but the upper rungs of the class structure means that there has become less and less to go around for everyone. When people have talents, skills, abilities and energies that are going to waste or left unrewarded because there are fewer and fewer job opportunities to utilize these capacities, then we must ask who has been most responsible for the loss.</p> <p> </p> <p>The political economic and socio economic shortcomings of our Great Society are due in part to the general loss of cultural confidence in our own values and orientations. The complex of inferiority and failure should never be underestimated in terms of its power as self-fulfilling prophecy in our collective life. When we see foreign competitors who, by strength of their own social organization, cultural confidence and solidarity, seem to be getting ahead of us in the market place, it is almost automatic that we should begin seeing ourselves as born losers and them as born winners. When we begin to believe this, we begin behaving in ways which tend to reinforce these ideas, as if they were true, and little can then be done, short of complete reversal of roles, to change our attitudes about ourselves.</p> <p>People sometimes seem to be subconsciously aware of these attitudes and their consequences upon our lives, and will almost deliberately set out to attack our self-confidence and to undermine our basic faith in our values, abilities and beliefs.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5"><a name="Militarism">MILITARISM, PACIFISM, POWER AND PEACE</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p> </p> <p>The best defense is a good offense. The best offense is none at all. The prize can only be lost if it can be won by peace.</p> <p>The balance of power can only be upset. Peace cannot be permanent if it is promised by the threat of war. Any weapon has only one purpose in the hand of its wielder, and this is to murder. Once forged, a weapon will eventually be used.</p> <p> </p> <p>The Power of Peace is the appeal and appreciation of what is most commonly and mutually human in all of us. The Power of War is the threat to what is most common and mutually human in all of us. War and Peace have the same source in the human heart, but in each the heart serves a different master.</p> <p> </p> <p>The cowardly of war are the courageous of peace, and the courageous of war are the cowardly of peace. We honor our war dead as sacred heroes, and think of those who wish to continue living in peace as fools. The coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but once.</p> <p>Our earthbound age is discovering the preparations for and consequences of war are increasingly expensive, unaffordable, and destructive. We are learning indirectly the hard worn lesson learned and forgotten on thousands of fields of battle that no one wins in war and everyone loses. War, and its machineries of death, are quickly becoming barbaric anachronisms in an earthbound age, which in the long run has no net profit for anyone and yet which is increasingly costly for everyone. It is a grand paradox that permanent and lasting peace in our earthbound age will not be won by victory in war, or by its threat, or over the bargaining table of the powerful military nations. Peace will be achieved when the common soldier simply throws down her/his weapon to let the earth and the sea reclaim it.</p> <p> </p> <p>Better more mouths to feed and more babies to breed than buttons to push and triggers to pull. The world might become an over populated place, but at least it doesn’t have to be a violent one.</p> <p> </p> <p>Militarism is ultimately an anti-human disease in which the social preoccupation with the fear of death leads to a compulsion to project and cause death upon others. The main problem with this social pathology is that it is extremely contagious and pernicious—the need to beget death in ourselves leads to the same needs in others.</p> <p> </p> <p>The thing the military mentality fears most is peace and freedom. Peace depends upon the realization of freedom in the world, and freedom depends upon peace. In a world that is peaceful and free, there is no room for the military minded, and this is the worst possible threat to the warmonger.</p> <p> </p> <p>As long as we seek to define empowerment in narrow and unequal terms which divide humankind into different groups, such empowerment can only lead to its own corruption and the perversion of violence and war. Only when we seek panhuman empowerment through the realization of human rights, freedoms and equality, can we speak legitimately of our own empowerment as well. Such empowerment can only be had through the promotion of Pacifism in the world—a live and let live ethos of love, charity, tolerance, and forgiveness in a world of evil.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is a paradox of Pacifism that its power can only be had in the individual’s renunciation of the pathos and nomos and obsessive-compulsive preoccupation with empowerment in the world. The power of pacifism comes from the renunciation of power hence its dialectical transcendence in the realization of the power of the human heart.</p> <p>It is also a paradox that such empowerment also constitutes the ultimate connection between panhuman interests and rights and individual interests and rights. The pursuit of our own rights, freedoms and responsibilities in the world is concomitant with the pursuit of universal human rights, responsibilities and freedom in the world. One cannot be had without the other, and one cannot be taken away without taking away from the other.</p> <p> </p> <p>Those who pursue the path of pacifism cannot but help be led sooner or later to the same conclusions regarding the paramount importance of human rights, responsibilities and freedoms in the world defined in both the broadest, panhuman sense as well as in the narrowest of individual senses.</p> <p> </p> <p>To relinquish the preoccupation of power and violence in our own personal lives, and to gain the upper hand in the control of our existential fears and uncertainties, is to gain access to and release a vast hidden reservoir of human potentiality in both ourselves and in everybody whose life we touch.</p> <p> </p> <p>The cultivation of creativity, in ourselves and in others, goes hand in hand with the promotion of Pacifist values and world view in the world. Human creativity is the opposite of human destructiveness. That which is creative, if frustrated, must become destructive. That which is destructive, if constrained, must become creative. Peace is to war as creation is to destruction.</p> <p> </p> <p>If we wish to diagnose the extent of evil in the world, and to understand the fundamental irrationality of its pathology, then we have to look no further than our own Pentagon which promotes global militarization in the name of the ‘Defense’ and ‘World Peace’ and our CIA which threatens, with all its secret psychological operations, to destroy the foundation of the freedom of mind and will in the world. We must see the fundamental madness of the intellectual rationalization of MAD, which has sought to secure a lasting ‘Pax Americana’ by threatening the ‘mutually assured destruction’ of virtually all life on earth. When the Pentagon wins a victory in the world, humanity loses another battle.</p> <p> </p> <p>If we wish to find our worst enemies and our most dangerous threat to our freedom and future security in the world, then we have to look no further than on our own neighborhoods, our own backyards and on our own mirrors. The threat is there, like a shadow we always cast in the light.</p> <p>The preoccupation and fanaticization of violence and aggressive power in the world is a symptom of our own immature and regressed development. It is to be well wondered how much the promotion of aggression in the world doesn’t rely upon the repression and frustration of human sexuality in the world, when so much violence of obscene proportions is replete in our television programming while even the most innocent and natural images of sexuality are taboo and perverted. Human development can only be advanced when as both individuals and as a world society, we learn to give up our dependent and neurotic attachment to such violent and immature forms of power in order to cultivate more human capacities and pursue more worthwhile interests in the world. In our global militarism, humankind has become like dependent and retarded children in the pursuit of its own developmental interests.</p> <p> </p> <p>MAD-ness equals ’In order to save the world, it was necessary to destroy the world.’ In order to assure peace and freedom, it is necessary to control peace and freedom by the threat of war. The madness continues to grow unabated in the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>The victimization of children in war is parallel to and an extension of the victimization of children in peace. The former relies on weapons to amputate, burn and break the bodies of children, the latter relies on poverty to amputate, shock and paralyze the child’s soul and spirit. In this sense it can be genuinely said that war is a kind of politics of enforced inequality between different classes and categories of people. There is no greater or sobering lesson in the horrors and unnecessary realities of war than to see and smell and hear the screams of a child that’s been burned head to foot by white phosphorous or napalm. This is a tragic if sometimes-necessary way to be taught the value and virtue of pacifism.</p> <p> </p> <p>Too bad that no one has yet thought up a kind of inoculation to the horror and violence of war which would render humankind immune to the threat of its infectious disease. It seems that sometimes we can only get pacifism under the skin when we can become sensitized to the suffering of others and aware of our human heart of darkness in the cause of such suffering.</p> <p> </p> <p>If war is the pursuit of politics by another means, then peace is the pursuit of war by another means. In war, there is always a better way.</p> <p> </p> <p>There is only one kind of development, and this is human development. Any human action, which does not ultimately contribute to the improvement of the human condition in the world, either directly or indirectly, must be considered as unnecessary or antithetical to the long term interests of pan human development. In the human world, there are no neutral words or deeds. Neutrality is only the guarded disguise of the pursuit of power. The best index of human development in the world is the relative health, happiness and opportunity of the average child.</p> <p> </p> <p>Though there are many consequences and causes in the historical and cultural explanation of how and why war happens, within context of the modern World System we cannot overlook the central importance played by the history of political economic development in creating the conditions as well as the means for virtually every major war in modern earth history. Economic affluence at home has often entailed economic imperialism and exploitation aboard. The promotion of capitalistic development is interdependent with the control of colonial underdevelopment. When armies are marching and whole nation states are mobilized for war, it is the captains of the armament industry, weapons manufacture and the military industrial complex that profits the most and wins. Capitalistic enterprise often makes alliances with fanatical fascists and bureaucratic officials.</p> <p> </p> <p>There will be peace in the world when so few are no longer allowed to profit from the suffering of so many.</p> <p>Peace depends upon the realization of human freedom in the world. The realization of such freedom depends upon the education for responsibility to realize such freedom. The realization of such responsibility depends upon the promotion of the values and views of non-violence, which entails the realization of human equality in the world. The basis of violence in the human world is the creation and promotion of human inequality, by class, race, religion, nation, caste, age or sex. It follows from this chain of associations that if we want to attain peace in the world, the best thing we can do is to promote human equality.</p> <p> </p> <p>For closely related reasons, it takes money to make more money just as poverty begets yet greater poverty. Similarly, and still related, we may say that just as violence leads invariably to more and greater violence, so too does peace promote more peace.</p> <p> </p> <p>The escalation of world war has been a vicious cycle of the growth of global militarization, which has been fueled primarily by the capitalistic interests of the armaments industries. It is the epitome of evil in the world that so many should have been made to suffer so terribly so that only a small proportion of humankind can have its cake and eat it too. Outlawing all weapons would not stop these parasites of human pain, but it would prevent them from acquiring the prestige, which they do not deserve so well.</p> <p> </p> <p>Our earthbound age is one in which many things stand for there opposite. We promote war in the name of peace, aggression in the name of defense, fascism and totalitarianism in the name of freedom and democracy, death in the name of life, deceit in the name of truth, poverty in the name of affluence, hierarchy in the name of equality, underdevelopment in the name of development. It is a testament to the power and authority of official verbiage and the mass media that can turn black to white and white to black, and obscure all colors in the world beneath the veil of gray. It is the epitome of the evil and unfreedom of the human mind when such instruments and devices as the television, radio, newspaper, education, magazines can be used to rationalize away any problem or paradox, no matter how fundamentally nonsensical, irrational or inherently pathological it may really be. It is all the more remarkable when it is considered that what is taken as the basis of social scientific fact is really fiction, and there is no such thing as the average John and Jane Doe Public. We have created an illusion of world power by the make believe magic of paper realities, and as long as it seems convincing and credible enough to the uninquisitive and gullible, the world will continue to conform to the lie, and turn a mythological prophecy into an ideological history.</p> <p> </p> <p>Educating our children for peace and teaching no-violent and pacifistic values in the world has never been an especially problematic or  not efficacious proposition except that we’ve made it seem so. Because it has rarely been tried, it is believed that it cannot be done. But if we can prepare our youth to be good warriors then it seems possible also to be able to be able to prepare them for being good peacemakers of the world. He means for such pacifistic education has long been available, but the motivation has always been lacking. Its benefits for humankind far outweigh its costs.</p> <p> </p> <p>War is a situation for which everyone is responsible for their own small part that is played, and yet no one is to blame for the entire thing. Whether we work in a munitions factory, buy war bonds, or we pull the trigger, or drop a bomb on an anonymous enemy, we are all ultimately responsible for our acts in the war. Nuremberg has instructed humankind that it is no longer merely enough to blindly follow one’s orders without ethical consideration of the moral consequences of our own involvement. If all participants and combatants accepted their fullest human responsibility for their own involvement in the perpetration of its violence, then there would be no war in the world to judge. The tyranny of aggression and violence is that it forces the innocent and the good to commit evil and atrocious acts. In war, as in peace, the buck stops at the center of each and every person’s soul, and we cannot legitimately point our fingers at our enemy to blame for our actions and decisions.</p> <p>Though in war everyone is responsible for their own part that they play, and no one is ultimately to blame, some people share more responsibility and blame than others because they play a bigger and more critical role in the perpetration of violence. In this regard, we must look to the politicians and high ranking military commanders who are most influential of the decision and directions of violence in war, but who rarely if ever suffer the first hand consequences of such violence. Only naïve and gullible young men can be made to readily die for a false cause. It has been unfortunate in history that the arena of conflict and combat cannot be confined to include just those instigators and war mongers and profiteers who are most responsible for the war and yet who suffer least from its consequences. Such leaders might be less likely to wage war and dissuaded from entering armed combat if they had to confront the very real prospects of their own possible death from such a decision.</p> <p> </p> <p>Peace comes from the capacity for compromise. The world will not meet us halfway if we are not willing to meet the world more than halfway. Compromise is an art, which is learned in life. Its capacity comes from patience, tolerance, and the willingness to adopt the point of view of one’s opponents. It does not come easily. It does not come without struggle, risks or courage.</p> <p> </p> <p>The groundwork for war is laid when people raise some symbolic form to a level higher than their own. It comes when people who are otherwise good and common to commit acts that are evil and uncommon because they are not held responsible for their own actions, but are able to defer that responsibility onto something beyond themselves, superhuman, absolutely and ideally good.</p> <p> </p> <p>The foundations for a secure peace cannot be laid in the preparations for war.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5"><a name="Earth">EARTH AND NATURE</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>It is the earth that will adapt humankind to her needs, and not we who will adapt the earth to our needs. In our transformations of the world, we have become transformed by the world. Neither we nor the world can go back to our original separate states of nature.</p> <p> </p> <p>Because of humankind’s predations, the evolution of life on earth has once again entered upon a contraction phase. In every concrete crack and crevice of our civilization, nature is struggling for survival and return. We must not underestimate the recuperative and regenerative power of the natural earth.</p> <p> </p> <p>The never ending forces of erosion work steadily away on the edges of our grand civilization. They work so slowly and gradually that they are imperceptible to our great vision. It is the great and certain patience of Nature’s ways that will eventually conquer over the insolent impetuousness of our own human progress. Human Greatness and Evil, vice and virtue, will make no difference when lying side by side in the grave of the earth, covered over by the sands of time, buried beneath the regenerative soils if decomposing life.</p> <p> </p> <p>Archaeologists and paleontologists of the distant future, if there are any, will dig beneath the earth’s soils to discover a layer of irradiated concrete rubble and piles of broken and shattered bones. They will have discovered a worldwide base line for early human civilization, and wonder what forgotten historical events caused this massive level of destruction. They will discover the ages old lessons of human nature and human history that has been learned the hard way in one age only to become forgotten in the new age. Hopefully our remote heirs of humankind will have learned these lessons by then well enough not to repeat the same old mistakes. This will be evidence of humankind’s real progress.</p> <p> </p> <p>Nature has a sense of order, and a mysterious mind of its own. Our involvement in the processes of nature can only interrupt and interfere with these patternings and their products in a dissonant and destructive way. The best we can hope for is a neutral relationship between our civilization and the natural world upon which it depends.</p> <p> </p> <p>What a curse upon the earth it has been that the spirit of humankind should remain perpetually insatiable, and its soul always searching for salvation in the world.</p> <p> </p> <p>How is it that one species among all the forms of life on earth has come to so dominate the earth and destroy most of the other forms of life in its quest for power and security from the forces of nature?</p> <p> </p> <p>We cannot escape in anything we do the ecological imperative of our earthbound age, that the human destruction of the world’s natural habitats and ecosystems are the most consequential problematic of survival which has ever confronted humankind except our earliest era of evolutionary adaptation and struggle for survival against the forces of nature. Could it be that humankind learned its first evolutionary lessons too well, and adapted too much?</p> <p> </p> <p>Could it be that the needs of humankind’s own destruction are too deeply rooted in the first evolutionary steps of human nature? Historical civilization may have been humankind’s elaborate way of postponing the inevitable—a sophisticated way of usurping nature’s control over our destiny because we are maladapted from the start to fit into the scheme of things.</p> <p> </p> <p>Humankind evolved as a phylogenetic freak of nature, and human civilization has developed as an infection upon the living tissues on the earth’s skin. The few brief millennia which this disease is playing itself out is but a momentary episode in the natural life span of the earth—an episode which is nonetheless producing catastrophic consequences.</p> <p> </p> <p>Destruction is always a faster, simpler, and easier process than construction. Creation takes time, patience, trial and error. It is a sign of our earthbound age that despite all our rapid developments of world technological civilization, we are accomplishing in a few brief moments of mad destructiveness what required many millions of years for nature to achieve. We are taking away so much from nature after she has given so much to us.</p> <p> </p> <p>Our war making tendencies, violent and aggressive capacities and our basic destructiveness towards nature can only be taken as a sign that as a biological species, we are like children who have not yet grown into place in the natural scheme of things. A fully-grown species does not destroy its environments because such ecocide leads to destruction of the species as maladapted. A more mature species has incorporated into its nerves and veins the organic experience and evolutionary wisdom of natural karma, and has found and seeks to maintain a fragile balance of power in its relation with the natural order of things. The development of our civilization has been but a premature precociousness—as a species we are trying to grow up too fast, and cannot feel at ease in our childlike condition.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is possible that nature itself is yet young on earth—that in its evolutionary exploration of its own possibilities and limitations, in the dinosaurs, in the great mammals, in humankind, it is slowly and steadily trying out and figuring out the most suitable arrangement and patterning for its myriad diverse elements. When it hits upon a correct answer—like cockroaches, sharks or other primordial species--then it stops and moves on to the solution to other elements of its grand design. If it frequently makes mistakes, it does not hesitate to tear things back down and start all over again. If this is true, then we must begin to see our own presence and purpose upon the earth as constrained by perhaps ultimately controlled by the designs of nature. Our existential being upon earth may well prove to be extremely tenuous.</p> <p> </p> <p>Death is meaningless to nature except as a natural process in the representation of life. It is inevitable because it is necessary and so natural. To humankind, death has come to mean everything, as the ultimate thing we cannot avoid no matter how hard we may try. On this basic difference rests all the problems and paradoxes of the human condition on earth and of the natural condition of an increasingly, exclusively human world.</p> <p> </p> <p>Time has purely been a human construction in the natural world. Nature has its rhythms and cycles of birth, regeneration and death, which have been happening time immemorial, but it knows little of the timing, which we ascribe to her. It has its schedules and its seasons, but it has always been a never ending, continuously changing moment of the present. Nature remembers little of its own past, and thinks nothing of its own future, except, as these become organically incorporated and consequential to the development of its own being on earth. Otherwise the pathways and trajectories of past and future have no meaning that they have to us. Perhaps we measure time so carefully and exactly because we are so aware of our mortality and ephemeral presence upon earth.</p> <p> </p> <p>We must not underestimate the delicacy of the balances, which have evolved in nature. Minor causes regularly lead, however indirect and extenuated the chain of linkages, to major and long lasting consequences. The complexity of nature’s interconnections, webs of relations and pathways of change is so great and so random as to be unpredictable by our science. There is no telling exactly what or how our actions of today will reverberate and resonated upon the earth and rebound upon us tomorrow. We can only be sure in our understanding that consequences will come.</p> <p> </p> <p>When the earth shakes, the wind blows, the waves rise, and the rains fall, there is little humankind can do to stop it. It is in these moments that we are most reminded of our own beingness in nature and of our own natural helplessness before the forces and elements of nature. It is in these moments that we are reminded of the real power that moves the world and all things in it.</p> <p> </p> <p>To see our sui generis origins in the earth itself is to remind ourselves of the primordial volcanism and fundamental electromagnetism of our bodies and beingness. It is possible that our bodies, as all life on earth, has a kind of force field or natural aura of life which all life is sensitive and remotely aware of. The common hysterias of our uncontrolled aggression, violent perversion, and crowd madness has its roots in the mesmeric power of these autochthonous of life. In our transformation into civilized human beings, we must deny and tune out this kind of hypnotic spell of nature, which becomes cast, over our beingness. It is a power, charismatic and violent political leaders have learned to master.</p> <p> </p> <p>Earthboundness is a modern condition of existential awareness of and in the human world. It is a collective consciousness of our own ecology of being upon the universal earth. It is a way of discovering ourselves in our environment.</p> <p>Earthboundness is a human state of being which has become increasingly bound by the earth. It is a paradox that earthboundness did not really rise in our collective conscience until after humankind first escaped the imprisoning pull of the earth’s gravitational field. The view from space offered humankind a conception of the earth as a lonely and solitary, but living planet in the vast depths of space. As long as we had our feet firmly planted upon the ground, we took the boundaries of the earth’s horizons for granted.</p> <p> </p> <p>Like being culture bound, earthboundness has come to mean dialectically its own contradiction upon earth. The previous geo-centrism of our imaginations and our conscience in which we say the earth exclusively in our own terms—put there for the sake of our own development and aggrandizement, has given way to an enlightened appreciation of the importance, and limitations, of the earth as an entity itself, in its own right. The paradox of earthboundness has come to ultimately usurp and relativize our own anthropocentric world view and value orientation towards all life on earth. We are no longer the dominant species, the apex of the hierarchical pyramid or the top link of the Great Chain of Being. We are becoming better able to appreciate the point of view and intrinsic importance of all other life forms on earth, especially when our civilization has plotted their destruction and extinction. Other plants and animals have their own separate evolutionary purpose and reason for being on earth which is separate and not subordinate to our own narrow human purposes and designs, and because the water and force of life which flows through all the veins and channels of the earth also flow through our own veins, the loss of any and all life on earth, is our loss as well.</p> <p> </p> <p>The wind blow for our own being, and the waves roll and crash upon the rocks with the vitality, which flow through our veins. The distant, strange sounds hidden in the conch shell are the echoes of our own beginning on earth. The yelps and howls of the coyotes in the moonlit night are the beckoning and calling of our own primordial nature. The owl that hoots in the darkness of nights shadow talks of our own darkness and our own destiny. The silent beauty of a flower and the rolling landscape is the silence of our own death. In everything, Nature calls us back to our own being and our own beginning.</p> <p> </p> <p>Humankind has become earthbound as never before—the existential uncertainty of our own condition upon earth is the direct consequence of the development of our civilization running head long upon a collision course with our own earthboundness. We may speak of our earthbound karma and our earthbound dharma, our earthbound imperative and our earthbound ecology and ethos, in a relevant way that would have made less sense even a decade ago, and utter nonsense a century ago. But now earthboundness is coming to increasingly shape and define our own identity upon the earth and to have an increasing influence upon many elements of our everyday lives. Nothing we do anymore does not have some kind of indirect effect upon our world in long chains of relation which we barely comprehend, and we can no longer afford to ignore these indirect kinds of consequences of our daily activities and involvements, as they will eventually come back to us in unexpected ways. The circularity of the earth’s surface and the seasonality of life has become our own circularity and our own seasonality.</p> <p> </p> <p>Earthbound enlightenment is the dawning of a new consciousness in the human world. It is an awareness of our environments and of the dependency of the human conditions upon these environments in new and revolutionary ways, ways which our own being and becoming upon earth, in terms of human development, has hardly caught up with. The most valuable resource we now have is the human resource, and the most critical constraint we have upon this resource is the limitation of time. If we can learn to just slow down the pace of our changes in everything we do, then we can give to ourselves, our children and our world the extra edge of time that is most needed in order for us to resolve our earthbound predicament.</p> <p> </p> <p>In our earthbound age, less is more, small is beautiful, and the slower the better. There is no need to do today what we can safely put off until tomorrow, or the day after.</p> <p> </p> <p>No one really knows what the carrying capacity of the earth really is, or what the long term promise and potential of our scientific progress will really prove to be. It is too son to tell. But it is certain that the most pressing problem and predicament of our earthbound age is that of global over population and the corresponding depopulation of the earth of other forms of life. In bringing evolution on earth to a standstill, is stopping nature’s clockwork, and in continuing to reproduce our own kind at an exponentially uncontrolled rate, we are creating for ourselves a global crisis and climax of unprecedented proportions. The prospects of our world cannot be bright if we continue along our way as blindly as we have so far been. It is perhaps too late to reverse the wheels of history or to prevent the impending holocaust, but no one has the bottom line on this either.</p> <p> </p> <p>We are upon the verge of a new era, the dawn of a new epoch, the birth of a new age on earth. In the twilight of our earthbound awakening, we do nit yet know if we are at the dawn of a new day or at the dusk of a new night. We can no longer afford our old values and worldviews in the same naïve and innocent way as before. We have become bound by the ecological horizons of a round earth. In its roundness, we have always implicitly understood that the earth was a finite resource, even with the infinite progress of our science. Our earthbound awakening is upon us, and it influences everything we think and do in our common world. It has come to increasingly frame the external contexts of our everyday life, constraining our beliefs and behaviors in ways, which were rarely understood before now.</p> <p> </p> <p>Earthboundness is the only bottom line of our modern moment and our contemporary human condition. Earthboundness is the key conceptual metaphor of our moment, our nature, our world, the earth and our condition upon it. We might be able to escape the gravitational pull of the earth, but we cannot escape the prospects of our own earthboundness.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is not ourselves or our father figures, leaders, commanders, statesmen, capitalists, and parental authorities who will inherit the earth ad all the problems of our human world. It will be our children and our grandchildren who will inherit the future earth and who will hold the key to the future of all life on earth. If we cannot instill in them a new respect for all life on earth, including human life, and teach them the lessons we ourselves have learned the hard way. Our failure will become their failure, and we can only blame ourselves.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5"><a name="Being">BEING and THE WAY</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>A bamboo is more supple than a gnarled old limb—the bamboo bends in whichever direction the wind blows, while the limb is sure to break in a heavy storm. But the old twisted limb is sure to make the more dependable walking stick.</p> <p>Truth resides in the undichotomized whole, and is revealed in the relations between the many parts. The way is always a paradox—a dilemma of alternative avenues.</p> <p>We seek what we cannot know and know what we cannot seek.</p> <p> </p> <p>When we exhaust all our answers, only questions remain. There is no solution that does not give birth to yet a new set of problems.</p> <p> </p> <p>Every path leads to the way, and the way follows every path.</p> <p>In a world of proud princes, it is the humble pauper who is king.</p> <p>In a world of big Chiefs, it is the little brave who would carry the day.</p> <p>In a world full of captains and commanders, it is the peacemaker who conquers</p> <p>In a world of the beautiful and sophisticated, it is the plain and simple that is most sublime</p> <p>In a world full of the unusual and the extreme, it is the commonplace and average that is most outstanding</p> <p>In a world of prophets and visionaries, it is the blind mute who points the way.</p> <p>In a world full of many winners, it is the loser who counts success as a lesson well learned.</p> <p>In a world full of complicated words, it is the simple deed that speaks the loudest.</p> <p>Nothing is, that also is not. Everything that seems to be, is really something else. The art of living is always an art of indirection, and the way of life is never a straight line.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p>It wasn’t until I walked the way of the world that I came to understand how much of a home-body I really had been. But, upon returning home, I soon realized how much of a discontent wanderer I had become.</p> <p> </p> <p>A never ending source of paradox is that although our illusions must always be dispelled, our life is full of illusion that sustains us in the darkness of disillusionment.</p> <p> </p> <p>The way lies in waiting for the hapless wanderer who come stumbling along searching for it. It is ever patient and ever present and ever silent. It never tells the wanderer when she or he has found it.</p> <p> </p> <p>There is only one way, though it comes from many corners of the world and leads in many directions. If you happen to meet someone along the way going in the opposite direction as yourself, neither traveler is wrong. Both are just upon different parts of the same path.</p> <p> </p> <p>The way that is, is never the way. The way that isn’t, is always the way. Neither this way nor that way is the way, nor is the other way. The way that isn’t the way always winds between the other ways.</p> <p> </p> <p>The way has no beginning and no end, but is always between both beginning and end. It is an eternally moving moment that never comes to rest. To follow along the way is to make a journey without ever reaching the journey’s end. The destination of the journey is to be found along the way.</p> <p> </p> <p>There is no wrong way, because there is no right way. There is no best way, because there is no worst way. There is only one way, but it leads in an infinite number of directions. Though there are an infinite number of directions, they all lead in the same way. We cannot lose the way that we cannot find—we can only lose the way that can be found.</p> <p> </p> <p>The way always leads in only one direction, and the way is without any direction. We cannot turn back along the directionless way. The way is always forward, though there are many dead ends. The directionless way is always long and winding, twisting and turning in many directions, and though each direction is the way, the way remains only one directionless direction.</p> <p> </p> <p>To follow the way is to lead the way is to follow the way is to lead the way….until we’ve finally lost our way. And once having lost the way, then we will finally find it. And finding it, then we eventually lose it forever.</p> <p> </p> <p>The directionless direction cannot be found by any map or compass. It is the direction that the wind blows and the water flows. It is the direction that the earth moves through the universe, and the direction the human takes through the forest. The way is always a grand circle within a circle, encompassing yet other circles. The directionless direction of the way is infinitely roundabout and circular.</p> <p> </p> <p>We cannot ever change our way, though the way is always changing. The power of the way is its paradox, and the paradox of the way is its power. The direction without direction leads in all directions and yet goes nowhere. The directionless direction leads nowhere, and yet can be found everywhere. It is somewhere and anywhere. And there is here and this is that.</p> <p> </p> <p>The way is silent, and silence is to be found along the way. Words are like stones in the way—they mark the path but make the path difficult to follow. Words are strung together by silence and the way of silence is strewn with words. Words may need the way, but the way does not need words.</p> <p> </p> <p>The wise person knows the way though s/he has never seen it. The fool is blind to the way though s/he may have long lived beside it.</p> <p> </p> <p>The way passes through this world, but is not of this world. It is of another world. This world is full of petty people who think they are important, but travelers along the way are few and far between. The way begins at the end of the world, and the world begins at the end of the way.</p> <p> </p> <p>The way ends at the end of the day. The way is not a matter of distance, but of duration. It is not a sense of place, but one of process. Where the sun rises, that is where the way begins.</p> <p> </p> <p>Night overshadows the way, and clouds our senses. We fear the night because we lose our way.</p> <p> </p> <p>To lead the way is to follow the way. To follow the way is to lead the way. To see the way is to seek the way. To seek the way is to see the way. To find the way is to lose the way. To lose the way is to find the way. To learn the way is to travel the way. To travel the way is to learn the way.</p> <p> </p> <p>Like a long tunnel that never ends, the way always leads through darkness to a distant source of light. Which star in the nighttime sky is not the way?</p> <p> </p> <p>We cannot ever know what is in the minds of others, but only what is in our own minds. We can know what is in our minds only imperfectly and with uncertainty, for our minds area always playing tricks upon us and fooling us—hiding and changing. And if our minds are always hiding and changing, then knowing the minds of others is thus doubly treacherous. It is a miraculous wonder that we may know anything at all except our own illusion.</p> <p> </p> <p>Humanness is the source of our being, and our being is the source of our humanness. As human beings, the evolution of our experience and the experience of our evolution has gone hand in hand with the creation of the uniqueness and paradox of our condition. With each new generation born, this evolutionary experience of humanity is recreated and relived in both the parents and their children. As such, our species are but one linkage in a long chain that stretches back time immemorial to the very beginning of life on earth. And each generation is the next and newest link.</p> <p> </p> <p>Being is a frame of mind and mind is a state of being. It follows that if the sense of being is environmental in nature, then so too are the senses of the mind. Both mind and being are organically rooted in the evolutionary experience of the natural world.</p> <p>Being is always decentered. As such it chronically lacks the sense of balance that only comes from the possession of the center. Being is always upon the outside looking in, and never upon the inside looking out. The state of being and the frame of mind of the view from the inside is fundamentally different from the being of the view from the outside. The view from the outside is subject to the vicissitudes and vagaries of nature—to its changes of weather and the predation of the wild. It suffers the cold and wet of winter and the heat and sun of summer. The view from the inside is one based upon the control of nature, the protection from elemental forces and hazards. It is an artificial point of view.</p> <p> </p> <p>The sense of being is not to be gained through vicarious experience. Vicariousness substitutes illusion for the reality of being. It is difficult not to live vicariously in a world that so conditions our experience by vicariousness and illusion. The existential problematic of modern living is not the same imperative of survival that made earlier humankind’s sense of being in the world so sharp and acute. It has become the imperative of learning to live non-vicariously by seeing through the illusions that come between our experiences of the world and our own sense of being in the world. It has become the imperative of recovering a lost sense of being in our world from the flood of illusions that inundates our experiences.</p> <p> </p> <p>Being begins in the bare bones of basic experience. The raw state of its reality works its way from the surface of our skin deep down underneath like an infection that spreads throughout the body. Being begins in honesty. It is free of illusion because it cannot lie.</p> <p> </p> <p>Along the way of being, we give up our innocence for wisdom. Being does not come with disillusionment, but before the illusion. Disillusionment suffers the loss of being upon the road to becoming. It represents a return to the place where we started, with the experience of what was left behind, without the original innocence with which we started.</p> <p> </p> <p>Our return to natural being can never be complete. It must always entail a sense of loss, of imperfection, of unfinished business, and of unfulfilled feelings. The recovery of our own natural innocence can only be had through the discovery of the darkness of our own hearts from which the possibility of our disillusionment and the disillusionment of our possibility both spring simultaneously.</p> <p> </p> <p>Nonbeing is to be found in the denial of death, as something dark, unnatural and evil. Being is to be found in the embrace of the existential inevitability of death, in the ephemera presence and mortality of our own existence.</p> <p> </p> <p>Being begins in the experience of death and ends in the experience of birth. In each birth is the beginning of another death, and in every death is the ending of another birth. We cannot be and deny our own mortality at the same time, not without delusion and self-deception.</p> <p> </p> <p>Our being in the world has become increasingly defined and constrained by the earthboundness of our contemporary condition on earth. Because we cannot escape our earthboundness, we cannot escape the existential consequences of its ecological imperative upon our lives. It is a paradox that the salvation of our own being in the world is based upon and in turn forms the basis of the salvation of our world itself, just as the destruction of our world is rooted in and leads to the destruction of our own sense of being in the world. Human reality and being are inextricably related with its earthbound environment. Human destiny will be the fate of the earth.</p> <p> </p> <p>The way changes with the world. What it was yesterday is not what it will become tomorrow. Today it takes us this way, and tomorrow it will take us that way. The way is always some other way.</p> <p> </p> <p>The way is not well served by hurrying along without smelling the flowers and seeing the picturesque sites. The way is therefore always slow and steady, sometimes stopping and often turning. It is made for walking and not for running.</p> <p> </p> <p>We may sleep and rest, and yet still journey along the way. Our dreams area always a journey along the way. We may spend all the day of our lives working and traveling to one place or another, and yet never once make a single step along the way. We may journey along the way by standing still, and we may move unendingly and yet go nowhere. The way moves mountains closer to our feet, but it does not move our feet closer to the mountains.</p> <p> </p> <p>The way is always the vision of a mountaintop hovering above our horizon, and it always leads through a dense and dark forest that never seems to end. The way ends at a still and silent lake at the bottom of a mountain valley that is hidden somewhere in the forest. When we come to the end of the way, we will know its view not from the mountaintop but by the clearness of its reflection upon the surface of the water.</p> <p> </p> <p>Of the many different paths to follow, which way does not lead back home to where we began?</p> <p> </p> <p>All ways lead finally to the same end—that is death.</p> <p> </p> <p>If there is a will, there is a way. The heart can have only one master, but the way can have many hearts. Being serves the human, the human serves the will, the will serves the heart, the heart serves the way, and the way serves the being. To follow the way is to lead the way, and the way always leads from and back to the human being.</p> <hr> <p> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5"><a name="last">ODDS and ENDS</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">(Children, Migration, Mixed-marriage and other Marginalia)</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>I find most children quite interesting and enjoyable. It is their parents whom I find too snobby even to say hello, and too hung up on their own egos to really enjoy life. It is too bad so many children have so little choice in the matter of their parents.</p> <p> </p> <p>Growing up is learning one has choices to make. Better to remain an eternal child than to have to become a frustrated and repressed adult.</p> <p> </p> <p>In their innocence, children are without the pretensions of the adult world. In their ignorance of the world, they are without the prejudices that make the adult so sure of their world.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is the natural openness and unabashed inquisitiveness that makes childhood such an interesting period of life. Children do not become embarrassed or ashamed of themselves as adults have learned to become, though they may be shy or become confused. Children meet the world with one hundred percent of their being, adults with less than half.</p> <p> </p> <p>The world of the child is not just a simpler version of the world of the adult. It is a different kind of world in which the quality of experience is very alien to the adult world. Children do not make the kind of normal distinctions that so order the adult world and that are usually taken for granted. For a child, it is very possible that a dinosaur could be in the backyard, or that Bambi can be in Snow White’s forest. Cartoons, in their Carroll like animation of normally inanimate objects, capture some of the sense of the child’s reality very clearly.</p> <p> </p> <p>It was not until I became a father that I really grew up. It is not until people have children of their own and become full-time parents that they become full-fledged adults, and give up the illusionary vanities of their own lost youth for the sake of their children’s future adulthood.</p> <p> </p> <p>My daughter has taught me so many things I never really understood before. She has taught me the joy of simple pleasures seemingly inane from the adult point of view. She has taught me the meaning of patience, tolerance, responsibility and selflessness. She has taught me the true meaning of love, friendship and companionship. Most importantly, she has taught me many of the neat things of my own childhood that I had somehow forgotten in my struggle to grow up.</p> <p> </p> <p>Children learn about the adult world by tearing everything they can touch down to their own level. By tearing apart the adult world, they are learning how to eventually put it all back together again. Though they may make many mistakes, they will also compose a new sense of order much different, and in many ways, far better than the world of their parents.</p> <p> </p> <p>Mixed marriage really puts to the test the faith that, in the face of universal human nature, differences of race, culture, language, and history are of little importance. We frequently fail this test in our own faith.</p> <p> </p> <p>When we were first married in my wife’s homeland, rumors spread quickly that I was a "California Abalone Diver," or a "Confidence Trickster," or a "CI. agent," but nobody ever came forward to see if these claims were true or false. The people who started some of these rumors were people bent on exploiting my wife for her money and labor before she married me.</p> <p> </p> <p>By being married to a Chinese wife it has reaffirmed my faith in anthropology. Chinese are not that different from Americans, as both can be rude, mean, selfish, prejudiced and ignorant.</p> <p> </p> <p>Though there is little romance about mixed marriage, romance is sometimes the only common illusion that will save the marriage.</p> <p> </p> <p>Mixed marriage is a funny situation, everyone seems curious about you, but after their curiosity is satisfied, they seem to feel uncomfortable to be around you. Being married to a person from another culture is to live between two cultures, and to become a full member of neither one. It is truly being an odd couple. About the only way out of this situation is to become quite wealthy, and then you can become honorary and privileged citizens of either culture, rather than just outcast pariahs.</p> <p> </p> <p>There are some facets of my wife’s Chinese character that I shall probably never really understand. There are some traits of my own that I have little doubt seem quite strange and abominable to her. These differences can sometimes be quite subtle and on the surface at least be covered over by similar resemblance, but they can become major stress points in the relationship for the slightest, most petty reasons.</p> <p> </p> <p>When you are an odd couple, everyone stares but few speak, and though everyone is quite polite, few are very friendly. So many who think they are superior to you for some reason or the other can become quite rude and arrogant towards you. Everyone talks behind your back, and few talk in front of your face.</p> <p> </p> <p>Our daughter, the product of "miscegenation," knows little about the differences between "Chinese" or "American." If left on her own she and her kind would quickly create a new hyphenated "Creole" culture that was genuinely "Chinese American," and perhaps she really will anyway in spite of her parents’ purposes and prejudices. It is good to know that, though she will never be just one or the other, she will always have a choice between both worlds. When she fills out an employment application form, she can check herself off as either one or the other.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p>Mixed couples are citizens of a country of their own making. It is a country whose only territorial boundaries are the earth’s oceans that separate foreign shores. It is a "multicultural" society in which racial differences are effectively undermined.</p> <p> </p> <p>My Chinese-American daughter is living proof that the ideology of racial purity is a myth that defies the natural reason of evolution. She has brown hair, almond eyes, tan skin, my wife’s toes, and my stubborn disposition, and she is about as cute as can be. She is the proverbial dragon lady.</p> <p> </p> <p>Our Chinese-American daughter shares the best and worst of both worlds, and she will be free to choose between them.</p> <p> </p> <p>Mixed marriage and children of miscegenation form a new racial and ethnic category in the world that has little to do with any previous distinctions. When the world becomes one, people will be free to move about as they please and to marry only those who come closest to their hearts. Their children will inherit citizenship to the world and keys to the future.</p> <p> </p> <p>The migration experience involves an unending sense of personal displacement and estrangement in a foreign land that is often threatening and sometimes hostile. The migrant never fully resolves these feelings, but represses them in the interest of adapting to demanding new situations. The migrant longs for a return to their homeland like an old person longs for lost youth, or an adult longs to return to childhood, or an unhappy "has been" longs to return to a more glorious past. It is in the existential paradox of the migrant’s life that the world that was "home" will have subsequently changed in such a way that things no longer seem the same and there is little room remaining in which to fit.</p> <p> </p> <p>The child the migrant has adapted to the new environment as if it were their home. Lacking the experience and wisdom of the old world, these children grow up to out-perform their parents in a world that’s largely taken for granted. This is often the source of an intense kind of generational conflict.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p>Migration has been the rule, and not the exception of human history. Migration has been going on time immemorial. The portrayal of humankind as permanently settled in one local region and as home-bound in world view defies the anthropological wisdom of human culture history. Humankind has long been getting around and mixing things up much more than we, in our semi-sedentary existence, would give them credit. The rise of human civilization has always depended as much upon the "exogenous" influences of trading, trafficking and traveling, as it has upon "locating" the individual to a permanent and fixed place.</p> <p> </p> <p>Human beings are prone to move about and to be over the long term quite transient, because the grass always seems greener on the other side and in their perennial unhappiness they are always left unsated and unfulfilled in what they have in their present circumstances. This need to move on is fundamental to human nature, ingrained in our evolutionary experience.</p> <p> </p> <p>There is a tendency for a host society to exploit, ridicule, discriminate against, take advantage of, and to stereotype the newest immigrant. Immigrants are often seen as childish, ignorant, barbaric, dirty, dangerous and immoral, and even though they often begin at the bottom of the social ladder, they are seen as a political-economic threat to the status quo. This kind of paranoia toward the newcomer happens even among people who were them selves previous newcomers. Everyone at some point in history has descended from immigrants.</p> <p> </p> <p>The American Academic and Professional "Brain Drain" has been going on for a long time and represents a curious kind of capitalistic conspiracy of international class that neatly cross-cuts other racial or ethnic boundaries. If America used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, it has since become the marketplace of the international elite and the technocracy of the professional class. If there have been many ugly Americans abroad, there have since been many more "ugly Foreigners" in America, with the only thing being on their minds the getting ahead at everyone else’s expense. This "Brain Drain" effectively helps to maintain the political economic structure of poverty both domestically and abroad, and effectively undercuts upward social mobility among the lower classes both at home and abroad. "Amerika, Inc., the Beautiful Only" has long played the friendly fool who nevertheless manages to take full advantage of foreign labor and domestic conformity.</p> <p> </p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> <hr> <p><a name="Copyright">Blanket Copyright</a>, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.</p> <p>Last Updated: 08/25/06 </p> <hr> <p> </p> </font> <p align="left"> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p align="center"> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> s="na";c="na";j="na";f=""+escape(document.referrer) </script> <script language="javascript1.2" type="text/javascript"> s=screen.width;v=navigator.appName if (v != "Netscape") {c=screen.colorDepth} else {c=screen.pixelDepth} j=navigator.javaEnabled() </script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> function pr(n) {document.write(n,"\n");} NS2Ch=0 if (navigator.appName == "Netscape" && navigator.appVersion.charAt(0) == "2") {NS2Ch=1} if (NS2Ch == 0) { r="&size="+s+"&colors="+c+"&referer="+f+"&java="+j+"" pr("<A HREF=\"http://www.TheCounter.com\" TARGET=\"_top\"><IMG"+ " BORDER=0 SRC=\"http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383"+r+"\"><\/A>")} </script> <NOSCRIPT> <a HREF="http://www.TheCounter.com" TARGET="_top"><img SRC="http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383" ALT="TC" BORDER="0" width="88" height="31"></a> </NOSCRIPT>  </body>