Human rights are a sham. They are sham(e)ful. A step in the right direction, perhaps, but the baby has begun to stink with the bathwater (probably because this system has drowned in itself). Rights are unsubstantial -- and most certainly not synonymous -- to compassion, co-in-passion. They are impersonal (instead of interpersonal), as that they leave movements -- being moved, moving toward, moving someone to... -- to the heart of the reader and the main resources for action to the individual in question. Heart in one and action in the other -- a dissonance between movements. Rights are semiotically discontinuous triadic complexes. Human rights respected (read 'allotted') by authorities and governments are not signs of love or care; they are mostly quotas of space to satisfy watchdog Judges. Rights to bear arms or vote are not naturally innate qualities we come recognize (Locke's God is dead if no other God isn't); rights are plots of territory given to (or at times taken away from) stewards by more powerful lords, an abstract sociopolitical fiefdom. My right to know or to express myself is the subject to an empty predicate of equally empty entitlement to discourse, private or public, "with limits." Boundaries to property; fences in a forest. Lines drawn on shifting plates of magma and temporary sediments. And you say, animals have rights now too? And rocks maybe?
Don't respect my rights. Open your ears to my words and your eyes to my gestures, my face. Be moved, or at least give me the opportunity to move you. Opportunities, not ordinances. Experience me. Love me. I do you. And you, and you. Yes and yes. No, not by default. Not because you resemble a human being; nor because you or I deserve it. Just because I know who I am (in theory) and I know who you are (in theory), and because the beginning of this sentence is a redundancy (in application). Opportunities, not ordinances. Compassion and crescendo, not credences (with bread and wine). Movements, not immunities.
If you want governments to respect and care about their people, don't throw human rights in their Face. The Christian God of the United States built the world in seven days and offers to save you; the Face of China was built by the hands of the people over millenia, and it means the world to them to save it. Both God and the Face have forgotten the people now, though; neither is as strong as the new ziggurat of the capitalist market. But remind them of their roots (after you learn them yourself); be radical (radicle) with Confucianism. Who knows -- maybe we'll learn how to revive our own inner Lazarus in the process, to see that building heaven on Earth means Creating out of love of the other (l'autre, tout autre), and does not entail justifying ourselves while waiting for the "end of days" (only Christians are convinced that the messiah has come already and is coming back now) with the notion that our neighbor had the right to choose between heaven and hell. "What Wills the Justice Deparment" is warn on everyone's wrists (of the right hand), when we should maybe be asking What Would Jesus Deliver? -- to all, not the few.
Or...reflecting and taking with us the important lessons of these antiquated systems of thought, perhaps we should face this time of closure of a sort. Maybe we should finally throw out the dead baby with the stale grail water. A change of system design over system improvement.
Whatever we do, we can't keep doing things the way we've been doing them. It isn't right.
Showing posts with label a new world. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a new world. Show all posts
2010/02/22
2008/03/29
2008/03/23
I look at a human being, even myself, and I see a fish, a monkey, a giant bacterium anomaly. A package of somatic intention, a temple of neurosynapses immersed in hairy foam rubber and assorted juices. I see a vector, a cloud of lines of embedded code, all projecting the phenomenon of difference.
How shall I address difference? Of so many things, difference seems to be a phenomenon – a deduction – concerned with distance: a farthering and isolating, then a bringing together, a uniting (or reuniting). These are the properties of a mosaic, with inconsistent fragments arranged together to eventually result in something (somehow) coherent. Difference is art and science, in purpose and in recursive motion. It is the permanent subject of mathematics.
Motion also requires time as well as distance. Emotion overwhelms the observer of excessive difference, striving with all due efficiency and means to recalibrate a worldview that incorporates, assimilates, homogenizes the disparate halves of known and unknown (familiar and unfamiliar). Indeed, difference is not heterogeneity, but the quaking phenomenon of experience between the heterogeneous and homogeneous. It is an elementary, essential rudiment to equilibrium and to relativity.
We – I – might feel morally compelled at times to minimize difference, but it absolutely mustn’t be mistaken for minimizing violence. We – I – mustn’t mistake stagnation for equilibrium. Peace is neither the ability to become, nor the state of becoming, accustomed to difference; peace is the side effect of complete recognition of the necessity of difference to health and progress. (In this way, peace can never actually be a goal per se, anymore than the Buddhist or meditator can call Enlightenment a goal.) Social progress will not come through a blindness or ignorance to difference, nor even a mere toleration of it; it will come through the transition from a fear of difference (a phobia of the unfamiliar) – the outcome of a geopolitically sensitive, culturally developed caution for impermanence and change, and coupled with a millennia-old biological inclination for conservativism toward one's immediate environment – to an appreciation of it.
How shall I address difference? Of so many things, difference seems to be a phenomenon – a deduction – concerned with distance: a farthering and isolating, then a bringing together, a uniting (or reuniting). These are the properties of a mosaic, with inconsistent fragments arranged together to eventually result in something (somehow) coherent. Difference is art and science, in purpose and in recursive motion. It is the permanent subject of mathematics.
Motion also requires time as well as distance. Emotion overwhelms the observer of excessive difference, striving with all due efficiency and means to recalibrate a worldview that incorporates, assimilates, homogenizes the disparate halves of known and unknown (familiar and unfamiliar). Indeed, difference is not heterogeneity, but the quaking phenomenon of experience between the heterogeneous and homogeneous. It is an elementary, essential rudiment to equilibrium and to relativity.
We – I – might feel morally compelled at times to minimize difference, but it absolutely mustn’t be mistaken for minimizing violence. We – I – mustn’t mistake stagnation for equilibrium. Peace is neither the ability to become, nor the state of becoming, accustomed to difference; peace is the side effect of complete recognition of the necessity of difference to health and progress. (In this way, peace can never actually be a goal per se, anymore than the Buddhist or meditator can call Enlightenment a goal.) Social progress will not come through a blindness or ignorance to difference, nor even a mere toleration of it; it will come through the transition from a fear of difference (a phobia of the unfamiliar) – the outcome of a geopolitically sensitive, culturally developed caution for impermanence and change, and coupled with a millennia-old biological inclination for conservativism toward one's immediate environment – to an appreciation of it.
2008/01/05
reawakening alternatives for moral paradigms
China's thriving Confucian schools
| By Jill McGivering BBC News |
Parents believe studying Confucius benefits the whole of society
As soon as they walk into the tiny school, a converted apartment in a tower block, the children are bundled into grey cotton wraparound robes, fastened at the back with modern Velcro.
Flowing sleeves flap round their wrists, square black hats wedged on to their heads - some, too big, slip down over the eyes.
The children, from three to six years old, have come to special weekend classes to learn the teachings of China's ancient sage, Confucius.
2007/12/06
2007/11/17
2007/10/10
it is important that we not view fundamentalism in an improper light; for by 'fundamentalist' in its colloquial usage, we often mean to simply imply an 'extremist,' and by 'extremist,' to take an extreme stance. in this layout, however, things are unfortunately distorted from the inside out. for we still view an extremem as a bilateral product, a position that is necessarily accompanied by a remote and more often than not dialectic converse, an opposite extreme. we view the extreme this way instead of as the nuance of an extremity, a line of growth projected outward from an indeterminable center of an asymmetrical body (indeed, indeterminable precisely due to this asymmetry). that is, not as a choice between the left and right hand, as (more or less mistakenly) posited on nearly all forms of modern globalizing governmental structures, but as the protrusive skeletal framework to one of multiple fingers, or manner of excess, like the penis or the nose, that shows no resemblance even to branching. while we have split the brain in two to further attempt to explain away our everyday behavioral functions and peculiarities via centralizing them in either one or the other half, we have maintained the heart’s basic holism, even allowing its oddly nonbisymmetrical shape and location on the left side of the chest. the circulatory system’s excessive faculty, serving the function of that name. the timelessly depicted rendezvous point for excessive emotion and stir for mobility. it is in fact the heart, not the head, that better portrays the nature of the extreme, to which the negative connotation in ‘extremism’ may be attributed where the results appear violent or undesirable. make no mistake, though, that we are all necessarily extremist at some frequent points in our lives, climatic stages to an unraveling storytelling and process of reasoning.
this more realistic portrayal of extremism is the only way through which to properly view fundamentalism. for in deriving the concept from the term’s ethnological roots, we understand it as an extremist adherence (which may or may not be conservative) to the most base literary fundamentals of a schooling. the Universal Darwinists are cemented to the principles of natural selection, with signs of their extremism appearing in the disregard (if not complete denial of) the other essential functions to evolution – ‘survival of the fittest’ is the world’s Absolute creed. the Sunnies and the Shi’ites now continue to dispel their rage of their political differences through violence and war sponsored by their each absolutely infallible version of Islam – despite that the Islamic doctrinal differences at the base of the politics is so trivial that such hatred and killing could hardly be proclaimed to have religious purposes in mind. and there are of course those Christians, most renownedly labeled fundamentalist Christians, who have perhaps spanned the course of history longer than any other form of fundamentalism (albeit in a wider variety of manifestations). it is also perhaps the most formidable fundamentalism, second to only one other in the world (which i will get to in a minute) but at the same time invariably linked to it. for Christianity, in its fundamentalist form, unlike the structure of Islamic fundamentalism which is foundationally religious and stems into a disparate but inseverable political arena, is political throughout; that is to say that the religion and its contextual political environments have since its propagation been so interwoven that the differences between them have by this day and age become inscrutable. thus why the insistence of a separation between church and state has nevertheless mostly resulted in its failure. thereby, the number one fundamentalist operation, so covert and widespread now that few would not hesitate to call it that, is the adherence to an American-based ultracapitalist model around which all developing conformist countries and globalizing societies revolve, beset from the start with past colonialist influences and reformations to thus be so conducive to this way of (the more subtle and thus perhaps more dangerous) neocolonialism.
if we approach these real world schemas with the left-hand-right-hand gestalt of extremism, we can, however painfully, justify these courses of theory and action as a very far right wing affiliation (the Son sits at the right hand of the Father), just another sort of manifestation within the diverse spectrum of beliefs. as such, it deserves the respect and toleration that all sorts are due, especially amid the ever growing awareness and necessity for international, intercultural cooperation. but that is precisely what throws fundamentalism outside of the categories for belief systems at the pragmatic stage – for Christianity rises among Christians, but fundamentalism is itself blind to the veracity of its host beliefs except as to whether or not the conditions of the host are sustainable – for it is at its rudimentary praxes uncooperative, unnegotiable. fundamentalism is not any kind of belief; it is a function by which a system of beliefs can assume a tyrannical or at least dominant position against other systems. and what is partly so dangerous about this is that it does not retain itself within the order from which it originated but breaches all manner of diplomacy, protruding further and further into eventually raping the substances of other intermingling orders – überChristians are captured by the fabricated rhetoric of politicians raving world progress in the name of the Father and are at once moved to challenge, and respond to being challenged by, the sciences, in converting by forgery the observations of their religious reality into those of a scientific one (i.e. Creationism); Universal Darwinism not only confounds the sciences (for it is not itself a science but an approach to science) by castrating of them their necessary degrees of complexity and permanently vague teleological conclusions (wherever they have any), but also destroys God. it is thus not anything so innocuous as a choice of the right versus the left (which is itself too limiting a model by which fundamentalism can operate), but an uncompromising literalism with solely proselytizing intentions, a forceful insemination by a distorted and relentless intercultural phenomenon.
this more realistic portrayal of extremism is the only way through which to properly view fundamentalism. for in deriving the concept from the term’s ethnological roots, we understand it as an extremist adherence (which may or may not be conservative) to the most base literary fundamentals of a schooling. the Universal Darwinists are cemented to the principles of natural selection, with signs of their extremism appearing in the disregard (if not complete denial of) the other essential functions to evolution – ‘survival of the fittest’ is the world’s Absolute creed. the Sunnies and the Shi’ites now continue to dispel their rage of their political differences through violence and war sponsored by their each absolutely infallible version of Islam – despite that the Islamic doctrinal differences at the base of the politics is so trivial that such hatred and killing could hardly be proclaimed to have religious purposes in mind. and there are of course those Christians, most renownedly labeled fundamentalist Christians, who have perhaps spanned the course of history longer than any other form of fundamentalism (albeit in a wider variety of manifestations). it is also perhaps the most formidable fundamentalism, second to only one other in the world (which i will get to in a minute) but at the same time invariably linked to it. for Christianity, in its fundamentalist form, unlike the structure of Islamic fundamentalism which is foundationally religious and stems into a disparate but inseverable political arena, is political throughout; that is to say that the religion and its contextual political environments have since its propagation been so interwoven that the differences between them have by this day and age become inscrutable. thus why the insistence of a separation between church and state has nevertheless mostly resulted in its failure. thereby, the number one fundamentalist operation, so covert and widespread now that few would not hesitate to call it that, is the adherence to an American-based ultracapitalist model around which all developing conformist countries and globalizing societies revolve, beset from the start with past colonialist influences and reformations to thus be so conducive to this way of (the more subtle and thus perhaps more dangerous) neocolonialism.
if we approach these real world schemas with the left-hand-right-hand gestalt of extremism, we can, however painfully, justify these courses of theory and action as a very far right wing affiliation (the Son sits at the right hand of the Father), just another sort of manifestation within the diverse spectrum of beliefs. as such, it deserves the respect and toleration that all sorts are due, especially amid the ever growing awareness and necessity for international, intercultural cooperation. but that is precisely what throws fundamentalism outside of the categories for belief systems at the pragmatic stage – for Christianity rises among Christians, but fundamentalism is itself blind to the veracity of its host beliefs except as to whether or not the conditions of the host are sustainable – for it is at its rudimentary praxes uncooperative, unnegotiable. fundamentalism is not any kind of belief; it is a function by which a system of beliefs can assume a tyrannical or at least dominant position against other systems. and what is partly so dangerous about this is that it does not retain itself within the order from which it originated but breaches all manner of diplomacy, protruding further and further into eventually raping the substances of other intermingling orders – überChristians are captured by the fabricated rhetoric of politicians raving world progress in the name of the Father and are at once moved to challenge, and respond to being challenged by, the sciences, in converting by forgery the observations of their religious reality into those of a scientific one (i.e. Creationism); Universal Darwinism not only confounds the sciences (for it is not itself a science but an approach to science) by castrating of them their necessary degrees of complexity and permanently vague teleological conclusions (wherever they have any), but also destroys God. it is thus not anything so innocuous as a choice of the right versus the left (which is itself too limiting a model by which fundamentalism can operate), but an uncompromising literalism with solely proselytizing intentions, a forceful insemination by a distorted and relentless intercultural phenomenon.
2007/09/22
a supposition for spirituality
involutionary niche 1: conservative ritualism
this is the most stagnant of the niches in spiritual development and is primarily a top-down determined expression of a religion's or culture's (mostly past) intention to incarnate the spiritual into symbolically meaningful praxis. the ritual performed from this niche in its relationship to one's spirituality greatly resembles the crossword puzzle or riddle to one's mentality, or even masturbation to one's physicality, in that at most it sustains or merely stimulates the faculties of the respective aspect of human being. change in respect to the ritual is mostly passive, derived from custom or ruling (thus the top-down scheme), and in fact the conservatism of its application requires a minimal of internal reflection or external informative influences.
involutionary niche 2: symbolistic institution
this requires knowledge of the ritual, if not the ritual itself, but expands it into the symbolic order of the religion or culture, as the responding procedure to the event of inquiry regarding the ritual -- the consensus to the inquiry 'why do we do this?' as it might possibly be answered with regard to the nature of what is spiritual. manifest ritual is explained through its relationship to the world.
(here is born the misconception of disparate worlds of being, that is, not that different modes of being [that accompany the diversity of perspectives and responses a person or a people may have to the world] occupy one existence ["we're all in this together!"] but that separate dimensions of existence [e.g. the divine and the natural] mysteriously occupy different times within one's singular mode of [potentially eternal] being. thus, we can also see from this the drive to submit oneself to [supposedly] unending occupation by forms of a separate existence as a goal to one's spiritual development [i.e. the invitation for the presence of christ to never leave me throughout my temporal Earth-based life].)
thereby, ritual is signified, made significant, by the education of its indoctrinated meaning. this niche is occupied by the greatest number of those whose vocation or inclination is to share doctrinal information ('spread the "Good News"') as it is by those who relate a tradition's signifiers to life as the final significance (or aspect of the final significance) to living.
involutionary niche 3: spiritual roundedness
the conditions of this niche have undoubtedly been most affectively experienced (though perhaps not yet sufficiently explained) by the world's most sincere mystics. however, most of these have likely failed to fulfill the niche, as i believe it requires as much a growing religiopolitical awareness as (if not more in the beginning than) the full-fledge impression of the real upon the sensible. for we must understand here that the real does not contain distinctions between the aspects of human being, and so the mental is as essential to pronounce in the symbolic order as the physical if the demands of the niche are to be met. human history and cosmology are quickly becoming active ingredients to this awareness and seem to promise to resolve the ritual to the most necessary praxes per individual or people, to suffice and sustain the remaining priorities of the spiritual that institutionalized religion and culture (qua State) cannot. (it may even require a further breach in consciousness that characterizes the stereotypical enlightenment of mystics, and scientists or artists.) among the terms of its range of perspectives is a dissolution of the human/divine dichotomy, and may include the same of the staticity to the self/other, Self/Other binaries. in any case, i believe it entails a consecration of the All, with oneself as fundamentally divine and Natural, as opposed to a consecration of merely one or the other. in a sense, it is dialectic, but to posit it in its explanation as merely a dialectical process is to miss by far the elements of its verity.
this is the most stagnant of the niches in spiritual development and is primarily a top-down determined expression of a religion's or culture's (mostly past) intention to incarnate the spiritual into symbolically meaningful praxis. the ritual performed from this niche in its relationship to one's spirituality greatly resembles the crossword puzzle or riddle to one's mentality, or even masturbation to one's physicality, in that at most it sustains or merely stimulates the faculties of the respective aspect of human being. change in respect to the ritual is mostly passive, derived from custom or ruling (thus the top-down scheme), and in fact the conservatism of its application requires a minimal of internal reflection or external informative influences.
involutionary niche 2: symbolistic institution
this requires knowledge of the ritual, if not the ritual itself, but expands it into the symbolic order of the religion or culture, as the responding procedure to the event of inquiry regarding the ritual -- the consensus to the inquiry 'why do we do this?' as it might possibly be answered with regard to the nature of what is spiritual. manifest ritual is explained through its relationship to the world.
(here is born the misconception of disparate worlds of being, that is, not that different modes of being [that accompany the diversity of perspectives and responses a person or a people may have to the world] occupy one existence ["we're all in this together!"] but that separate dimensions of existence [e.g. the divine and the natural] mysteriously occupy different times within one's singular mode of [potentially eternal] being. thus, we can also see from this the drive to submit oneself to [supposedly] unending occupation by forms of a separate existence as a goal to one's spiritual development [i.e. the invitation for the presence of christ to never leave me throughout my temporal Earth-based life].)
thereby, ritual is signified, made significant, by the education of its indoctrinated meaning. this niche is occupied by the greatest number of those whose vocation or inclination is to share doctrinal information ('spread the "Good News"') as it is by those who relate a tradition's signifiers to life as the final significance (or aspect of the final significance) to living.
involutionary niche 3: spiritual roundedness
the conditions of this niche have undoubtedly been most affectively experienced (though perhaps not yet sufficiently explained) by the world's most sincere mystics. however, most of these have likely failed to fulfill the niche, as i believe it requires as much a growing religiopolitical awareness as (if not more in the beginning than) the full-fledge impression of the real upon the sensible. for we must understand here that the real does not contain distinctions between the aspects of human being, and so the mental is as essential to pronounce in the symbolic order as the physical if the demands of the niche are to be met. human history and cosmology are quickly becoming active ingredients to this awareness and seem to promise to resolve the ritual to the most necessary praxes per individual or people, to suffice and sustain the remaining priorities of the spiritual that institutionalized religion and culture (qua State) cannot. (it may even require a further breach in consciousness that characterizes the stereotypical enlightenment of mystics, and scientists or artists.) among the terms of its range of perspectives is a dissolution of the human/divine dichotomy, and may include the same of the staticity to the self/other, Self/Other binaries. in any case, i believe it entails a consecration of the All, with oneself as fundamentally divine and Natural, as opposed to a consecration of merely one or the other. in a sense, it is dialectic, but to posit it in its explanation as merely a dialectical process is to miss by far the elements of its verity.
2007/09/09
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