healing whiteness: an exploration into the european indigenous soul

What's Your HotHouse?

2009-10-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, two people two people died in what the media is referring to as a "sweatlodge" in Sedona Arizona.

In fact, in my understanding, it wasn't a sweatlodge. As information has unfolded it has become more clear that this was not a traditionally run sweat. More of a hot house. this article used to be entitled "Sweat Lodge Deaths" but as information has come to light I have been encouraged not to even title this article using that term. And I have to agree.

I don't know if there were any traditional elders present to lead it. I suspect there weren't. We know there were 60 people in it - a traditional sweat might hold 12 people. We do know that Ray declined to be interviewed by the sheriff's office on the night of the incident and returned to California the morning after the deaths.

According to www.abc15.com -

"At one point, someone lifted up the back of the tent, allowing light into the otherwise pitch-black tent. Ray demanded to know where the light was coming from and who committed the "sacrilegious act," Bunn said. A man, yelling "I can't take it, I can't breathe, I can't do this" had crawled out, Bunn said. As it neared the end, Bunn said some participants found themselves physically and mentally unable to tend to those around them. After the eighth round, Ray instructed them to exit the sweat lodge just has they had entered -- going clockwise, a movement meant to symbolize being inside a mother's womb. What followed was a triage situation with people laid out on tarps and water being thrown on them to bring down body temperatures. Some people weren't breathing and had bloodshot eyes. One woman unknowingly walked toward the fire before someone grabbed her, Bunn said. Shouts of "we need water, we need water," rang out. "They couldn't fill up the buckets fast enough," Bunn said. Off to the side, a medical doctor participating in the retreat performed CPR on Shore and Brown with the aid of others. When Bunn asked if she could help because she knew CPR, she was told to stay back. Ray was standing about 10 feet away, watching, Bunn said. "He didn't do anything, he didn't participate in helping. He did nothing. He just stood there.""

I can't say much more about the differences at this point.

The Hot House was being led by James Ray (featured in the New Age hit movie - The Secret). It was, according to Dr. Christine B. Whelan, "the culmination of a five-day nearly $10,000 “Spiritual Warrior Event” advertised as a retreat to “accelerate the releasing of your limitations and push yourself past your self-imposed and conditioned borders.”

MSNBC reports that,

"In all, 21 of the 64 people crowded inside the hot house Thursday evening received medical care at hospitals and a fire station. Four remained hospitalized Friday evening — one in critical condition and the others in fair condition."

First of all, my heart is with the families and friends of those who died or are in critical care. Such a terrible, shocking tragedy. And to all those involved. I am sure James Ray is broken right now. Such terrible news. My heart is with this man who, I am sure, has helped many, many people and given much beauty to the world.

I have no idea what was involved in these events. There's often more than meets the eye. And accidents can happen to even the most skillful of people. It can be all too easy to jump on the bandwagon and make assumptions about what did and didn't happen or why. I really don't know.

And it lifted up many questions and concerns for me about the new age scene and our relationship to our limits.

THE CALL OF LEADERSHIP:

The world is on fire. To put it mildly - shit is going down. We face, as my friend and mentor John Robbins puts it two critical crises - the end of civilization as we know it - and the continuation of civilization as we know it.

And these times of what Caroline Casey calls, 'dire beauty' are calling many of us forward to do the work that is needed for the stopping of the violence, creation of alternatives and deep healing work that is needed.

But we'd do wisely to remember what Spiderman's Uncle Ben said about the relationship of power and responsibility.

But before we explore leadership - we need to step back a bit and look at . . .

A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF LIMITS:

My dear friend and mentor Vicki Robin has, for years, been lifting up the question in my mind about limits. Certainly, there are limits based in old fears. There are self imposed restrictions that don't serve us. And then - there are real limits.

My friend Katchie Ananda, one of the most brilliant and grounded yoga teachers I know shared with me,

As a young yoga student, I more than once let an over-eager yoga teacher push me in a yoga pose past my limits - and I got injured. I so wanted to reach a new level that I discounted my safety in the pursuit of my goals. With time, I learned to take responsibility for my own safety, and now I teach my students to listen to their bodies and respect their limits. Ray's followers - tragically, perhaps criminally - apparently were not encouraged to do the same.

In most serious spiritual traditions, every teacher has a relationship to a teacher and a community that provides a check on the teacher's ambition and ego. The practice has developed over many years and can help the practitioner find an inner sense of a balance that allows for growth with integrity. It's a process that requires time, patience and mindful attention.

We are a culture obsessed with freedom. And we have learned to see freedom as the absence of any limits. Therefore - limits become the enemy of freedom.

In this culture: Freedom = No Limitations.

In fact, as George Bush often implied, those people who want to stop us from getting whatever it is we want to get - 'hate us for our freedom'.

And this is the problem. We feel entitled to live without restriction to our actions. We feel entitled to live as if our actions were without consequence. We've come to see anything that might limit our total freedom as an obstacle to be overcome at best - or an enemy to be destroyed at worst.

I want a woman. Her boundaries around touch? Something to overcome.

I want to sell this vacuum cleaner to this family so I can win the trip to Hawai'i. Their objections? Something to be overcome.

I want this land for my oil company. The indigenous people object? Something to be dealt with.

As one participant of the Hot House - Beverly Bunn related, "People were not physically forced to stay inside [the hot house] but highly encouraged. It was all about mind over matter, you're stronger than your body,"

This is, at best, a profoundly immature way to live and, at worst, pathologically sociopathic and lacking any empathy or curiousity to the boundaries we come across (in ourselves or others).

As Thomas Berry put it so well, "the universe is not a collection of objects, it's a communion of subjects." This world is not full of resources (to be exploited or stewarded or whatever) - it's full of relatives. With their own boundaries. Their own needs and desires.

A river is alive. It wants to go somewhere.

The mountain is alive. It wants to stand there.

Your fears are alive. They want to be listened to.

The older I get - the more I understand and resonate with the indigenous wisdom of 'all my relations'. Accord everything respect.

Limits are not the enemy of life - they're the expression of life. Everything is limited. That's the nature of this world. Hearts full of desires encased in bodies that will never fulfill them all. And there's a beauty to pushing those limits. To testing ourselves. Our capacities are often far greater than we imagine.

But - when limits are not respected (by ourselves or others) everyone has a breaking point.

* * *

My friend Tooker Gomberg was one of the most inspiring and creative activists I have ever known. And one of my dearest friends. In 2004, after suffering from years of depression, he took his life by jumping of a bridge. He couldn't take the pain anymore. He reached his limits.

A few weeks after his death I found myself walking with an old schoolmate and her friend who'd recently returned from a music school in Europe. After weeks of being pushed to new levels of excellence on the piano - he awoke one day to find himself in a straight jacket in a mental institution; with no idea of how he'd gotten there. His mind had, temporarily, broken. He'd reached his limit.

Our muscles are like that. They can lift more than we think. You hear of mother's lifting cars to free their children. But, there is a limit. There's a point where they start to give. They have limits. And, as new research in muscle growth tells us - the more brief and intense the exertion is - the longer the period of time is needed for the muscle to grow.

Muscles do not grow during exertion - they grow during rest.

And yet - there is an entire industry of personal growth that challenges people to surpass their limits - without the balance of the need to accept our limits as we find them. And so sometimes people might push themselves further than is appropriate. Perhaps they are told that the natural 'stop' signals they're receiving are just 'fear' and that they should push past it.

In this case, there is the possibility that many people became very ill and two died because they pushed themselves too hard. Possibly because there was a culture and world view encouraged them to not be able to notice or heed their own needs for self care.

Like many things in life - it is not simple. When do we push our limits? And when do we rest and not only accept them but . . . enjoy them.

I return to the words, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can - and the wisdom to know the difference."

And it's the wisdom piece that I think needs the most attention.

* * *

In his book "Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art", author Stephen Nachmanovitch explores how art and creativity thrive in limits - with edges to push up against and use. Give an artist only three colours of paint, one canvass and a theme - and you'll often see inspiration. Tell an artist, "okay . . . so do some stuff . . ." and watch them shrink. Limits can be freeing.

We believe that the lack of limits makes us happy - but it's not true. Less limits do not mean more happiness. More choices does not mean more fulfillment.

In one study, participants went through a photo shoot and were presented with two photos of themselves. They were invited to take one home. In the first group they were told they could come back and switch it for the other one at any time. The second was told this was their only time to choose - they'd be stuck with that picture forever. Guess which group was happier with their choice? Group two. Less options = more contentment?

Yes.

There's another way that limits are brought up for me in hearing about this incident.

WHEN ARE WE READY TO TEACH, TO HEAL AND TO LEAD?

"The sweat lodge needs to be respected," Joseph Bruchac, (author of "The Native American Sweat Lodge: History and Legends") said. "When you imitate someone's tradition and you don't know what you are doing, there's a danger of doing something very wrong."

He also called the number of participants in the lodge "appalling."

"If you put people in a restrictive, airtight structure, you are going to use up all oxygen," he said by phone Saturday from his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "And if you're doing a sweat, you're going to use it up that much faster." American Indian sweat lodges typically hold about 12 people and are covered with blankets made of natural materials, such as cotton or wool, and the air flow isn't restricted, he said. "I don't see how the person running that lodge could have been aware of the health and well-being of that many people," he said.

*

This is not direct commentary on James Ray. For all I know he is a fully trained sweatshop leader and this was a freak accident with circumstances we can't know about. (But what we do know is that Ray has refused to speak with authorities and has since left the state).

A sweat lodge is not something you play with. It's big medicine.

YOUNG TEACHERS, BIG CONSEQUENCES

When I was 19 years old I was leading workshops for high school students all around Alberta with a company I started. At 21 I was leading personal growth workshops for people two and three times my own age. At 25 I was running the youth program of the State of the World Forum (founded by Gorberchev). In my early twenties I was leading camps on activism to acitivists with far more experience than me.

And in every case - I really felt entitled to do so. I saw myself as a leader. And I got a lot of amazement from older people and praise. They saw me as a big deal and I enjoyed that.

But here's what I learned most from those experiences - I wasn't as ready as I thought I was. I was young. I was arrogant. I was full of self importance. I wanted to be seen as powerful and courted that.

And I got my ass handed to me many, many times. I got yelled at a lot. I had my ignorance of important issues lifted up again and again. Sometimes graciously and other times not. I had my limitations shoved in my face repeatedly. It turns out I could be dominating as a co-facilitator. Turned out I didn't know shit about issues of race and class.

I used to lead board breaking as an empowerment exercise for high school and juniour high school students. They'd each get an inch thick piece of pine. On one side they'd write a fear they had, on the other side they would write what it would mean to literally 'break through' the fear. It was profoundly powerful in its impact precisely because it was so scary for them.

And then, one day, one of my volunteers, going totally against my instructions in his technique deliberately, broke his wrist.

And I stopped. The real risk of what I was doing came home to me. This was no joke. And I'm not just talking the potential (very real) for my uninsured ass to get sued. People could get hurt. I was no karate master. I was teaching them to break wood in a few hours.

I'm not saying it was a bad thing to do or that I might never do it again but I woke up to the real risks in it. The impact of what might happen if it went wrong.

There's an old Gaelic Proverb: "Be aware that everything has a price. Be prepared to pay that price. But be aware that some prices are not worth paying."

It turns out that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. It's enough to make you think you know something, but not enough to do it right. Not enough to handle contingencies. Turns out you can sound really good and say the right things and impress people - but that words and aphorisms and platitudes or empowerment don't protect you from the world.

A friend of mine who became Chief of his tribe in Arctic Village at age 25 described to me having a year of being yelled at by grandmothers.

And maybe that's a part of being young - being arrogant.

And maybe that's why we have elders. As Michael Meade puts it, 'the role of the elder is to hold the ground steady while the youth go wild.'

The elders formed a container in which the youth could explore their limits with relative safety. Because the elders know something about humility. And limits.

* * *

My friend Randall Benson commented on this note saying,

"I grew up in this realm being my mother is Cree and my father is metis and participating in sweats, ceremonies and pow wows held by the elders of our community. I have never heard of this [kind of accident] until now. I am saddened that this has happened under the guise of a sweat. Simply put, there are but two individuals that I trust in all of Canada to lead me in a sweat and one is an elder (Cree)from where I am from and the other is another very respected elder (ojibway) from Manitoba. This is huge medicine and it MUST be lead by huge medicine (in service of others). PERIOD. This is what we (children) were imprinted with from day one. This stuff is not a business or a really cool way to get your "groovy card punched" it is as real as day and night and can be very dangerous if lead by the wrong individual and not just from a physiological sense but also for a spiritual sense."

*

And my friend Frank MacEowen - author of The Mist Filled Path and other books on Celtic and Highland Scottish spirituality - commented:

"I am still interested to learn what exactly happened with this. Having participated in over a hundred sweats "behind the buckskin curtain" of Native America, having trained for over a decade in how to lead a proper sweat, and having facilitated hundreds of personal and group purification ceremonies using the lodge myself, I have never heard of or seen *one person* have the reaction these people had.

Initiatory experiences of various kinds can and do stretch a person's concept and understanding of who they are but, the way I was taught, the sweat lodge is not the place where this happens. If anything, the purification lodge itself is simply a preparation for other such experiences.

Was there a toxin on the stones he used? That's what it sounds like to me. Was he not allowing people to leave the lodge if they wanted to? That's a form of violence.

Did he not start off slow, gradually build the heat so that a person can gently focus their mind, pray, and remove impurities through their sweat? If he used too many stones, put them all in at one time, then the sweat lodge (which is meant to be a womb-like experience) was hellish.

Whatever happened is clearly disturbing. Undoubtedly he wasn't attuned to the energies of each person within the group--which is a requirement of a purification lodge facilitator. Each person. This becomes an impossibility running a sweat for 60+ people. It is meant to be an intimate experience. I would never facilitate a lodge with more than 12 people. Period.

My fear is that part of the fallout from this will be an attempt to prevent First Nations people from the practice -- a practice for which there is a long tutelage so as to gain insight into the subtleties of the process."

*

Jacqueline Fayant, an indigenous person living in Edmonton shared with me her concern,

"I think when we decide to engage in writing on a article where the general public reads "Sweatlodge Deaths," that moment immediately diminshes what had been a long standing spiritual practice by our Elders for centuries - It should have read "Hot House Deaths" as what this person was practicing was... New Age and not Aboriginal traditional practices by a respected Elder.

The issue became political and it immediately implicated Aboriginal Spiritual practice by it's title, which has been a long standing defamation practice of media toward Aboriginal people for decades."

*

My friend and colleague Marilyn Daniels is a brilliant life coach and mentor for those not only wanting succeed with the system but who want to tranform it. You can find her work at http://visionlegacy.com/. After she read this, she wrote to me,

"As a coach, most of my clients come to me because they want to grow and move outside of their current limits. Most of the time this is a good thing - we need to outgrow outmoded cultural and personal patterns, we need to break out of culturally imposed definitions of who we are and what we can achieve.

Doing this, in fact, may be critical for our collective survival. We need to grow up as a species.... But there's a point at which this can all tip over into addiction to growth, the incapacity to accept oneself, the inability to respect inherent limits - our own and the planet's. Being able to hold each part of this complex equation with awareness is critical."

* * *

But we live in a day and age where you can become a 'reiki master' in a weekend versus a medicine person over a decade. You can become a successful motivational speaker in a few years vs. a traditional story teller in a minimum of seven. You can become a holistic practitioner in two years vs. a Druid in 12-20.

And this concerns me about the personal growth scene. The easy way that spiritual insights are tossed around. But, to quote my friend David Korten, "we can't talk these things to death. We need to live them into being."

And, when we try that, we discover it's not so easy to do. We come up against our limits. And those limits aren't the enemy - but they are there. And, if we ignore them we get hurt. If we step into leadership and ignore them - other people can get hurt.

In my youth and exuberant arrogance - other people got hurt (or could have). I led events that totally collapsed. At a summer camp in Montana I let the youth go climb around - only to see some of them thousands of meters away climbing up very steep mountain sides with no gear. And no nearby help. No one was hurt. I was fortunate.

These things happen to people in leadership.

But these days everyone wants to be a leader. Stated differently, many people want to be seen as leaders.

Stated another way still: many people feel entitled to be seen and treated as a leader. Entitled to self appoint themselves into that role. After all, what are two of the most common words used in ads today (especially promo materials for personal growth workshops)?

"YOU DESERVE"

Want to be a best selling author? You deserve that.

Want to be a revered seminar leader? You deserve that.

Want to be financially rich? You deserve that.

But . . . are you really ready for it? Have you authentically earned it?

(And have you really considered the impact of that? If you want to be a billionaire - how will you do that in a way that doesn't exploit the planet or make slaves of people? I have asked this question many times and never received an answer worth listening to.)

Here's a whole other perspective: when you are ready for it - people will ask you for it. When you are really a healer - people will start calling you on. When you've earned people's trust - they will naturally see you as a leader.

We live in a culture that doesn't think too highly of paying its dues.

I lead all the workshops I do on a Pay What You Want basis. People attend the whole thing and pay whatever they want at the very end. And when i do a crap job - I get paid less. When I experiment with a new format that doesn't work - I get paid less. And I think that's fair.

I led free three hour intro workshops for years and years until I finally settled on the content and got clear in my own mind how I was seeing marketing. As that relationship and point of view clarified - I had people insisting on paying me for the workshop.

"No, no. This is a free workshop."

And they'd look at me and say, "No. This was really good. I need to pay you something."

So then I started asking for money - sliding scale of $1-40.

But I didn't start charging until people started paying.

Are you ready for what you're asking for? Have you really earned it?

Being Chief of a community in traditional cultures wasn't primarily about power over others - it was about a deep responsibility for the clan. You were the one to make sure the elders and children were fed first. To make sure the tribe was safe. It wasn't the kind of job one hungered for. It was a vote of deep confidence from your community, it was a sign of trust. And it was a privilege - and a burden.

In traditional communities, being a shaman didn't mean you just led groovy workshops whenever you wanted. It meant you lived in a community and you got up at 3am when you were needed to tend to the ill and bring healing.

LIMITS ARE NOT THE ENEMY

The personal growth scene extols us to push past our limits, that we have no limits. There are books with titles like "Unlimited Power" or "Unlimited Wealth". As if limits, of any kind, were the enemy.

But we do have limits.

Rampant capitalism seems to think there is no limit to growth. But the Earth has limits.

In the movie 'The Secret' (in which James Ray is featured) this philosophy is extolled. There's this sense that we can do, have and achieve anything we want. And that we should. That if we can conceive and believe, we can achieve.

I wrote a whole blog critiquing this film - http://www.thesecretbehindthesecret.blogspot.com
and it's more than we can get into here.

And I'm not arguing against testing ourselves and growing. But I am concerned with the ways we go about it.

If you push too hard, and too fast doing yoga - you can hurt yourself. Very badly.

If you irrigate a field too quickly, the water bounces off the surface of the soil (it can only absorb so much so fast).

Yes, sometimes we need to move fast - and sometimes we need to slow down. This culture needs to slow many things down.

As Thomas Merton put it,

“There is a form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent means most easily succumbs -- activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of activists neutralizes their work for peace. It destroys their own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of their work because it kills the inner wisdom which makes their work fruitful.”

GROWTH IS NOT THE ONLY GOAL

Nothing in nature lives forever. Or grows forever. Death is there too.

We live in the days skyrocketing growth. Straight up in straight lines. Bigger is better. What do we want? More.

But a small business doesn't only need to grow big and sell. It can also grow deeper into the community. We don't just need to grow more powerful and wealthy - we can also deepen and wisen. Our economy doesn't just need to grow in GDP - it needs to deepen in quality of life. As Gandhi is said to have stated, "there's more to life than increasing its speed."

Is what we need right now really more power or more wisdom about how to use that power?

I feel concerned about the obsession of power to conquer our limits over the wisdom to enjoy, test and explore our limits.

I fear that our culture misunderstands growth. That is is like the acorn trying to grow itself by lacquering on shells on top of its shells and becoming a bigger acorn, rather than immersing itself in the necessary time of darkness to slowly crack, die and burst itself into the oak; an authentic growth far more profound than an increase of the shells.

Stated another way: to explore our limits is to explore our truest nature. Our limits aren't there to be dismissed as dreadful demonstrations of deep disempowerment but honoured as the containers we live in.

ARE WE READY FOR LEADERSHIP?

And so this is the question I put before the house - are we really as ready for leadership as we think we are?

This is what I've come to understand: it's not for us to call ourselves healers or shamans. This is what the community calls us when we do our job well.

A dear friend of mine who authored many books on Celtic Spirituality and led a number of workshops for a decade stepped down from him role as he grew aware of the way his own ego was playing into it and the need for his own inner work and journey. A step backwares and out of the limelight? Yes. And one deeper into his own authentic path.

My dear friend Julia Butterfly spent two years in a redwood tree she named Luna - to protect it, the old growth surrounding it and to bring attention to the issue. She's one of the most wonderful people I know. She asks people in her talks, "What's your tree? What's the thing you'd give your life for? Or to? Where's the place you can take a stand? What's your tree?"

I'd like to add another question here.

"What's your hot house?"

Where are we feigning greater expertise than we truly have. Where do we find ourselves posturing wisdom when we're really feeling clueless? Where are we settling for grandiosity at the expense of something deeper and truly grand? Where are we presenting half baked goods as fully baked? Where are we charging the full fee for something that's really only worth half?

Leadership (and perhaps simply these times) calls for deeper and deeper integrity.

It is supported by mentors and elders who can help us find our way. And if we're not elders yet - then that can be our role - to call the elders out of hiding and into the role they've spent a lifetime ripening for.

The world is on fire right now - and we are called to be bold, but humble. To have a strong ego, but not a big one. To take risks - but not carelessly. To test boundaries while we honour them. To give up the need to status, focus on our growth and enjoy the natural rise is stature we get in our communities when as we deepen.

Limits aren't the enemy - they're friends we can trust and enjoy. They don't confine us - they define us. Acting within our limits is not always laziness - it can be the height of responsible action. Sometimes saying 'no' to opportunities for leadership we aren't ready for is the best gift we can give.

As my dear friend Alli Starr often says, "We don't always need leaders. But we do always need leadership."

True freedom is not found in the absence of limits but in our ever deepening, respectful and loving relationship (and intimacy) with ourselves, others and the forces of life.

We feel most powerful when we act within our integrity. Acting outside of our integrity feels terrible. We feel ungrounded, off rhythm and hesitant. Integrity breeds presence and relaxed awareness.

Derrick Jensen wrote a book called "The Culture of Make Believe". Which is what our culture has become. Full of pretending. Full of pretense. Full of posturing.

In a culture of self promotion, we are encouraged to also engage in self reflection. We are invited to trust our own growing process, the wisdom and nature of our own boundaries. To trust the rate of our own growth. And encourage others to trust that too.

The irony is that when we let go of trying to be more, to be seen as so great - our natural greatness shows up. People aren't drawn to people who are 'confident' - they're drawn to people who are comfortable in their own skin. At peace with themselves. Centered.

"The best chief is not the one who persuades people to his point of view. It is instead the one in whose presence most people find it easiest to arrive at the truth".

~Mohawk Wisdom

* * *

Further Articles of the Incident:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33243288/ns/us_news-life/

http://christinewhelan.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/james-ray-death-lodge-when-will-we-learn/

http://beyondgrowth.net/guru-criticism/james-arthur-rays-spiritual-warrior-event-kills-2-injures-19-in-sweat-lodge-fiasco/

http://ecn.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DFAE654BAA0D7010!615.entry?sa=56154061

The Spells We Are Under - John Michael Greer

2009-02-17T10:19:00.000-08:00

Dear Colleague,

Attached is a critique full of provocative ideas for the environmental community. It is a personal letter and we have the author’s permission to circulate it widely. But to identify the people and context:

The author is John Michael Greer, who explains quite a lot about himself in the letter. We’ve also put a bio at the end of the letter.

The recipients are Patrick Reinsborough and James John Bell, members of the smartMeme collaborative, the activist-oriented message-and-media consultants. For more about smartMeme, see http://www.smartMeme.com

Greer is critiquing a book edited by David Solnit, “Globalize Liberation” (SF: City Lights Book, 2004). He focuses on Patrick’s chapter, “Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination: Values Crisis, the Politics of Reality, and Why There's Going to Be a Common-Sense Revolution in This Generation.” You can read that chapter on the Rachel site at

http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=508

Peter Montague is also publishing the chapter in several parts in Rachel’s.

The letter is perfectly understandable without reading either the chapter or the book, but it also frames a way to read or reread both. Enjoy! Discuss!

* * *

John Michael Greer writes:

James asked me for my thoughts on "Globalize Liberation," and I hope neither of you will mind a lengthy, even labored, response. The book is extremely thought-provoking in its strengths and weaknesses alike, and it's given me an opportunity to rethink many of the assumptions I've had about social change and the potential shape of the future. Since I come to these issues from a somewhat unusual perspective -- the perspective of a practicing mage and initiate of several magical orders -- I recognize that the ideas "Globalize Liberation" evoked in me are perhaps a little different from those common in the progressive community. Thus I've chosen to explain those ideas here at some length.

James, we've talked extensively about magic, but I don't know how much of that you've shared with Patrick. For that reason, not to mention the off chance you might pass this around to others, I should probably take a moment to explain what I mean by magic and why it's relevant to social change at all. Dion Fortune (Violet Firth Evans), one of the most important magical theorists of the twentieth century, defined magic as "the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will." While magic as I understand it is more a craft than an art or a science, the basic principle holds. The medium of magic is consciousness -- one's own consciousness, that of other people, and (more controversially, at least within the worldview of modern industrial culture) that of other-than-human entities of various kinds. The tools of magic are will, imagination, and the innate structures of consciousness itself, constellated through formal patterns of symbol and ritual. The goals of magic are defined by the individual magician.

The relevance of all this to social change and society in general was pointed out powerfully by the late Ioan Culianu, one of the few significant modern scholars of magic who was also a competent mage. In his groundbreaking "Eros and Magic in the Renaissance" (1984) Culianu argued that modern advertising is a form of magic, and proposed that modern consumer societies can be seen as "magician states" in which social control is primarily maintained not by violence but by manipulation through magically charged images. It's a crucial insight; when people treat, say, fizzy brown sugar water as a source of their identity and human value, their resemblance to fairy-tale characters under an enchantment isn't accidental. They're quite literally caught up in a spell.

Those who aren't used to magic may find it easier to think of spells as stories. Quite a lot of magic, in fact, can be understood as storytelling. The mage uses symbol and ritual to tell a story, and makes it so spellbinding that the listeners come to believe that it's real -- and then make it real by their actions. Magical combat is a struggle between storytellers, in which each mage tries to define a common reality in terms of the story that best serves his or her purposes. The struggle between the global corporate system and the activist community, to build on Culianu's insights, can be seen as a
conflict of magicians telling opposing stories.

One obvious danger in magical combat is that of falling under the spell of the other mage's story -- but there's also the subtler danger of falling under the spell of one's own story, losing track of the fact that it's a story rather than the raw undefined reality of human experience out of which stories are assembled. When that happens, the self-enchanted mage may not be able to let go of the story, even when it's no longer relevant and another story would be more useful. As the old tale of the Sorcerer's Apprentice points out, if you lose control of the magical forces you summon, you're in trouble. Something of this sort seems to have happened in large parts of the progressive community.

Reading "Globalize Liberation" highlighted for me three stories, or spells, in which many of today's progressives seem to be caught. Let's call them the spell of reification, the spell of corporate triumphalism, and the spell of rescue. (This last has another name that's more revealing, but I'll save that for a bit; I'm sure you know that mages don't bandy about true names too freely.) I'd like to talk about those spells first, and then go on to talk about the more hopeful side of the book: some of the ways in which today's progressive community has begun to master its own magical powers and, with them, the future of the world.

I. The Spell of Reification

To my mind, one of the most striking essays in "Globalize Liberation" is Van Jones' piece "Behind Enemy Lines: Inside the World Economic Forum" (pp.87-96). It's especially valuable because it brings core assumptions of the progressive community up against the very different world of industrial society's ruling elite.

Jones was astonished to find that the vast corporate structures against which he and many other progressives had been campaigning so hard -- the WTO, the World Bank, and so on -- were treated, by the people who run them, as mere tools to be used or tossed aside at will. The elite see themselves personally as the holders of power, and institutions as their means and modes of power. The activists outside the police barricades, by contrast, see the institutions themselves as the problem. The scene from "The Wizard of Oz" comes forcefully to mind; Dorothy and her friends try to figure out some way to deal with the terrifying apparition of Oz, the Great and Powerful, but never notice the little man behind the curtain.

This is only one form of a pervasive problem in today's progressive politics: the way that identification so often transforms itself into reification. In magical tradition, names are a source of power, since to name something is to give it a context and meaning of the mage's choosing. In struggles for social change, it's therefore crucial to name what one is fighting; that's identification. But to go beyond this, to forget that every name is an abstraction imposed on a complex reality, and to treat the name as though it's an independent reality lurching around all by itself causing problems -- that's reification, and it's fatal.

The economic elite Jones encountered at the World Economic Forum use reification as a form of protective camouflage. The WTO and its like distract protest from the people and interests who shape, operate, and profit from them. The elites could discard any of them in a heartbeat without bringing the world one step closer to progressive goals. But this isn't the only form of reification that gets in the way of effective social change.

Starhawk's essay "A Feminist View of Global Justice" (pp. 45-50) shows another kind of reification at work. Starhawk's a capable mage, and her essay is a good example of name magic. Responding to claims that the world's problems are caused by corporations pursuing their own good under the banner of neoliberal ideology, she argues that corporations and neoliberalism alike are simply forms of patriarchy. By this act of renaming she subordinates anticorporate language and analyses to the feminist philosophy she's defended so ably in her many books.

But what is this thing called "patriarchy"? As feminist philosophers have rightly pointed out, there's nothing in American society or culture that isn't part of the system of privilege subordinating women to men. It's useful to glance a few pages ahead to Betita Martinez' article on racism, which argues that the system of white supremacy (the name she places on racism, in another act of name magic) similarly embraces every institution in American society. If every part of American society is part of the system of patriarchy, and every part of American society is likewise part of the system of white supremacy, are the two systems actually different?

I'd point out that human relations and exchanges in American society (and indeed most others) suffer from systematic inequalities along lines drawn by gender, color, age, ethnicity, social status, sexual orientation, body weight, physical appearance, and many other factors. None of these divisions exist outside the whole system of privilege. It can be good strategy to use labels such as "patriarchy" to focus attention on some particular group suffering under the system, but it's crucial not to fall into the same mistake as those who protest the WTO, and forget that patriarchy is simply one mode of privilege, a manifestation rather than a cause.

Failure to realize this burdened an earlier generation of activists with bitter, divisive, and utterly futile quarrels between men of color and white women as to whether racism or sexism was the "real problem," when the real problem is a system of privilege that treats gender and color, among many other things, as grounds for unequal treatment. But reifying privilege as something separate from society as a whole doesn't advance understanding either. The word "privilege" is merely a way of describing systematic patterns of inequality in the fabric of human relations and exchanges; it doesn't exist outside that fabric, and it can only be changed by changing the fabric thread by thread, weaving it into new patterns of equality and mutual respect.

Of course systematic oppression of women on account of their gender is a reality, and something that any progressive movement worth the name needs to confront. In that Starhawk's essay focuses attention on this, it's performing a valuable service. But it's crucial to remember that many women also suffer oppression and injustice for reasons unrelated to their gender -- reasons such as color, ethnic background, and body weight -- and that women can also be privileged by social divisions, and inflict oppression and injustice on others. Using a label such as "patriarchy" for the whole problem obscures these issues and, as I'll show a little further on, closes off potential avenues for effective action. Beyond this, insisting that one particular mode of privilege is more important than others is itself a claim of privilege, and -- as in the case of the quarrels just mentioned -- commonly accompanies attempts to claim that one group's experience of oppression and injustice deserves more attention from the activist community than others.

Reifications are problematic because they can distract progressives from points of access where their actions can make a difference. Consider George Lakey's fascinating account of the Otpor movement against Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in his article "Strategizing for a Living Revolution" (pp. 135-160). One of the tactics Otpor members used to halt police violence against them was to take photos of their wounded and make sure the family members, neighbors, and children of the police got to see them. This was a brilliant bit of magic. The individual human beings who made up that reified abstraction, "the police," were stripped of that identity by a spell of unnaming, and turned back into neighbors, husbands, children, parents: people who were part of civil society, and subject to its standards and social pressures. That couldn't have been achieved if Otpor had reified and protested "police brutality," since that act would have strengthened the reification of police as something other than ordinary members of society.

The same point should be made about one of the most pervasive reifications in "Globalize Liberation," the reification of the existing order of society itself. David Solnit's otherwise excellent introduction (pp. xi-xxiv) falls headlong into this trap. Solnit confidently proclaims that "the system" is the cause of the world's social and ecological problems, and then goes on to define "the system" as the sum total of those problems: war, economic exploitation, and so on. It's a breathtaking display of circular logic, and invites the retort that "the system" is simply an abstract reification of everything about the world that the progressive community doesn't like.

Again, Lakey's account offers a potent alternative. Otpor strategists recognized that the Milosevic dictatorship wasn't an independent reality imposing itself from above on a passive society. It was simply an arrangement of things within Serbian society, and could only exist with the constant cooperation of millions of ordinary Serbs. The same is true of today's global corporate economy; it exists because people throughout the world, and especially people in America, uphold it by their actions. In effect, we are "the system." If we recognize that fact, instead of reifying "the system" as some force alien to us, we can own and then wield our power over it.

II. The Spell of Corporate Triumphalism

The notion that "the system" is something outside the society that constitutes it goes hand in hand with the claim that the struggle against "the system" is entering its most desperate phase right now. Patrick, I'm going to pick on you here, mostly because you indicated a willingness to accept scathing criticism; plenty of other essays in the book fall into this same rhetoric. You start your thoughtful essay "Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination" (pp. 161-212) with the words: "Our planet is heading into an unprecedented global crisis. The blatancy of the corporate power grab and the accelerating ecological meltdown is evidence that we do not live in an era where we can afford the luxury of fighting merely the symptoms of the problem." Language like "doomsday economy" and repeated insistences that we have no choice except all-out struggle feed this sense of desperation.

There's a strong confirmatory bias at work in discussions of these topics in the activist community, which has resulted in the widespread acceptance of statements that can't be justified by the facts. You comment, for example, that the current ecological transformation is "the sixth great extinction," that it's more rapid than any other, and that it threatens the survival of the Earth's biosphere itself. This rhetoric is extremely common in activist circles these days but it's not actually supported by scientific research into the Earth's past extinction crises, which I'd encourage you to look into. There have been more than twenty great extinctions since the end of the Precambrian Period, not five (or six); many past extinctions were much swifter than the present example (the K-T event that wiped out the dinosaurs was almost instant, since it involved an asteroid smashing into the Earth); and the Earth's biosphere has easily weathered crises much more drastic than anything it's facing now. The current crisis is a reality but it doesn't threaten the survival of life on the planet.

Does this mean that we needn't worry about the ecological and climatic shifts now under way as a result of human blundering? Hardly. Given that global warming alone may well drown every coastal city in the world under rising oceans, wreck the global agricultural system on which six billion people depend for their daily meals, and send tropical epidemics raging through the temperate world, just in the next century, we have plenty to fret about. As James Lovelock has shown, the earth's biosphere is an intricate, powerful system that responds homeostatically to cancel out imbalances. Our society's inept prodding at the biosphere risks kindling a homeostatic response that could flatten the proud towers of our cities and push Homo sapiens to the brink of extinction.

This view of the situation has a solid foundation in science. As a tool for raising questions about the existing order of society and mobilizing individuals and communities, it's likely to work at least as well as the rhetoric of desperation described above. Yet it's received very little attention in progressive circles. Partly that's an effect of the third spell I'll discuss in this essay; partly, it's a rhetorical habit, common on the American left from colonial times to the present, of using apocalyptic rhetoric to prod people into listening (though by this point people are pretty well immunized to it). Partly, though, it's the result of another factor.

This factor is a mythology of corporate triumphalism. Today's global corporate economy presents itself as the inevitable wave of the future, a rising power that will master the destiny of the planet sometime soon if it hasn't done so already. Francis Fukuyama's widely read essay "The End of History" typifies this myth: "liberal democracy" (that is, corporate socialism manipulating the republican systems of an earlier era of politics) is the most efficient and therefore the best possible form of government, and so history defined as the evolutionary clash between competing forms of government is at an end.

Fukuyama's essay is a masterpiece of unintentional comedy, with its implied portrayal of George Herbert Walker Bush as Hegel's "world-historical personality" -- am I the only person who thinks that Bush the First talks like Hardy Har Har, the chronically depressed hyena in the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons? -- but it also offers a glimpse into the workings of the myth. It starts with a clever reification, turning six thousand years of wildly diverse events into a single process called "history," which by Hegel's definition has one driving force (conflict between forms of government) and one goal (the triumph of the "best," or rather, the most efficient form of government). By this act of name magic, all previous time becomes a process leading inevitably to today's global corporate system, and the total triumph of that system becomes the natural conclusion of everything that's come before: the end of history.

Progressive activists might be expected to challenge this forcefully, and present new ways of seeing the past that either dissolve "history" altogether or redefine it in ways that foster social change. Instead, most modern progressive thought accepts the myth of corporate triumphalism intact, merely changing the moral signs ("good" becomes "bad" and vice versa) and tacking on a final chapter in which, at the last possible minute, the good guys win out anyway. The resulting story makes for good fantasy (it's the basic plot of Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings") but bad strategy. Worse, by fitting the social change community into the dramatic role of heroic fighters for a lost cause, it subtly encourages activists to put themselves in positions where they will heroically fail to accomplish their goals, thus playing the part the story defines for them.

As a contrarian thought experiment, imagine that by some accident (a head-on collision between two time machines?) you find yourself holding a history of the world published in San Francisco in the year 3004. You eagerly turn to the pages about the early 21st century, hoping to find out how a triumphant, expansionistic corporate system was defeated by a heroic minority of global activists. What you find instead is something quite different...

"By the dawn of the 21st century it was clear that the ramshackle structure of economic and political compromises that followed the disastrous Great European War of 1914-1945 was falling apart, and taking Euro-American global hegemony with it. Efforts to expand that hegemony's technological base in the late 20th century by introducing supersonic transports, large-scale nuclear power, and other dubious advances went nowhere in the face of popular resistance and economic realities, while spectacularly inept handling of currency exchange problems by would-be "global managers" among the governing elites put formidable strains on a faltering system. The triumphant imperialism of the 19th century had given way, and the global capitalism that followed it proved too weak to resist the forces of change.

"From 1970 on, elite groups knew they faced severe resource and energy shortages in the near future, and from 1990 on the catastrophic threat of global climate change could no longer be ignored (though it was publicly denied), but the system they were expected to manage lacked the flexibility and resources to respond to these hard realities. Nor could it cope with the ballooning of a fictive economy built on exotic financial instruments -- essentially unpayable IOUs with nothing backing them -- which emerged in response to pervasive weakness all through the productive sectors of the economy. Increasingly frantic transfers of jobs, resources and wealth across nation state borders propped up the system over the short term, but the resulting ecological and economic damage fanned the flames of popular discontent and brought the final collapse steadily closer.

"2001 marked the beginning of the end. In that year, another fiscal crisis mismanaged by the elites pushed the nation state of Argentina (now part of the Confederacion de Vecindades de America del Sur) into economic and political meltdown. Argentines responded by building new, locally based networks for decision making and exchange, and as these expanded the remnants of national government slowly flickered out. Fiscal and ecological crises elsewhere in Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe in 2005, 2008, and 2010 saw more than a dozen nation states start coming apart in the same way. Even in those nation states that managed to hold together through the troubled first decade of the 21st century, economic dislocation and political failure drove the growth of new local systems on the Argentine model. As news of these spread over the Internet, it fed a growing awareness that the old order's days were numbered.

"In the end, the breakup of the West Antarctic ice sheet in 2012 proved to be simply one crisis too many for a beleaguered, malfunctioning, and overloaded system. Faced with rising sea levels and coastal flooding worldwide, hamstrung by an unmanageable burden of unpayable debt from the fictive economy, and targeted by overwhelming popular resentment due to their failure to take preventive action against the global warming crisis, the world's economic and political elites were left without any viable options at all. Most members of the elites were killed outright or fled into hiding. In their absence, the old society fell apart in a matter of months, leaving local networks and neighborhood councils to pick up the pieces."

Take a moment to think of your own place today in that history of elite failure and collapse. To mimic the effects of confirmatory bias, think of everything you know that fits that vision of the future. Make an effort to experience the world around you as though today's global corporate system isn't a triumphant monster, but a brittle, ungainly, jerry-rigged contraption whose managers are vainly scrambling to hold it together against a rising tide of crises. See the issues that engage your activism in that light, not as though you're desperate, but as though the system is. It's a very different perspective from that of most activists, and reaching it even in imagination might take some work, but give it your best try.

The point I'd like to make, once you've tried on both stories of the future, is that both of them -- the story of corporate triumph and the story of corporate failure -- explain the past and present equally well. The actions of the IMF and the World Bank in the last decade or so, for example, can be explained as a power grab by a doomsday economy in the driver's seat, but they can equally well be explained as desperation moves by a faltering elite faced with a world situation that's more unsteady and ungovernable by the day. The same is true of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and anything else from the current-events page you wish to name.

Which of these stories is true? Wrong question. The events that define either story haven't happened yet, and which story people believe could well determine which way the ending turns out. If people believe that the global corporate system is invulnerable, most of them will make their peace with it and come to rely on it, and their actions will give it more power. If people believe that the global corporate system is doomed, most of them will withdraw their support from it and begin seeking alternatives -- and that in itself could doom it. Ask yourself, then, which of these stories fosters more hope, gives more encouragement to alternative visions of society, and more effectively cuts at the mental foundations of today's economic and political systems.

Yet of course these aren't the only two choices. Philosophers of science have agonized over the hard realization that any given set of facts can be explained by an infinite number of hypotheses. Mages, by contrast, revel in the freedom this implies. The freedom to reinterpret the world, to abandon a story of desperation for one of possibility and hope, is basic to the worldview of magic. It's a freedom that today's progressive community might find it useful to embrace as well.

III. The Spell of Rescue

But the progressive community's embrace of the rhetoric of desperation and the mythology of corporate triumphalism have another source, as I've suggested above. Another spell or, to use a model that's particularly appropriate here,another story keeps these patterns in place.

Patrick, I'm going to pick on you again, though I could as well discuss most of the essays in the book. "Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination" tells a story with three characters. One is innocent, helpless, and in need of rescue. The second is sinister, devious, and the cause of the first character's predicament. The third is heroic, idealistic, and the first character's only hope of rescue. The biosphere, the corporate "doomsday economy," and the activist community are the names you give these three characters. Other essays in the book tell the same story but give the characters different names. Still, you know whose story I'm talking about. It's the story of Dudley Do-right.

On the off chance that you somehow missed out on watching the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, where he originally appeared, I'll summarize. Dudley Do-right was a Mountie, blond, heroic, and as thick as a brick. His girlfriend Nell Fenwick was always being tied to railroad tracks by the villainous Snidely Whiplash. Dudley rescued her time after time, to the sound of Snidely's trademark line, "Curses, foiled again!" The next episode, though, there's Snidely tying Nell to the tracks again as Dudley gallops to the rescue. The roles of the three characters are as predictable as a corporate press release: Snidely has the active role and gets the action going in each episode, Nell's role is passive (getting tied up and rescued), and Dudley's is reactive (foiling Snidely and rescuing Nell).

Map the story of Dudley Do-right onto your article and it fits down to the fine details. "The system" has the active role, and it's always tying someone or other to the railroad tracks. The biosphere, in this case, waits passively to be rescued. The progressive community reacts by galloping to the rescue, and Whiplash Petroleum issues a press release saying "Curses, foiled again!" Dudley uses direct (re)action of various kinds -- at the point of assumption (he tries to talk Snidely out of tying people to railroad tracks), destruction (he unties Nell from the tracks), production (he flags down the train), and so on. The next episode, though, there's Snidely tying Nell to the tracks again. And again. And again...

What's happened here is another bit of magic gone awry. The magic in question is what the system of magic I practice calls "assuming a godform." For certain kinds of magic, mages in my tradition choose one of the gods or goddesses of ancient Egypt, based on the energy they want to bring into focus -- Isis for love, Horus for power, Nephthys for wisdom, and so on -- and first visualize, then actively experience themselves as that deity. In its psychological dimension (it has others) assuming a godform is a way of temporarily redefining self-concept. Who you think you are defines what you think you can do, and that sets the limits on what you can do. Assuming a godform allows the mage to step outside the limits of ordinary self-concepts by taking one aspect of human potential and raising it to the power of infinity.

People do this in a less conscious way all the time. Kids assume popular culture "godforms" right and left -- look, I'm Spider-Man! Most adults do it a bit more subtly, but if you watch them and know your pop culture you can usually figure out what images they've assumed. You'll also notice, though, that many of them are stuck in a single image, repeating the same role over and over, even when it's conterproductive. I suggest that this is what's happened to the American progressive community; it's gotten stuck in the godform of Dudley Do-right.

No, I don't think today's activists literally spent too much time watching the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show and got mesmerized by Canada's least intelligent Mountie. Like any satire, Dudley Do-right pokes fun at familiar themes; we laugh at him because we all know the story he's lampooning. The self-concept that the progressive community has embraced is the one Dudley Do-right makes fun of, the image of the heroic rescuer. Assuming that image in the first place was good strategy: an effective counter to negative images of "protesters," not to mention a way to impose the image of Snidely Whiplash on defenders of privilege. What makes it a problem is that activists got stuck in the role and can't step out of it. They can't see themselves as anything but heroic rescuers. As confirmatory bias comes into play, they inevitably see the world around them in terms of Nells to rescue and Snidelys to vanquish.

The spell of Dudley Do-right has much to do with the purely reactive stance of the American activist community. When activists define their role wholly in terms of resistance and refusal, of "articulat[ing] a NO to the system" (David Solnit's phrase, p. xv) rather than pursuing a positive ideal, they guarantee that they'll perpetually be scrambling to counter some new assault by the system, trying to maintain an inadequate status quo against the threat of further losses, rather than making the system and its defenders scramble to counter efforts to change the status quo for the better. This reactive stance comes out of the Dudley Do-right role, since the heroic rescuer is always reactive; it's the Snidelys of the world who get each episode moving by grabbing another Nell and tying her to the railroad tracks.

Dudley also underlies some of the less productive rhetorical habits of the activist community. Patrick, I'm going to use your sidebar "Framing the Climate Crisis" on p. 182 as an example; it's fairly mild compared to some of what we've all seen, but it'll make the point. You argue that "[i]t's up to activists to ensure that people understand that a small cartel of energy corporations and their financial backers knowingly destabilized our planet's climate for their own personal gain. This may turn out to be the most devastating crime ever perpetrated against humanity, the planet, and future generations." Grand rhetoric, but I trust you're aware that it's a fantastic hypersimplification of a hugely complex issue. To be precise, it's a Dudley Do-right definition, in which activists are Dudley, energy corporations are Snidely Whiplash, and "humanity, the planet, and future generations" are a collective Nell.

Is it a useful redefinition? Depends on what you're trying to achieve. It sounds as though you hope to target the energy companies for destruction by using them as scapegoats for disasters caused by global warming. If that's indeed your intention, it might work, but since global warming's sources go far beyond the mere Snidelyhood of oil companies (and include the actions of the energy-squandering American middle class you skillfully dismiss as "soccer moms"), having oil company CEOs torn to pieces by howling mobs won't actually do much for humanity, the planet, or future generations. In the meantime, the rhetoric of demonization helps guarantee that the issue of global warming will become more fiercely polarized and further from a solution than ever.

An alternative approach might be worth considering. Again, George Lakey's discussion of the Otpor movement is relevant. The Otpor strategists deliberately avoided polarization of the sort that American progressives embrace reflexively. Instead of demonizing the police, they pursued a policy of outreach, building bridges that ultimately reached into the upper levels of the police bureaucracy. That paid off handsomely in the final crisis of the Milosevic regime, when the police stood by and did nothing as crowds seized the Serbian Parliament building. If activists in this country took an Otpor approach to people in the energy companies, instead of painting Snidely Whiplash's long black mustache on them, they could get similar results.

Of course this would require giving up the very real emotional payoffs of the Dudley Do-right role; the rush of being a rescuing hero is a potent drug, and so is the righteous indignation of knowing your enemies are Satan (or Snidely) incarnate. Letting go of Dudleyhood can also require giving up more tangible payoffs; as Patrick points out in an excellent analysis of the professionalization of dissent (pp.193-199), significant parts of the activist community have been bought out and turned into junior partners in the corporate system. Playing Dudley Do-right is among other things an effective way to ignore one's own complicity in arrangements of privilege and exploitation, since everything can be blamed on a Snidely Whiplash of one's choosing (such as "the system").

IV. Binaries, Ternaries, and Shifting Levels

I'd like to shift gears here and talk a little more directly about the magical dimension of all this. One of the interesting things about the spell of Dudley Do-right is that it's a dysfunctional ternary. James, we've discussed magical number theory at quite some length, but again I don't know how much of that you've shared with Patrick, and if either of you show this to anyone else the chance that they'll have the least idea of what I'm talking about is pretty slim. So I'll try to sum up the elements of magical philosophy in 500 words or less.

Toward the beginning of this letter I mentioned that the structures of consciousness are tools of magic. In the system of magic I practice, those structures are identified with the numbers from 1 to 10, understood not as quantities but as abstract relationships. You can experience anything through any number (though numbers above 10 denote relationships too complex for the human nervous system to handle). Each number has its strengths and its weaknesses. If you're working deliberately with the structures of consciousness -- which is to say, if you're a mage -- you choose the structure/number you use based on the effects you want to get. Most of the time, for reasons too complex to get into here, you choose one, two, or three.

Anything seen through the filter of the number one is called a unary. When you see something as a unary, you highlight qualities in it such as wholeness, indivisibility, and isolation. See it through the number two, as a binary, and you'll highlight different qualities such as division, conflict, balance, and complementarity. See it through the number three and still different qualities such as change and complexity will be highlighted. All these have practical implications. If you want people to cooperate and build community, get them to think of themselves as part of a unary; if you want them to quarrel and resist change, convince them they're on one side of a binary; if you want them to make change, make them think of their community and their world as a ternary.

Our society has a persistent habit of always seeing things in binaries. The binary is symbolically masculine -- think of the ithyphallic straight line, defined by any two points -- so this isn't surprising! Our politics divide up into left and right, our ethics into good and evil, our most popular religions oppose one god and one devil, and so on. Campaigns for social change are no different, and plenty of activists think they can get where they want by opposing something. In a binary, though, every action is balanced by an opposite reaction, so thinking in binaries is very problematic if you want to foster change.

If you're a mage, you respond to dysfunctions of this sort by shifting numbers. The traditional rule here is that numbers always change in a specific order: one becomes two, two becomes three, and three becomes one and shifts to another level. (The reasons for this rule, again, are too complex to go into here.) Thus if you've got a situation that presents itself as a binary, and you want to change it, you can't effectively turn it back into a unary -- it'll just pop back into being a binary again -- but you can turn the binary into a ternary by redefining the situation in terms of three independent factors, rather than two. This is called neutralizing a binary, and it's a very common bit of magical strategy.

The "good cop/bad cop" routine is a move of this sort. The cops redefine the binary between policeman and suspect by having one officer act friendly, while the other comes on like Attila the Hun. The binary opposition dissolves, and fairly often the suspect talks. The American political establishment uses the same move on the progressive community every four years, with the Democrats playing good cop and the GOP playing bad cop; activists time and again get sucked into the ternary, and put their time and energy into a candidate whose only claim on their attention is that he's not quite as bad as the other guy. It doesn't help that the two parties switch roles and do the identical move on conservative activists too.

James, you and I have talked at quite a bit of length about ways that activists can take control of this dynamic and use ternaries for their own purposes -- for example, by having "good cop" moderate progressives and "bad cop" radicals double-team a corporation or a government. But it's a crucial mistake to oppose "good" ternaries with "bad" binaries, and thus turn the relationship between them into a binary. Every number is appropriate in some places and a waste of time in others, and the Dudley Do-right scenario is an example of a ternary that's a waste of time. The three characters circle endlessly around one another; you've got action, complexity, and an addictive emotional payoff of self-regarding heroism and self-righteous indignation. What you don't have is a resolution of the problems the progressive community thinks it's fighting.

The magical response to the Dudley Do-right trap is to shift from ternary to unary, which means recognizing that Dudley, Nell, and Snidely aren't three independent factors at all, but three interdependent elements of a single structure of experience. As long as activists see themselves as heroic Dudleys, they'll inevitably see every problem in terms of Nells to rescue and Snidelys to rescue them from. Any one role defines the other two. Leaving that behind, in turn, involves shifting to a new level of self-awareness. Many activists these days honestly believe that the three roles are out there in the world, that the biosphere really is tied helplessly to the railroad tracks and the board of directors of Whiplash Petroleum really are twiddling their black mustaches and going "nya ha ha" as the train approaches. Banishing the spell requires waking up to the fact that these roles are in the mind of the observer, and that it's possible to define the situation in other ways.

This is one of the reasons why, earlier on, I deliberately proposed several models for the current situation that don't fit the Dudley Do-right scenario at all. For the biosphere to be a suitable Nell for Dudley to rescue, she has to be helplessly tied to the railroad track; the fact that this particular Nell might actually be an irritated grizzly bear, fully capable of breaking the ropes and tearing Snidely (and Dudley) limb from limb, doesn't fit the story even though it may fit the facts. In the same way, the future history that shows Snidely himself tied to the railroad track, flailing about helplessly as the train approaches, chucks the Dudley scenario out the window. Redefine one role and the entire story changes.

It may be high time for some such redefinition. I'm heartened by the words of the anonymous aboriginal woman quoted on p. 417: "If you come only to help me, you can go back home. But if you consider my struggle as part of your struggle for survival, then maybe we can work together." In the terms I've used here, she's saying that she isn't a helpless Nell awaiting rescue, and progressives from the industrial world aren't heroic Dudleys riding to her help. She's cast a spell of renaming that turns the Dudley Do-right ternary into a unary of equals working together for survival. Can that same spell be extended to the entire project of social change? I believe so.

V. Learning New Magics

I've put quite a bit of time into critiquing aspects of the activist community in this letter, and for all I know one or both of you may see that as a frontal assault against everything you believe. That's not my intention, though. I've tried, borrowing your language, to apply some direct action at the point of assumption -- that is, to challenge some of the inadequately examined assumptions that are hindering a powerful global movement for positive change.

What I see in "Globalize Liberation" generally is a situation in which theory hasn't caught up to practice. Shopworn slogans and reifications long past their pull date jostle new tactics and strategies that the old language doesn't really describe. Patrick, I've lambasted your essay "Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination" several times, but it's also in many ways the most impressive and magically sophisticated section of the book. Yes, it suffers from each of the problems I've noted, but it also breaks very promising ground.

I'd like to point out two things it does that put it way past many other attempts to analyse the situation and propose strategies. First, it focuses on the central place of imagination in the making and unmaking of social reality. That's spectacularly important. The politics of reality, as Theodore Roszak pointed out in "Where the Wasteland Ends" (1972), is a politics of the imagination. It's not just that change has to be thinkable before it's possible, though this is true and important; it's also that imagination can change the world by itself. The collapse of eastern Europe's communist bloc in 1989 happened because people stopped imagining themselves and their societies in ways that made putting up with a bad system reasonable. Remember the dazed expressions on the faces of so many former communist heads of state and secret police chiefs? Their power had always been imaginary; political power always is. What happened in 1989 was that people recognized that, and imagined it out of existence.

The essay goes on to say that "[i]f we want to talk about reality in the singular...we must talk about ecological reality" (p. 200). Here you're selling your own insights short. I grant that as mental maps go, ecology -- with its keen awareness of limits and consequences -- is a helluva lot more useful now than the economic models that powered industrial society through the glory days of the Age of Exuberance, but it's still a map, not the territory it tries to describe. If it's allowed to fossilize into a dogmatic ideology, it could become just as toxic as the mental maps it's starting to replace.

If we want to talk about reality in the singular, we haven't yet grasped the power of the imagination, because "reality" is always in flux, shaped by a complex dialogue between the blooming, buzzing confusion of the universe of our experience and the world-defining powers of the imagination -- and the result is never quite the same for any two individuals, ever. The Zapatista quest for "a world where many worlds fit" offers more than any one vision of what's real. That being said, I find the idea of earth-centered politics very useful, since it focuses attention on the raw experience of natural systems. If I may speak briefly from a position wholly within the magical worldview, how trees and stones imagine the world is at least as important as how human beings do so, even if the human beings are ecologically literate.

The second crucial thing "Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination" does is encourage self-awareness in the activist community. The edgy discussion of the professionalization of dissent, and the brief but lethal definition of "defector syndrome" in the appendix, challenge two of the most obvious places where activism has become its own reward rather than a means to an end. My comments about the spell of Dudley Do-right are aimed at another. When activism becomes a masturbatory act of self-gratification, as it sometimes does, it's just another part of the existing order -- a pressure valve that allows the disaffected to vent their passions harmlessly.

This is where "Globalize Liberation," with its focus on Third World activism and experience, has the most to offer American progressives. The essays on Zapatismo and the Argentine experience are among the most promising things I've read in social change literature in the last two decades. They point to powerful redefinitions of activism and the transformation of society, and if activists here in America pay close attention the results could be spectacular. The principles Manuel Callahan cites in his essay "Zapatismo Beyond Chiapas" (pp. 217-228) -- refusal, space, and listening -- would be worth applying within the activist community, as well as in interactions with the rest of American society. Can you imagine a group of radicals from San Francisco moving to Pittsburgh, and subordinating themselves to the community in the middle of the Rust Belt? If you can't, work on the idea until you can.

I could go on about many other strong points in the essays in "Globalize Liberation," but this letter has already ballooned to unjustifiable size and I'll limit myself to one: the theme of Marina Sitrin's brilliant piece "Weaving Imagination and Creation: The Future In the Present" (pp. 263-276). The notion of prefigurative politics itself is profoundly magical. Ritual magic, after all, is prefigurative politics on the individual level; the mage works with symbols, and focuses will and imagination through that act to make the symbol prefigure the reality. To do the same thing on the scale of nations and peoples is an immense challenge, but it's also a powerful possibility. It also points toward modes of politics -- parapolitics might be a better term -- that use the prefigurative power of the imagination to change the world without using anything that looks like politics in any sense we'd recognize today.

What I'm seeing most clearly in "Globalize Liberation" is a movement in transition, partly anchored in tactics and analyses from past decades, partly working with the improvisations of the present, partly reaching out to the new possibilities of the future. It's a promising sight. As I've suggested in talking about the myth of corporate triumphalism, the existing order may not be nearly so solid as it tries to make itself appear. It can't be repeated often enough that the modern industrial state isn't the natural endpoint (or endgame) of some inevitable historical process. It's what philosophers call a contingent reality; things happened to turn out this way, but they didn't have to, and there are good reasons why the future probably won't be a duplicate of the past. As we move into the twilight of the industrial age, the old bets are off.

So those are my responses. I hope some of this turns out useful. Call me or drop me an email any time if you want to talk about any of it.

With my best as always,

John Michael Greer

(added bio):
John Michael Greer is the author of eleven books and many articles on
magical philosophy and practice, including "Inside a Magical Lodge"
(Llewellyn, 1998), "The New Encyclopedia of the Occult" (Llewellyn,
2003), "A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism" (ADF, 2005),
and the forthcoming "Druidry: A Green Way of Wisdom" (Weiser, 2006). An
initiate in the Golden Dawn tradition, he has also been active in the
Druid community for many years; he currently heads the Ancient Order of
Druids in America (AODA), holds the highest level of initiation in the
Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD), and received OBOD's Mount
Haemus award in 2003 for his research into Druid history. He lives in
Ashland, OR, with his wife Sara.

More information and a complete list of his book publications are online
at http://www.aoda.org/about/greerbio.htm

The Waking Up Syndrome

2008-04-13T02:31:00.000-07:00

The Waking Up Syndrome

by Sarah Anne Edwards and Linda Buzzell

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality." — T. S. Eliot

Just dealing with our daily lives keeps most of us too busy to worry about whether or not the sky is falling. We focus on getting to and from work, paying our bills, doing our errands, and, if our time-stressed schedules allow, enjoying a little time to relax with friends and family.

But we’re deluged of late with dire pronouncements from high-profile newscasts, documentaries, and scientific reports about global warming, melting ice caps, dwindling oil supplies, and a looming imminent economic collapse. Closer to home, we’ve experienced climate-related disasters: floods, wildfires, hurricanes, wildfires, and severe droughts.

While the sky may not be falling, this day-after-day onslaught of alarming news is making it more difficult simply to overlook the triple threat of environmental, climatic and economic concerns. It’s leaving many of us feeling like Alice in Wonderland, being sucked down a Rabbit Hole into some frighteningly grotesque and unfamiliar world that’s anything but wonderful.

Few of us are eager to contemplate, let alone truly face, these looming changes. Just the threat of losing chunks of the comfortable way of life we’re accustomed to (or aspiring to) is a frightening-enough prospect. But there’s no avoiding the current facts and trends of the human and planetary situation. And as the edges of our familiar reality begin to ravel, more and more people are reacting psychologically. A noticeable pattern of behavior is emerging.

We call this pattern the Waking Up Syndrome, and it unfolds in six stages, though not necessarily in any particular order.

Stage 1 - Denial.
When we first get an inkling of the shifting environmental reality and its potential impact on both the national economy and our daily lives, most people begin by denying it. We slip into one of four common ways to discount things we’d rather not deal with:

“I don’t believe it.”
We simply deny the existence of any such concerns and refuse to consider them. This might include latching eagerly onto any few remaining naysayers for confirmation and comfort. But as the number of reputable naysayers dwindles, more people are forced to face the fact that “something” is happening.

“It’s not a problem.”
We may admit there’s a change taking place, but deny that it’s significant, seeing such things as climate change and economic fluctuations as part of a normal pattern that is nothing to concern ourselves with. Or we may incorporate the changes we see happening into our spiritual and religious beliefs, regarding them not as a problem, but a test of faith, a sign of a global spiritual awakening, or evidence of a long-awaited Apocalypse. Some may believe focusing on such problems makes them worse and that we should instead visualize, meditate, or pray for the world to be as we want it to be.

“Someone will fix it.”
We may admit major problematic changes are underway but conclude that there’s nothing we personally can do about them and we needn’t worry because technology, scientists, the government, or some expert authority will come up with a solution in time to save us.

“It’s useless.”
We may believe there’s nothing anyone can do about macro-problems, so why do anything, except perhaps eat, drink and be merry. What will be, will be.

Stage 2 - Semi-consciousness.
In spite of the various ways we may try to discount what’s happening to our environment (and consequently to our economy and whole way of life), as evidence mounts around us and the news coverage escalates, we may begin to feel a vague sense of eco-anxiety. Some express this as virulent anger at all this discussion about global warming. Others dissociate from their growing concern and misdirect their feelings toward other things in their lives, perhaps blaming family members or jobs for their undefined discomfort.

Stage 3 - The moment of realization.
At some point we may encounter something that breaks through our defenses and brings the inevitability and severity of the implications of our collective problems into full consciousness. We might read a particularly compelling article, learn more about the aftermath of Katrina, hear a news broadcast about polar bear deaths or rampant fires and flooding, see a documentary like “An Inconvenient Truth” or “The End of Suburbia.” Or — most dramatically – we might experience a natural disaster ourselves with all its personal and economic costs.

At such moments, suddenly we realize no matter how we try to explain away the changes that are happening, they are and will be accompanied by huge challenges to life as we know it and cause considerable pain and suffering for many, including ourselves and those we love.

Even if we believe all these disruptions are leading to a global spiritual awakening or a long awaited Apocalypse— even if we think some helpful new technology is going to emerge (hopefully soon)— we nonetheless begin to understand on a visceral level that the changes taking place will have dramatically unpleasant implications beyond anything we’ve faced in our lifetimes. In fact, we realize many of these uncomfortable changes are already underway and will be growing in coming months and years, affecting most of the things we love and cherish.

But like the character Neo in the 1999 movie The Matrix, even at this point we still have a choice. We can choose to swallow the metaphorical red pill and find out just how deep this rabbit hole goes and where it leads. Or we can take the soothing metaphorical blue pill and choose to “escape” from the nightmarish Wonderland of the rabbit hole we’ve fallen into by slipping back into the comfort of our favorite form of assuring ourselves that all is well.

But if, like Neo, we take “the red pill,” we wake up to the reality of our individual and collective situation. We get that the triple threat challenge facing us is a real Medusa monster. Once we’re awake, the problem is full-blown in our consciousness. It’s right in our face. It won’t let us turn away, and the force of it makes “waking up” incredibly painful.

The moment we realize — even briefly — that we’re slipping into a dangerously threatening new world that no longer makes sense according what we’ve always believed, our genetic wiring kicks in with predictable physiological and emotional threat responses that can take many forms.

Some of us become obsessive newswatchers, documentary filmgoers, internet compulsives or book readers, wanting to know more and more about what’s really happening. Loved ones may think we’ve gone nuts. Spouses may consider divorce; kids may decide mom and dad are hopeless cranks.

The more fragile or vulnerable among us may get depressed or experience panic attacks. If something about this current eco-trauma retriggers earlier traumas in our lives, we may have a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) reaction. Even the more resilient may throw themselves obsessively into save-the-planet and other activities, soon to become exhausted and weary from trying to do what no one person can.

Others, once they realize what’s happening, see it as a new business or political opportunity. These green business ventures can sometimes be helpful and productive, but at other times can actively circumvent or sabotage the efforts of those who are trying to solve the problems.

Stage 4 - A Point of No Return.
Once awakened, especially as economic and environmental changes intensify, most of us find there is no turning back. We find ourselves traveling deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. Whatever methods we’ve used to avoid facing the coming changes is no longer successful to quell our personal concerns. We can no longer help but notice the continuing rapid progress of the bad trends – more expensive energy, higher costs of living, a weaker economy, more species in trouble, rising temperatures, more devastating severe weather events, increasing political, economic and military competition (wars) over remaining resources, etc. It all starts to make a dreadful sort of sense as we let in the enormity of the situation.

One of the most difficult aspects of this stage is the profound but unavoidable sense of isolation and disconnection we may feel when living in a different world from most of those around us, a world we can no longer escape from, but one few others seem to notice. The result is a bizarre sense of surrealism. Interaction and communication can become a challenge. How do we relate to a world that’s no longer real to us, but is business as usual to most? Do we try to reach out to others about the ugly new reality and endure their defenses? Is it better to indulge those who don’t yet see the reality we’ve stumbled into and act “as if” nothing has changed just to get along? Or might it be easier to withdraw from life as we’ve known it and turn into a hermit?

5. Despair, guilt, hopelessness, powerlessness.
The realization sets in that one person or even one group or community can’t stop the effects of such things as climate change and peak oil and their economic consequences from impacting millions of people around the planet and at home. We see this thing spiraling out of control and realize that our species, and even we individually, are responsible for much of what’s happening! As the mayor of Memphis said to the Los Angeles Times when a major heat-wave hit his city and most of the Midwest and South last summer, “This is pretty akin to a seismic event in the sense that there is no solution that we here in this room can come up with that will take care of everybody.”

Some have suggested that this stage is similar to the traditional grief process, and indeed, this is a time of grieving. But there is a significant difference between this awakening and the normal experience of grief. Grief that occurs after a loss usually ends with acceptance of what’s been lost and then one adjusts and goes on. But this is more like the process of accepting a degenerative illness. It’s not a one-time loss one can accommodate and simply move on. It is a chronic, on-going, permanent situation that will not only not improve, but actually continue to worsen and become more uncomfortable in the foreseeable future, probably for the entire lifetime of most people living today. This is what author James Howard Kunstler calls “The Long Emergency.”

Our grief and sorrow are also amplified by having to bear the pain of upbeat acquaintances who go merrily along in their denial, discounting their own uneasiness about what’s happening and wondering why we’re so “negative.”

Stage 6 - Acceptance, empowerment, action.
As we come to accept the limits of our general powerlessness, we also find the parameters of the power we do have in this strange new situation. We discover we no longer need to resist our current and emerging reality. We don’t need to feel compelled to save the entire world or to hold onto a world that no longer makes sense. We are freed, instead, to pursue what James Kunstler calls “the intelligent response, ” seeking and taking whatever creative, constructive action will best sustain those aspects of life that are truly most important to us in the context of the changes unfolding around us. At this point our curiosity and creativity kick in and we can begin following our natural instincts to find what is both feasible and rewarding to safeguard ourselves, our families, our communities and the planet.

And indeed, growing numbers of people are beginning to respond with a plethora of creative, socially and personally responsible actions along four paths that are similar to those identified by Joanna Macy in her book World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal and Richard Heinberg in Peak Everything: Waking up to the Century of Declines. We are finding individual and collective ways to:

Resist making matters worse.
What’s going on may or may not be inevitable, but we don’t have to speed it along. We can do at least one thing to ease or lessen the negative impact of these changes. We can join an environmental action group, plant a tree, bike to work, help with a protest march or write letters to our congressperson. Just doing our little bit to limit the damage eases the psychological distress we’re feeling, even if we’re not “saving the whole world.” Taking even a small stand for what Macy calls “the life-sustaining society” (as opposed to the life-destroying one) gives us back our dignity and sense of agency.
Raise our level of consciousness so we can maintain some serenity and not burn out in the midst of all this change. We might adopt a spiritual practice of some kind, take up meditation, expand our understanding of ecology or history, or spend time reconnecting with nature, learning to live our lives in harmony with the rest of the earth.

Build a lifeboat for ourselves and our loved ones.
Many people are already taking steps to create a richer yet more sustainable way of life better suited to weathering the new economic and environmental realities. Some are moving to less vulnerable or expensive locales. Others are simplifying their lives, starting to lower their energy use, or creating personal and community permaculture gardens. Still others are changing into more sustainable careers, joining relocalization efforts to safeguard their local economy, or adopting alternative ways to exchange needed goods and services. Learning more about these positive possibilities is vital. Until we can see that there are options, there’s no way out of despair except to return to dissociating or denying, which only makes us more vulnerable to the difficulties around us.

Join with others in small communities
for support and understanding. Don’t try to cope with this enormous challenge alone! Find others who share your concerns and views. Some people have formed reading or study groups around books like David Korten’s The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, Richard Heinberg’s Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, Cecile Andrews’ Circle of Simplicity: Return to the Good Life, or Middle Class Life Boat by Paul and Sarah Edwards. Others are becoming active in relocalization efforts like those described on www.relocalize.net . Still others are joining together to turn their neighborhood into a sustainable “eco-hood” or exploring options for co-housing or eco-villages.

Taking some action in each of these four areas prevents us from getting stuck in panic and paralysis. It energizes us and re-establishes a sense of confidence and security in life. Does it mean we will no longer be plagued with concerns, doubts or even fear at times? No. The threat of what we face is huge and relentless. There’s never been anything like it in human history. All who awaken to the enormity of the challenges before us still slip and slide somewhere along this continuum at times. One day we may feel encouraged with our forward action, the next we may be back to despairing. Or we many need to take a mental holiday altogether for a few days or weeks so we can come back refreshed and reinvigorated, ready to work again on the survivable future we’re creating for ourselves and our loved ones.

When asked in an interview with The Turning Wheel if there are times when she ever thinks “Oh, no! This is impossible,” even Joanna Macy, who has been a leader in championing ways to address these changes, replied, “Every day.” But she goes on to explain that while she does think this at times, such times pass because she can’t think of anything more engaging and enjoyable than addressing the most pressing issues of our time.

Such wisdom seems to be the secret to living positively while navigating the painfully difficult stages of awakening until we get to the point where we can enjoy the daily challenges our dismaying situation presents to our imagination, our creativity and our deep and abiding love for the most valuable aspects of life.

To Learn More

Books

Circle of Simplicity: Return to the Good Life by Cecile Andrews.

World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal by Joanna Macy.

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David Korten.

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change and other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century by James Howard Kunstler.

Middle-Class Life Boat, Careers and Life Choices for Staying Afloat in an Uncertain Economy by Paul and Sarah Edwards.

Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren

Peak Everything: Waking up to the Century of Decline by Richard Heinberg.

Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World by Richard Heinberg.

Reconnecting with Nature by Michael J. Cohen.

Documentary DVDs

The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream. www.endofsuburbia.com/previews.htm

Escape From Suburbia: Beyond the American Dream

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

What a Way to Go: Life at the End of the Empire. www.whatawaytogomovie.com/

Crude Impact

Organizations

The Post-Carbon Institute www.postcarbon.org

Sarah Anne Edwards, Ph.D., LCSW, is an ecopsychologist, author, and advocate for sustainable lifestyles. She is founder of the Pine Mountain Institute (www.PineMountainInstitute.com ), a continuing education provider for professionals seeking to empower their clients to respond to today’s challenging economic and environmental realities.

Linda Buzzell, M.A., M.F.T. is a psychotherapist and career counselor in private practice in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, California. She is the founder of the International Association for Ecotherapy (http://thoughtoffering.blogs.com/ecotherapy ) and the co-editor of Ecotherapy: Psyche and Nature in a Circle of Healing (in press, Sierra Club Books).

the irish origins of civilization

2008-02-05T23:39:00.000-08:00

These are two of the most extraordinary books I've ever read.

They are by Michael Tsarion and present a compelling alternative history of Ireland.

Who were the Tuatha de Danaan?

What about those stone circles?

Why is there so much in common between Celtic and eastern cultures?

Read these books:

http://www.irishoriginsofcivilization.com/

Whiteness: Membership Has Its Disadvantages - Tim Wise (LiP Magazine)

2006-10-24T15:21:00.000-07:00

This interview was done by Brian Awehali for LiP (which no longer exists). To find more of his brilliance (and soon much of the LiP archives), you should also go check out: http://loudcanary.com

LiP recently caught up with Tim Wise to discuss, among other things, the ways in which privilege can atrophy a person's ability to deal effectively with adversity, why the discussion around reparations can reap benefits far beyond the simple meting out of financial compensation, and why Americans, but particularly white Americans, have been led to believe in a fictional version of the real world.

"...people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and, indeed, no church— can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words...If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring."

–James Baldwin

Tim, when I last interviewed you, we spoke a lot about "whiteness"—both as a concept and as a "mark of automatic advantage." Racial or ethnic battle lines have been part of the

United States

since its very beginning, and these lines permeate every aspect of society. Yet they remain, in large part, uninterrogated and invisible. On the one hand, you've got white folks' commonplace denial of their racism, which spares them from acknowledging not just their own bigotry, but also denies the reality of people of color. They don't have to see them.
And on the other hand you've got the invisibility of whiteness itself, made possible by the fact that white perspectives are taken as the norm. They're the dominant perspectives on everything, including the economy, education and crime.
As you explained, those are two ways white supremacy— the broad, institutionalized system that exploits people of color and defends the privilege of white people— is still allowed to remain hidden and incomprehensible to a lot of Americans.
While membership in the white system of privilege has its obvious advantages, I want to get into how membership has its disadvantages. What price does a person pay for accepting the benefits of a racist system?
Well, I want to be clear. On the one hand, "disadvantage" seems to be almost inherently a relative term, so I wouldn't say whites suffer disadvantages from being white. I mean, in a racist system, relative to persons of color whites clearly are ADvantaged, other things being equal or nearly so. But I would say that whiteness carries a cost, even for those who benefit from its privileges, and that despite the relative advantatges there are certain harms, consequences, or perhaps dysfunctional aspects that are worth talking about.
On a basic level, one might consider the harms that come from racial privilege if, by virtue of that privilege, one remains isolated from others. So, to live in an almost all white neighborhood, thanks to past and present housing bias, as about 85% of whites do, means huge advantages in terms of wealth and assets, but also means that we're cut off from the experiences, cultures and contributions of people of color—to our own detriment in terms of being functionally literate and interculturally competent for a country that is increasingly non-white, and a world that never was white to begin with. And while that isolation and ignorance might not have mattered in an earlier era, now it does.
Even more though, I think a system of privilege often has the effect of setting up those who receive certain advantages for a fall. What I mean is that dominant group members quite logically come to expect certain things, and to have a sense of entitlement as a result of their relatively privileged status. And that can leave a person unprepared to deal with setbacks: personal, professional, or whatever else. The coping skills that oppressed groups have to develop to survive, are not as "needed" for dominant groups, and the result is sometimes tragic.
I started thinking about this in the wake of the multiple white suburban school shootings, and also data I was coming across that indicated disproportionate pathological and dysfunctional behavior among whites in various categories.
I mean, general crime rates are disproportionate in communities of color and poor communities, due to socioeconomic conditions that are correlated with crime. Yet specific crimes, like serial killing, mass murder, child sexual abuse, or drug use, and other dysfunctions, like suicide, eating disorders, or alcoholism are mostly found in the white middle class. And whereas everyone, right or left, would seek to explain "why" in the case of dark and poor folks—the left saying economics and structural causes, the right saying genes or cultural flaws—when it comes to white and middle class dysfunction, the question, "why," isn't asked.
Or if it is, the "causes" are inevitably located externally—the video games, the music, the movies—and never viewed as possibly intrinsic to the group in question or the environment in which that group finds itself. But I wonder, "why the disconnect?" Why are some crimes or dysfunctions disproportionately dark and poor, and others disproportionately white and middle class or above?
I would suggest that part of the answer is that in this culture, whites are dominant, and tend to develop a sense of control, entitlement and expectation as a result, unlike non-dominant groups, who through experience know that obstacles and barriers are part of their everyday experience. And since dominant group members have not had to deal with major obstacles to our advance, or in terms of our being accepted and valued in society, we really haven't had to develop those coping skills. So when the going gets tough, so to speak, we, more so than others, are more likely to react in a manner that seems so bizarre that it literally defies logic.
So if you look at the various pathologies that are disproportionately found in the white community, what are they? Almost all pathologies about "control" and rage—serial killing, mass murder, sexual sadism on the one hand; and then internally directed control pathologies on the other hand, like suicide, eating disorders, alcoholism, drug abuse, etc. The pathologies that are disproportionately in communities of color are not about control in the same way—they are largely what could be called "survival" pathologies, and pathologies related to deprivation or perceived deprivation.
So what I am trying to ask is whether there may be dysfunctional aspects to white, middle class culture—and the advantages that come from being white, male and middle class—in terms of building up expectations, generating a sense of entitlement, and causing a sense of invincibility that leads folks to let down their guards to serious problems or pathologies?
In other words, is the system of racial privilege that benefits whites so much ultimately planting the seeds of those same white folks' self-destruction and social entropy?

Let’s talk about the concept of intercultural competence and functional literacy. It seems like that’s especially relevant right now.

Well, it’s a perfect analogy between on the one hand the cultural incompetence that comes from domestic segregation from one another, or isolation white from black, or white from latino, for example, and what’s going on right now internationally. As I’ve traveled around the country this last month it’s obvious to me that Americans—especially white Americans, but really all Americans—are fundamentally lacking in understanding of not only other cultures, but other people’s perceptions and realities. And this is why so many people can ask the question, "Why do they hate us?" And say it with no sense of irony, no sense of wonder at all. And I think our isolation from the world—even as we engage it globally, economically—is now coming back to haunt us.
And it leaves us in a situation where we’re vulnerable to attack, essentially because we’re not prepared for that, and we’re not expecting anybody to really hate us that badly. Because, after all, why would they? More than that, it also leaves us fairly impotent in terms of how to respond. So we respond, I would say, the same old way we do with anything, which is throw some bullets their way and show our military might without really thinking about the effect that that might have in other parts of the world. It may mean, as in Vietnam, that we’ll win every single military battle, which we essentially did in Southeast Asia, and still lose, isolating ourselves in the larger world community in the process.
And I think that that’s a direct analogy to what we do domestically. Whites are, as the dominant group, isolated from people of color. We don’t understand their perceptions, we don’t understand their reality, and we end up offering policy prescriptions for various things that only make things worse and certainly don’t solve whatever problems those communities are faced with.
I know you have a piece in the forthcoming Reparations Reader. Why should the US consider reparations for African Americans?
Probably the better question for me is why wouldn’t we? I think that from any standard of international law or regular tort law in the US, persons who are injured have a right to compensation. And I think in this particular instance, that right of compensation doesn’t expire when the original victims have died, or when the original perpetrators die, because the harm is ongoing and systemic.
And in the case of racism, you look at what slavery did, not only in material terms, to restrict victims’ access to wealth and opportunity, but also what it did in terms of instilling racism as an ideology, then I think the impact on today’s racial reality becomes clear.
For example, prior to slavery, there really wasn’t a thoroughgoing racist analysis that placed whites in a racial group above everybody else and placed blacks as a racial group at the bottom. Really, it was slavery itself, by embedding the inequities between white and black, by creating a systemic structure of injustice, that then required rationalization.
So, as a way to rationalize the systemic injustice that was already taking place on the ground, the ideology of racism developed as a post hoc rationalization. And in that regard, even with slavery gone, and putting aside the material inequities that came about, which I think alone are enough to justify reparations...you still have to grapple with folks that claim black people are genetically or culturally inferior, and whose books become bestsellers. That kind of reality, that kind of ideology, there would not even have been a reason for it to develop, absent a system of institutional injustice that required some sort of justification to make it jibe with the larger American ideology of freedom and opportunity.
And I think in that regard [white folks] all now reap the benefits, and suffer the harms, that come from slavery, whether or not our families owned slaves, because as the result of this ideology of racism, white Americans have been placed both intellectually and structurally above people of color. So I think there’s a monetary rationale—a straight economic rationale—and also this larger ideological one.
Do you think South Africa and what they’ve done post-Apartheid is actually a good model for us to look at?

Partly. I think there certainly would be no harm in having a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example. It’s long overdue and probably should have been done a hundred years ago or at least 35 or 40 years ago.

The only controversy might be whether we should operate in the same way. In South Africa, as long as you’re willing to come forward and admit a crime or injustice you perpetrated against African blacks, you’re more or less forgiven, with no punishment except in the most extreme cases. I’m not sure that’s necessarily the model for us to follow. I think we can demonstrate in such a commission a significant amount of systemic injustice that [justifies] substantial reparation.
But at the very least, it would begin the dialogue, and I think that would be positive. And it would get us to talk about our history in a way that—and I make this point in the piece I contributed to the Reader—would really be liberating not just for the victims, whose stories would finally be told, but would also be liberating in a different sense for white people. Because I think that one of the harms we rarely talk about that comes from racism and white supremacy is the damage that it does [to the dominant group]. I think if you look at the whites who owned slaves, or whites who benefited in relative terms, you find that it stunted a certain amount of emotional growth and healthy human development.
I think of it in my own family terms. In this piece I’ve written for the book, I read through my family history and I see the way that my own family’s humanity was distorted. My own family’s ability to relate to one another in a decent, sort of humane way was stunted by our ownership of other human beings. When you look at pictures of my family and other white folks from that period, nobody’s ever smiling. Everybody looks very severe, like life is beating them down. And here was a family, one side of it anyway, that was quite wealthy and owned a number of slaves. But there seems to be no joy, no celebration of life at all in them.
You read their wills, where they’re leaving their footstools and armoires and then 5 slaves to their descendents and you just think "What does it take for a human being to think this makes sense in their mind?" And I would suggest that in order [to rationalize saying] "Here, you can have my armoire, you can have my cattle, you can have my pots and pans, and you can have Minerva, the slave woman," you have to cut yourself off from your own sense of who you really are, and cut yourself off from the decency that you probably had as a young child. You have to ignore what’s staring you square in the face. Which is that these are human beings. But you can’t let yourself think that, so you have to numb yourself to human pain. And that is just a horrible thing for anybody to have to do.
I think a reparations discussion would allow those persons who have been the beneficiaries, in relative terms, of this system, to repurchase that part of their soul that had to be diminished, that part of their family, that part of their humanity, that had to be diminished in order to make all of this OK.
What do you think can be done right now? How do you think, in the broadest possible terms, we can tear down the system of racial privilege? How can we use the "war" and its aftermath to help move that change along?
Well, I think most people will not come to an anti-racist position, especially if they’re white, based solely on the recognition that racial privilege is wrong. I think some will, maybe 20% can be brought over to an anti-racist position on that basis. But for the rest, I think it has to do quite a bit with recognizing the dysfunctionality of this system.
And that dysfunctionality exists on a number of levels. One aspect is the cultural incompetence that hurts our ability to make effective domestic or foreign policy. We’re seeing that right now. The other aspect is what I mentioned earlier, which is this large-scale social dysfunction that comes from receiving privilege. In the short-term, and in the relative sense, it’s nothing but good for those who receive it, but in the long run it really does set those same people up for a fall. And I think that pointing out the dysfunction, really asking white Americans to reflect on the harms and damages that come from a divided and unequal society is important. [It’s important that they] recognize what those harms are for them, and go beyond just saying how horrible it is for the other and how good it is for them. Really seeing the dysfunctions and making that part of the analysis is critical.
And I think we generally haven’t done that. Most of the really strong writers and theorists around racial privilege have focused on simply getting white people to recognize their privilege. And I think that’s part of it. But unless there is a reason for those white folks to want to give up that privilege, then the reality is that in a society like this, where self-interest is put above everything else, the more you convince someone they’re privileged, the LESS likely they’re going to be to want to try and end that.
So the question becomes "Well, why do I want to give it up?" I think the only answer to that for the vast majority is going to be because the cost that you pay to receive those privileges is just too high.
You know, [there’s] something else I want to talk about, which I sort of came to by thinking about a longstanding theory in sociology called "rising expectations theory" or "frustrated expectations theory." This whole argument, which you may be familiar with, is that when an oppressed group begins to see an improvement in their condition, perhaps quite modest, often times their expectations of the improvement will outstrip the reality and how fast the reform is taking place.
As a result, they will become exceedingly frustrated, even more so than when they were just being oppressed. So because there’s a huge gap between the aspiration and the reality, that frustration will often assert itself in violence or destructive behavior. And I think that’s true. I think it’s a strong argument. I think it explains a lot of the urban riots in the 60s, for example. Why did they happen at the time that reform was taking place and not before?
But what’s interesting is that sociologists and those who have put this argument forth have never applied it to people who ALWAYS had expectations. Why is it that only those who didn’t have any and now begin to get some, and then get squashed—why is it that only THAT matters? Why isn’t the same true for those whose expectations have always been at a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10? When THEIR expectations are frustrated, why wouldn’t they—to perhaps even greater extent—either lash out in anger or violence, or turn that on themselves via drug abuse and other [disproportionately white dysfunctional behaviors] I talked about?
I think it’s just a matter of seeing that, in many ways, a society that puts forth a certain set of expectations [for] a particular group and provides them with these amazing privileges, is a society that, unless it never changes, can never live up to its promise over time. And so when those people who’ve been promised the world and have come to think the world is their oyster, when they finally have to compete for things against people, on an equal basis—whether it’s men having to compete with women, whether its white folks having to compete with people of color, whether it’s Americans having to compete with people around the globe—the tendency is to think "Wait a minute, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. We were always supposed to have the best of everything."

That’s not a realistic model for the world, but it’s one that unfortunately, we have really been led to believe was going to work.

Paleness as Pathology - Tim Wise

2006-10-24T15:17:00.000-07:00

Paleness as Pathology:

The Future of Racism and Anti-Racism in America

By Tim Wise

Published in LIP Magazine, www.lipmagazine.org, May, 2006

Writing about the future -- in this case, the future of race relations and racial inequality, but in truth about pretty much anything -- is never a good idea. To prognosticate about the fate of our fractured society is to invite retrospectives however long from the time of one's writing, pointing out that in this or that regard, you were flatly wrong. But although accurate projections about race in the U.S. (or globally) are always risky, the endeavor seems worthwhile, if for no other reason than to get us thinking about how things might be much different than they are now; to examine the kind of world we hope to create and how we might go about getting there.

So, having assumed the risk and burden of discussing the future of racism, let me now make one thing clear: I have absolutely no idea whether the system of white world supremacy is capable of being abolished, or even significantly reformed. What's more, if it is, I am largely at a loss as to what specific steps will be required in order to finally make such a thing transpire--and in truth, that's not all bad. Fact is, people of color have been trying to solve the riddle of ending racism for hundreds of years, so if a 37-year old white guy comes along claiming to have the solution that has thus far eluded millions of racism's targets, you should probably run like your ass was on fire.

Yet, having announced my inability to make clear and unambiguous predictions about whether racism is going to be ended (and if so, how), I can certainly offer up at least a few suggestions about what must be done in order to put us closer to creating a society where inequity on the basis of so-called race is a thing of the past.

Understanding the Importance of Self-Interest

Traditionally, those in the civil rights and antiracism movements have sought to appeal to the decency and morality of America's majority -- that is to say, white folks -- in order to secure legislative and policy changes that would promote equal opportunity. While these approaches, combined with the force of social movements amassed in the streets, have secured certain reforms, the truth remains (as legal scholar Derrick Bell has argued), that white America has mostly responded not to its inner decency but rather our sense of self-interest. Only when whites have found ourselves menaced by the status quo, and decided that its maintenance would be a considerably worse idea than acceding to change, has change happened. So during the key period of the 1950s and '60s civil rights movement, absent the pressure generated by the Cold War to present itself as a bastion of democracy and liberty, it is unlikely that white America would have capitulated to change as quickly as it ultimately did.

Likewise -- and as John David Skrentny notes in his book, The Ironies of Affirmative Action -- absent the urban rebellions of the '60s, which ultimately scared white America shitless, it is doubtful that affirmative action programs (however limited they may be in securing true racial equity and justice) would have been implemented.

In other words, whatever moral conscience white America as a collective entity may or may not possess (and I wouldn't suggest placing too large a bet on locating such a social commodity anytime soon), it has not traditionally been that, but rather self-interest that has finally made whites, at least some of us, wake up to the need for a different direction.

Liberals might not like the sound of this. In fact, I'm certain they won't. They would prefer to believe that a really well-written position paper, explaining why racism and poverty are bad, will finally persuade policymakers to do the right thing. Maybe Congress just hasn't seen the latest missive from the Children's Defense Fund, they speculate. Maybe a few more letters to one's representative. Maybe another demonstration with really catchy placards. Maybe another bumper sticker slapped on one's car, reading something like, "It will be a great day when schools have all the money they need, and the military has to hold a bake sale to buy another bomber." Sure, that should do it.

But who are we kidding? The idea that white America (again, as a corporate entity, not as individuals) gives a rat's ass about doing what's right, flies in the face of more than a couple hundred years of experience. In 1963, about three-quarters of white Americans, according to Gallup polls, believed that the civil rights movement was moving "too fast" and asking for "too much." What can be honestly expected from a population as ethically moribund as that? A group that, at the dawning of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, told Gallup that the new anti-discrimination law should be phased in gradually, and should rely mostly on voluntary compliance by employers? A group that, even as recently as the mid-1990s said that although everyone should have equal opportunity to obtain any job, without regard to race, the government shouldn't actually do anything to ensure equal opportunity in practice?

No, for persons such as this -- persons who couldn't be bothered with more than a split-second glance at race and racism in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and who, according to polls, have since retreated back into their shell of denial and evasion on the matter -- the truth, however painful, is clear: White America, in the main, has no moral center to which one can appeal any longer, if it ever did. We have been staking everything on the contrary hope for a long time, with very little to show for it. Whatever changes we now celebrate rarely (if ever) stemmed from white folks waking up to the hell we had made for persons of color (whether in the U.S., Africa, colonial Southeast Asia, or anywhere else) and realizing the moral cost of continued oppression.

There have always been ulterior and much more self-interested motives. Lincoln, by his own accounting, went to war not to free black folks (whom he considered inferior and contemplated sending back to Africa had it only been feasible), but to preserve the federal system. White soldiers certainly didn't slaughter their blood brothers out of love for the sons and daughters of Africa. Indeed, the suggestion that the conflict might be about slavery, so enraged whites in New York (particularly Irish and German immigrants), that they responded to Lincoln's draft order by rioting--first attacking government buildings, but inevitably moving on to black neighborhoods, burning a black orphanage to the ground in the process.

Thus, as a matter of strategic concern, antiracists will have to do far more than make the moral case for equity. While such a case is still worth pressing, it cannot, alone, be expected to do very much--a fact that, although perhaps not terribly comforting, really shouldn't bother us in the least. After all, why do folks of color fight racism? Surely it is not out of the goodness of their hearts, or for some altruistic or charitable reason. Rather, it is because racism is deadly, and harms them: Fighting it is a matter of self-interest for people of color. And so what if it is? Do we really wish to suggest that whites should aspire to more noble motives -- as if we should be expected to be more selfless than others -- in our struggle against racism? Surely not.

So starting with the assumption that whites will not likely sever their attachment to existing systems of privilege and advantage for the "right" reasons, is it at least possible that they might be made to understand how those systems menace them too, every bit as much, if not more than the former Soviet Union ever did, or more than any urban revolt led by the dispossessed? Again, far be it from me to speculate as to what is or is not possible, let alone likely. Figuring out what will and will not motivate white Americans to head to the barricades so as to push for social change is probably a fool's enterprise in any event. But if such motivation is possible to come by, conjuring it must surely require a healthy dose of what follows.

Understanding the Roots of Modern Crises

While most of the left has long argued that capitalism is the primary impediment to peace and stability -- whether economic, ecologic or otherwise -- in fact, white world supremacy may be at least as critical, if not more so. Indeed, the extent to which capitalism is itself an outgrowth of European/white supremacy has been underappreciated by most on the left (particularly the white left, for reasons that are probably easy to understand). Marimba Ani, in her classic work Yurugu: An African Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, and Charles Ephraim, in The Pathology of Eurocentrism, (among others), have argued persuasively that competitive systems of economics did not simply develop naturally, as if by some Marxian edict of logical progression. Rather, they grew principally out of the dualistic mindset so common to European cultural thought and systems, stemming from Platonic and Aristotelian ethics. The splitting off of reason from emotion, now to be seen as conflicting human characteristics, or the splitting of nature from humanity, whereby the latter is seen as in need of controlling the former, and other such dyads, led to the creation of market systems, as well as racism and patriarchy.

Ani explains that Plato laid the groundwork of "an elaborate trap:"

"Once the person was artificially split into conflicting faculties or tendencies, it made sense to think in terms of one faculty 'winning' or controlling the other(s). And here begins a pattern that runs with frighteningly predictable consistency throughout European thought...The mind is trained from birth to think in terms of dichotomies or 'splits,' (which) become irreconcilable, antagonistic opposites...one is considered 'good,' positive, superior; the other is considered 'bad,' negative, inferior. And unlike the Eastern conception of the Yin and the Yang, or the African principle of 'twinness,' these contrasting terms are not conceived as complementary and necessary parts of a whole. They are, instead, conflicting and 'threatening' to one another...it is this dichotomized perception of reality on which the controlling presence (imperialistic behavior) depends."

To clarify: I am not saying that racism, in modern terms, preceded capitalism or patriarchy. Rather, I am suggesting that a particular way of viewing reality and the world -- a dominant cultural paradigm, or what scholars call cosmology -- emanating from Europe, having first taken root in ancient Greece and Rome, is what made the class system (ultimately capitalism), the gender system (patriarchy) and the race system (white supremacy) inevitable. All three are essentially European.

What began as a system of cultural imperialism, and Christian religious imperialism, later became racialized, with the creation of the concept of the white race. Although this concept was, as Theodore Allen has noted, largely crafted so as to rationalize oppression of African peoples, and to divide and conquer economically oppressed persons from one another, what Marxist theorists have often ignored is the origin of class conflict itself, which was necessary for either capitalism or racism to blossom. Most Marxists view capitalism as an inevitable stage of development, and thus, see no need to delve further into its culture-specific roots. But can we really view as merely coincidental the fact that the class system and capitalism as we know it developed in and from Europe? Or should we recognize in this something specific, something unique (and uniquely dangerous) about the European worldview?

As Euro/white supremacy developed into a full-blown system of now racialized and color-coded exploitation, it gained new life in the colonies of what would become the United States, and then the U.S. itself, even as the old European empires were beginning to crumble. Thus, white supremacy increasingly came to be a USAmerican product: after all, being expelled from one's colonial outposts, as happened with the British, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch and the Portuguese, made it increasingly difficult for Europeans to cling to the fantasies of their own inherent superiority. That dream had begun to die, for them, at the hands of Toussaint L'Ouverture in Haiti, and would continue its slow demise throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Likewise, the visible depravity with which Europeans treated one another -- with Nazi Germany being only the most extreme example -- made the idea of European supremacy harder to swallow, for those actually embedded in the cultures that had brought forth such monstrosities.

But in the U.S., second thoughts have been harder to come by, if for no other reason than the relative insularity, provincialism and even security that being bound by two oceans has long provided and encouraged. It is the American form of white supremacy, still, as with its predecessor rooted in the dichotomization of peoples into good/bad, responsible/irresponsible, which leads a nation such as the U.S. to believe itself entitled to the resources of the earth, be they oil reserves beneath the sands of Iraq, or coal deposits in a West Virginia mountainside. That entitlement mentality precedes the drive for profit, and helps to place it in its proper context. That same mentality then contributes to the world's ecological predicament, including global climate change, soil and wetland erosion, polluted drinking water and air, and the related health effects of all these.

It is the same white supremacist mindset that leads such a nation to believe itself worthy of dictating which nations around the globe can and cannot have weapons of mass destruction, or develop nuclear energy programs "responsibly." White nations can, as can Israel--which although not quite as "white" as the lands of Northern Europe, nonetheless is led by mostly European-descended Jews, in contradistinction to the region's darker, Arab majority. On the other hand, the black and brown are presumed incapable of possessing such munitions, and are to be stopped whenever possible in their quest to do so.

White supremacy, American-style -- which has become the dominant form on the planet today -- is what leads U.S. policy elites not only to believe an invasion of Iraq on false pretenses is justified, but also to assume it will be a smashing success. The hubris and self-congratulatory narcissism that predicted Americans would be met in the streets by Iraqis throwing flowers to the troops -- and which now cannot seem to fathom how badly things are going for the American empire -- stems from the mindset of racial and cultural supremacy that simply fails to see oneself through the eyes of others. After all, privilege and domination has allowed that same culture to never really care, or need to care, what others think. The result of such willed ignorance, is, sadly, now proving to be disastrous.

And it was only white Americans who seemed not to envision such a disaster, or to consider the moral implications of such a course of action. After all, prior to the March 2003 invasion, persons of color were largely opposed to the war in Iraq -- especially when the prospect of large-scale civilian death there was raised -- while whites, especially white men, remained resolute that the slaughter must go on, no matter how many Iraqis had to perish in the process. While black and brown folks, and even white Europeans, took a more nuanced and critical view of American war plans, that special breed of white person who we might call Caucasoid Americanus -- who, unlike their European counterparts haven't (yet) had their attachment to white supremacy tempered by the crumbling of our own version of colonialism -- pushed forward, convinced in the righteousness of the cause, and the invincibility of our gung-ho military.

This same mindset has regularly allowed the brushing off of mass death, so long as those doing the dying weren't white like us. Five hundred thousand Iraqis dead from U.S. sanctions, according even to former Secretary of State Madeline Albright? No problem. At least 30,000 Iraqi civilians dead because of the current war, even according to Bush--who proclaimed this grim (and no doubt highly understated) fact with no more emotion than one might demonstrate when telling another the day's weather forecast? Again, no problem. It's worth it: a sentiment most assuredly to be heard as well, and delivered every bit as coolly somewhere deep in the caves of Afghanistan with regard to 9/11. Sorry, but them's the breaks.

Even the Cold War was seen by many American war planners as a racial, and not merely economic or ideological conflict. Consider what General Edward Rowney, who would become President Reagan's chief arms negotiator with the Soviets, told Manning Marable in the late 1970s, and which Marable then recounted in his book The Great Wells of Democracy:

"One day I asked Rowney about the prospects for peace, and he replied that meaningful negotiations with the Russian Communists were impossible. 'The Russians,' Rowney explained, never experienced the Renaissance, or took part in Western civilization or culture. I pressed the point, asking whether his real problem with Russia was its adherence to communism. Rowney snapped, 'Communism has nothing to do with it!' He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said simply, 'The real problem with Russians is that they are Asiatics'."

In other words, even the struggle with the Soviet Union, which drained both nations of such resources, helped squander monies that could have been used for human needs, and led to millions of deaths in Africa, Asia and Central America (and the deaths of more than a few U.S. and Russian citizens as well, in places like Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan) was in large measure predicated on a desire to maintain white supremacy. Quite a cost, this system.

White supremacy also cannot prepare for, though it is directly implicated in, the coming energy crunch facing the West. Largely unwilling to move toward renewable energy -- because it is less profitable (at least at the present time), and because it fails to satiate the white desire to consume and destroy, thereby demonstrating the power of one's will and genius -- the West ambles into unsustainable and irrational energy policies (like drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or building more refineries and drilling platforms in the hurricane-ravaged Gulf of Mexico). So, too, we maintain our dependence on Middle East oil reserves, not realizing that given a few more years of American imperialism abroad, OPEC may decide they've had enough, and choose to stop trading in dollars as their main currency. A shift to the euro on the part of the oil producing nations (something a few of those states have already talked about) would literally cripple the American economy, demonstrating the limits of white supremacy, American style.

In other words, and to put it in colloquial terms, this cowboy shit won't work for much longer. At some point, the Indians fight back: economically, militarily, socially and culturally. For those seeking an answer to the eternal (and almost exclusively white) question, "Why do they hate us?" you couldn't do much better than to come to understand the way in which racism and white supremacy, with capitalism and militarism as its primary transmission belts, has been experienced by the brown-skinned persons of the planet.

These are folks, after all, who know (whether at the level of the actual data, or merely intuitively) that a fraction of our culture's military budget could save millions of lives if redirected to the immunization needs of their nation's people; that less than a couple of weeks of spending on the war in Iraq could guarantee sanitary water supplies for everyone in the world. That the U.S. in this way could save millions of children from death every year and yet chooses not to do so, speaks volumes about the fundamental evil of the white supremacist mindset, and fairly guarantees the kind of hatred, instability and even terrorism down the line, that Americans have come to fear.

So, for those concerned about terrorism; upset by how the war is going in Iraq; pissed off at the price of gasoline, or worried about the melting of the polar ice caps, extreme weather events, and related environmental catastrophes: Blame white supremacy. For those upset about the unavailability of health care in the U.S., and the unwillingness of this nation to make such a thing a birthright rather than a commodity, blame white supremacy too. After all, the difference between the U.S. and Europe when it comes to providing a wide array of social services has long been the sense that in America "those people" (meaning the black and brown) would suck up too many taxpayer dollars under such initiatives. Racist backlash to welfare programs has then, ironically, limited benefits for whites as well.

And for those concerned about their wages being too low, don't just lash out at capitalism: blame white supremacy, too. After all, it is the sense that persons working in sweatshops abroad or harvesting our food here at home are not fully human (and certainly not the intellectual or cultural equals of white Americans) that feeds our unwillingness to push for higher wages and better working standards globally, not just the desire for mega-profits in a vacuum.

Likewise, how else (except as a product of a deeply supremacist mind) can we rationalize the words of former World Bank chief economist (and most recently President of Harvard University) Lawrence Summers, who said in a 1991 memo that the West should encourage polluting industries to locate in "less developed countries," because "health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages." He went on to explain, "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that," and that, in his estimation, "under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted." While such sentiment poses as mere economic hard-headed rationality, in fact it demonstrates a racist contempt for the victims of such policies, which whether deliberate and thought out, or merely so taken for granted as to approach the level of the banal, results in the same thing: dead brown people for the benefit and glory of whites.

Ironically, by keeping the world's black and brown poor in a state of destitution (or even making it worse, as Summers would prescribe), we guarantee the kind of economic hardship that will encourage businesses to take advantage of their labor -- desperate people, after all, will work for shitty wages and in awful conditions -- to the detriment of wage rates and benefits in the U.S. as well. And anyone who has a problem linking such cavalier dismissals of human life and worth on the one hand, to "anti-Americanism" and terrorism on the other, demonstrates a profound inability to connect even the most basic of dots.

At some level, perhaps we already know the linkages are real, even as we are loathe to say so out loud. Consider, just for a moment the meaning of a 2004 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, noting that America has a rate of mental illness roughly double the global average, and five times higher than conflict and corruption-torn Nigeria. And not just for any mental disorders, but specifically for "anxiety related" disorders and substance abuse maladies. Why, pray tell would such a thing be true? Why should the most powerful people on the planet -- and we can rest assured that as with all clinical studies, whites were likely oversampled and make up the disproportionate bulk of those examined in the U.S. -- have more anxiety and feel more stressed than the world's poor?

Perhaps it is precisely the privilege and power that remains so tightly in our hands, which generates the anxiety, the sense of dread, the fear that provokes such ludicrous concepts as "preventative war," so as to get them before they get you. Add to the disproportionate power the mindset of competition and greed nurtured by both white supremacy and capitalism and you have the perfect recipe for mass paranoia. As Derrick Jensen explains in The Culture of Make Believe, such a national ethos causes the world, in the eyes of its people, to "devolve into consisting almost entirely of victims and perpetrators, the fuckers and the fucked...You will perceive that everyone is out to get you. And why not? After all, you are certainly out to get them." In other words, white supremacy is crazy-making, and not only for its targets.

What it all Means for Social Justice Movements

Only by connecting a wide array of global crises to the overriding system of racism and white supremacy can we hope to persuade white folks to kick their addiction to privilege and power. Even that may not work for most, but it certainly stands a better chance than hoping against hope that white America is going to undergo some moral awakening anytime soon. For movement activists and organizers, this means infusing all of our existing projects with an antiracist analysis that seeks to explore the white supremacist roots of the various single-issue and multi-issue crises we face. By forsaking the exposure of this common thread, we risk continuing the isolated and atomistic efforts that make movements weaker, by allowing activists to conceive of their issues as separate and apart from others. In addition, by focusing only on the economic linkages, as white leftists often do, we fail to account for why so many non-ruling class, and even working class whites continue to support regressive and reactionary politicians and their policies--war in Iraq, budget cuts for social services, tax policy favoring the rich, and so on.

The reason for their fealty to such efforts is, of course, that in the short run it makes sense: their interests as whites are furthered by policies that denigrate, locally or globally, the world's black and brown. So explaining the underlying, albeit destructive rationality to white conservatism on the part of working people is the first step: otherwise, we risk sounding as intellectual scolds, who insist on explaining to the lower classes their "false consciousness," which to most sounds like an effete way of saying stupidity. They are not stupid. Rather, they are playing the hand as it was dealt to them. But then, by demonstrating that playing that hand is, in the long run, self-destructive -- in other words, that there are absolute interests that are sacrificed by maintaining relative advantage and privilege -- we might convince a large enough number to trade in one form of rational behavior for another, more lasting one.

Not to mention, stressing the racist roots of our current predicaments will also likely allow a much broader coalition building than we often see at present. If people of color, who are usually far ahead of white folks in their commitment to equality and social justice, see whites willing to take up these issues of racial supremacy and privilege, and connect those to issues of war, peace, ecology and economics, they will be far more willing to work with whites on projects of joint concern. At present, white liberal and left dismissal of the role of race and privilege in antiwar and environmental work, often fractures would-be alliances and prevents movements from gaining in both strength and militancy, with obvious results that are none too good for said movements.

In other words, we must utterly reconstruct our existing movements for social change, from the bottom up, so as to make them antiracist in both analysis and action. This means refusing to work with activists and organizations unwilling to bring an understanding of white supremacy and privilege to their work: quitting, not going to the meetings, not attending the marches, not giving such efforts your money or your time, no matter how much you support their goals. This means insisting so long as you are in such contingencies that a comprehensive discussion of the racial roots of these problems be brought to the fore. It means insisting on following leaders of color in local and national groups who are struggling with daily issues of survival, and assisting with their efforts, in any way they deem necessary: prioritizing their issues, and demonstrating ones commitment to racial justice and equity as a first order of business. It means standing up as whites and challenging white supremacy and privilege, in ones community and one's activist groups, even at the risk of being ostracized, criticized and ignored. The key is doing this in a way that makes clear one is acting not so as to save folks of color, but because one sees that racism and white supremacy are at the root of the crises that menace us all. Making this argument clearly will allow us to avoid the anger/guilt response so common to whites when racism is discussed -- in other words, the feeling that one is being blamed for hurting others and asked to make amends only for their behalf -- and instead focus on self-interest (in the broad, communal sense of the term) as a motivator for action.

In short, the project is to pathologize whiteness, white privilege, and institutional white supremacy. It is to make white culture -- the dominant cultural form on the planet today -- the problem, the enemy, not only of folks of color, but of whites too. It is to demonstrate that white supremacy is not only homicidal to the black and brown but suicidal to those of us who are members of the club that created it. For thirty years or more we've been subjected to one or another analysis, policy paper or best-selling book that sought to pathologize black folks, black culture, and black behavior. Blaming the victim has been elevated to high art in such a short time as this. Only by flipping that script and demonstrating that we have not a "Negro problem" (as it used to be said in the 60s) but rather a "white problem," are we likely to have a future at all, let alone one to which we should look forward.

On the bright side, we can always take heart in the realization that former white empires, imbued with every bit as messianic and self-assured a mentality of supremacy (and the wealth and power in each case to back up that mindset), ultimately crumbled. They overreached, planted the seeds of their own destruction with their hubris, and ultimately bumped up against the limits of their own ambition, and the immovable will of their victims to finally stop dying en masse.

On the far less bright side, we must recall that the end of those empires came at the expense of many millions of gallons of human blood and tons of human bones, whether spilled and stacked by King Leopold, Hitler, Stalin, or the South African Boers. One can hope that the end of the American Empire will come with fewer spasms of orgiastic violence than these past collapses, that somehow the end will come more peacefully. But the willingness of fading tyrants to bring others down with them is so great, such hope may be more wishful thinking than anything else.

If we wish to see the end of this Empire (and surely we should know that others around the globe are literally dying for such an outcome, and quickly), we must do all in our power to make clear its dangers to others and ourselves. We must attack it from within, not because we hate America (whatever, at long last, that is supposed to mean), but because we love ourselves, our children, and the children of the world more. Because we are tired of being afraid.

INTERVIEW: Enemy of the State - Derrick Jensen Interviews John Zerzan

2006-02-10T00:53:00.000-08:00

Derrick Jensen (right), author of "Endgame: The Collapse of Civilization and the Rebirth of Community" is one of my all time favorite authors and currently occupies four of the 10 available spaces on my "Books to Help Heal Whiteness".

John Zerzan (Left), author of "Future Primitive & Other Essays", has inspired a generation of activists to think deeply about our modern way of life and what it means to be human in this world.

"I would say Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate all forms of domination. This includes not only such obvious forms as the nation-state, with its routine use of violence and the force of law, and the corporation, with its institutionalized irresponsibility, but also such internalized forms as patriarchy, racism, homophobia. Also it is the attempt to expose the ways our philosophy, religion, economics, and other ideological constructions perform their primary function, which is to rationalize or naturalize--make seem natural--the domination that pervades our way of life: the destruction of the natural world or of indigenous peoples, for example, comes not as the result of decisions actively made and actions pursued, but instead, so we convince ourselves, as a manifestation of Darwinian selection, or God's Will, or economic exigency. Beyond that, Anarchism is the attempt to look even into those parts of our everyday lives we accept as givens, as parts of the universe, to see how they, too, dominate us or facilitate our domination of others. What is the role of division of labor in the alienation and destruction we see around us? Even more fundamentally, what is the relationship between domination and time, numbers, language, or even symbolic thought itself?"
- John Zerzan (from the Interview)

To read the full interview:

http://www.derrickjensen.org/zerzan.html

INTERVIEW: Derrick Jensen Interviews Bruce Stewart

2006-02-10T00:43:00.000-08:00

"Recently in New Zealand I encountered a powerful source of such hope. His name is Bruce Stewart, and he lives at Tapu Te Ranga in Wellington. He is Maori. He is indigenous."
- Derrick Jensen

"We are suffering from a great illness, and the way to get better is to serve others. We should all be in service. It makes us well. I serve the birds and trees, the earth, the water. Anybody can do it. They can do it in their way. It's action time." - Bruce Stewart (from the interview)

http://www.derrickjensen.org/stewart.html

INTERVIEW: Singing to the Dawn: Thomas Berry On Our Broken Connection To The Natural World - By Derrick Jensen

2006-02-10T00:31:00.000-08:00

"Thomas Berry (left), author of The Dream of the Earth, does not fit the image of a typical environmentalist. A Catholic monk in his late eighties, he is a philosophical forebear to younger generations of activists. His main focus is not the immediate battles being fought, but the roots of the problem, which he traces back to the very beginnings of Western civilization."

" The mission of our times is to reinvent what it means to be human. I've always liked the title of Chellis Glendinning's book My Name Is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization. We somehow have to get beyond Western civilization, which is so destructive in its present state. Such a profound change is hard really to apprehend. It's an alteration so absolute and so far-reaching in its implications that a person has to wonder what continuity might remain." - Thomas Berry (from the interview)

To read the interview - go to:
http://www.derrickjensen.org/berry.html

INTERVIEW: Derrick Jensen Interviews Martin Prechtel

2006-02-10T00:23:00.000-08:00

In an age of many new age Shamans, with very little training, it is rare to come across the real deal. Martin Prechtel (left) is trained in the Mayan Shaman tradition and Derrick Jensen (right) is one of my all time favorite authors.

"So we all have, on some level, a commonality of experience. We are all still human beings. Some of us have buried our humanity deep inside, or medicated or anesthetized it, but every person alive today, tribal or modern, primal or domesticated, has a soul that is original, natural, and, above all, indigenous in one way or another."
- Martin Prechtel (from the Interview)

To read the interview - go to:

http://www.derrickjensen.org/prechtel.html

The Moral Degradation of White Privilege - by Rootsie

2006-02-09T15:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.rastaspeaks.com/Rasta/whiteprivilege.html

What happens when you approach life itself with a sense of entitlement, rather than a sense of awe?

You get all the relationships wrong.
With the natural world: its forces, its cycles, its creatures.
With other people, places, and things.
With your own self.

Since you feel you are entitled to all good things you can imagine, you are constantly functioning with lesser or greater levels of disappointment. You do not treasure what you have, but always crave more.

Since you are probably aware of the comparative deprivation of many, even if you make no conscious connection between their situation and yours, the natural injustice does affect you. You can make many choices here, from engaging in 'charity', to indulging hedonistically in things that stimulate your pleasure centers so you don't have to think. Diversions and distractions keep you from focusing on the truth of our situation.

In terms of natural law, ignorance is not an excuse. Just because you exist in the condition of privilege does not mean you exist outside of natural laws. Causes have effects, whether you are aware of them or not.

You may engage in rationalizations or justifications which all boil down to this: you are privileged, we are, because we deserve it, while others do not. Whether you bring forth religious justifications, nationalistic ones, historical ones that paint your people in a positive light as opposed to 'them', this engagement with illusion contaminates any efforts you may make to develop yourself, spiritually or otherwise.

In the realms of love and romance, your fantasy probably swirls around some variation of 'happily ever after', since this is what your sense of entitlement leads you to expect. If difficulties arise, you are unwilling to engage them. In fact, all efforts requiring time and patience are equally elusive: most often you want what you want and you want it now. This is the message being constantly beamed at you by the various media. All you desire is available to you. Now.

You are tied to matter, and this leaves you ignorant of the subtle treasures of heart and soul that lie beyond the realms of matter. Your things become idols. You covet them more and love them more than the truth. You comfort and console yourself with them, for the state of misery you are in is real, and unbearable otherwise.

You expect to be welcomed with open arms wherever you go, and you react with surprise and anger when this is not so. You believe that if you just say something, that makes it true. 'I am not a racist.' 'I am black on the inside, where it counts.' 'Race does not matter.' 'I have many black friends, so I know what it means to be black.'

You may believe that racial inequality is a thing of the past, and that the evils whites committed in the past have nothing to do with you now, or you may cite your own personal ancestry, and point out that your people had nothing to do with the past 500 years of slavery and oppression.

But injustice for many is injustice for all: it cuts both ways. You did not choose to be white and to live in the West. You do not want this privilege, and yet it is yours. You are aware that in the present equation, pleasures for you mean pain for others. Well, no matter how you feel about it, until you move to do something about it, real happiness will elude you. It doesn't matter if this seems fair to you; this is simply how it is.

Further, it is impossible for you to be truly happy living with excess while others try to live without enough. You have to give it back. And not in the form of pity or mercy or charity, which are evil things as long as vast systems persist which maintain inequality. Charity is simply another one of those diversions that makes you feel good for a second but does nothing to address the disease in the long-run.

The way to give it back is not to run screaming away from the land of plenty and play poor in 'the third world' either. Another illusion, and simply dishonest.

The only thing to do is to devote your excess beyond what you need to live to activities which will dismantle this system of privilege. It is unnatural for people to work against their own interests, but white privilege is not in anybody's interest. If the purpose of life were to accumulate material possessions in such excess that others literally die so that you may possess them, that would be one thing. But no one really thinks that is our purpose here.

Our prevailing religion entreats us to 'love another.' It does not teach that we should love some more and others less. There is a profound personal price to be paid for hypocrisy. And thus agrees that same religion.

To benefit, willingly or not, from an immoral system of privilege taints everything in your life with immorality. This is monstrous, but it is true.

This is a society of addiction, of violence, of abuse, of grotesque consumption. It maims and mangles everyone in it. Appearance becomes reality, because reality is unbearable for most.

Ayinde Speaks

2006-02-09T15:38:00.000-08:00

I came across the website below and found the most beautiful and powerful collection of quotes and images. I commend the website to you. It opened my eyes to what Rasta was all about:

http://www.rastafaritimes.com/ayinde/

White Privilege - OSEPP - Org' for Sensible & Effective Prison Policy

2006-02-09T15:06:00.000-08:00

WHITE BENEFITS,

MIDDLE CLASS PRIVILEGE

IT IS NOT necessarily a privilege to be white, but it certainly has its benefits. That's why so many of us gave up our unique histories, primary languages, accents, distinctive dress, family names and cultural expressions. It seemed like a small price to pay for acceptance in the circle of whiteness. Even with these sacrifices, it wasn't easy to pass as white if we were Italian, Greek, Irish, Jewish, Spanish, etc.. Sometimes it took generations before our families were fully accepted, and then usually because white society had an even greater fear of darker skinned people.

Privileges are the economic "extras" that those of us who are middle class and wealthy gain at the expense of poor and working class people of all races. Benefits, on the other hand, are the advantages that all white people gain at the expense of people of color regardless of economic position.

Just because we don't have the economic privileges of those with more money doesn't mean we haven't enjoyed some of the benefits of being white.

We can generally count on police protection rather than harassment. Depending on our financial situation, we can choose where we want to live and choose neighbourhoods that are safe and have decent schools. We are given more attention, respect and status in conversation than people of color. We see people who look like us in the media, history books, news and music in a positive light. (This is truer for men than for women, more true for the rich than the poor.) We have more recourse to and credibility within the legal system (again taking into account class and gender). Nothing that we do is qualified, limited, discredited or acclaimed simply because of our racial background. We don't have to represent our race, and nothing we do is judged as a credit to our race, or as confirmation of its shortcomings or inferiority. There are always mitigating factors, and some of us have these benefits more than others.

All else being equal, it pays to be white. We will be accepted, acknowledged and given the benefit of the doubt. Since all else is equal, we each receive different benefits or different levels of the same benefits from being white.

These benefits start early. Others will have higher expectations for us as children, both at home and school. We will have more money spent on our education, we will be called on more in school, and we will be given more opportunity and resources to learn. We will see people like us in textbooks, and if we get into trouble adults will expect us to be able to change and improve, and therefore will discipline or penalize us less or differently than children of color.

These benefits continue today and work to the direct economic advantage of every white person in the United States. We will earn more in our lifetime than a person of color of similar qualifications. We will be paid $1.00 for every $.60 that a person of color makes.

There are historically derived benefits too. All the land in this country was taken from Native Americans.

Much of the infrastructure of this country was built by slave labor, incredibly low-paid labor, or by prison labor performed by men and women of color. Much of the housecleaning, childcare, cooking and maintenance of our society has been done by low wage earning women of color. Further property and material goods were appropriated by whites through the colonization of the West and Southwest throughout the 19th century, through the internment of Japanese Americans during WW II, through racial riots against people of color in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and through the ongoing legacy of legal manipulation and exploitation. Today men and women and children of color still do the hardest, lowest paid, most dangerous work throughout the country.

And we, white people, again depending on our relative economic circumstances, enjoy plentiful and inexpensive food, clothing and consumer goods because of that exploitation.

We have been taught history through a white-tainted lens which has minimized our exploitation of people of color and extolled the hardworking, courageous qualities of white people. For example, many of our fore-parents gained a foothold in this country by finding work in such trades as railroads, streetcars, construction, shipbuilding, wagon and coach driving, house painting, tailoring, long-shore work, brick laying, table waiting, working in the mills, furriering or dressmaking. There were all occupations that Blacks, who had begun entering many such skilled and unskilled jobs, were either excluded from or pushed out of in the 19th century. Exclusion and discrimination, coupled with immigrant mob violence against Blacks in many northern cities (such as the anti-black draft riots of 1863), meant that recent immigrants had economic opportunities that Blacks did not. These gains were consolidated by explicitly racist trade union practices and policies which kept Blacks in the most unskilled labor and lowest paid work.

It is not that white Americans have not worked hard and built much. We have. But we did not start out from scratch. We went to segregated schools and universities built with public money. We received school loans, VA loans, housing and auto loans when people of color were excluded or heavily discriminated against. We received federal jobs, military jobs, and contracts when only whites were allowed. We were accepted into apprenticeships, training programs and unions when access for people of color was restricted or nonexistent.

Much of the rhetoric against active policies for racial justice stem from the misconception that we were all given equal opportunities and start from a level playing field. We often don't even see the benefits we have received from racism.

We claim that they are not there.

Think about your grandparents and parents and where they grew up and lives as adults. What work did they do? What are some of the benefits that have accrued to your family because they were white?

Look at the following benefits checklist. Put a check beside any benefit that you enjoy that a person of color of your age, gender and class probably does not. Think about what effect not having that benefit would have had on your life. (If you don't know the answer to any of these questions, research. Ask your family members. Do what you can to discover the answers.)

WHITE BENEFITS CHECKLIST:

o My ancestors were legal immigrants to this country during a period when immigrants from Asia, South and Central America or Africa were restricted.

o My ancestors came to this country of their own free will and have never had to relocate unwillingly once here.

o I live on land that formerly belonged to Native Americans.

o My family received homesteading or land staking claims from the federal government.

o I or my family or relatives receive or received federal farm subsidies, farm price supports, agricultural extension assistance or other federal benefits.

o I lived or live in a neighbourhood that people of color were discriminated from living in.

o I lived or live in a city where red-lining discriminates against people of color getting housing or other loans.

o I or my parents went to racially segregated schools.

o I live in a school district or metropolitan are where more money is spent on the schools that white children go to than on those that children of color attend.

o I live in or went to a school district where children of color are more likely to be disciplined than white children, or more likely to be tracked into nonacademic programs.

o I live in or went to a school district where the textbooks and other classroom materials reflected my race as normal, heroes and builders of the US, and there was little mention of the contributions of people of color to our society.

o I was encouraged to go on to college by teachers, parents or other advisors.

o I attended a publicly funded university, or a heavily endowed private university or college, and/or received student loans.

o I served in the military when it was racially segregated, or achieved a rank where there were few people of color, or served in a combat situation where there were large numbers of people of color in dangerous combat positions.

o My ancestors were immigrants who took jobs in railroads, streetcars, construction, shipbuilding, wagon and coach driving, house painting, tailoring, longshore work, brick laying, table waiting, working in the mills, furriering or dressmaking or any other trade or occupation where people of color were driven out or excluded.

o I received job training in a program where there were fewer people or no people of color.

o I have received a job, job interview, job training or internship through personal connections of family or friends.

o I worked or work in a job where people of color made less for doing comparable work or did more menial jobs.

o I have worked in a job where people of color were hired last, or fired first.

o I work in a job, career or profession or in an agency or organization in which there are few people of color.

o I received small business loans or credits, government contracts or government assistance in my business.

o My parents were able to vote in an election they wanted without worrying about poll taxes, literacy requirements or other forms of discrimination.

o I can always vote for candidates who reflect my race.

o I live in a neighbourhood that has better police protection, municipal services and is safer than that where people of color live.

o The hospital and medical services close to me or which I use are better than that of most people of color in the region in which I live.

o I have never had to worry that clearly labeled public facilities, such as swimming pools, restrooms, restaurants and nightspots were in fact open to me because of my skin color.

o I see white people in a wide variety of roles on television and in movies.

o My race needn't be a factor in where I choose to live.

o My race needn't be a factor in where I send my children to school.

o I don't need to think about race and racism every day. I can choose when and where I want to respond to racism.

What feelings come up for you when you think about the benefits that white people gain from racism? Do you feel angry or resentful? Guilty or uncomfortable?

Do you want to say "Yes, but....."?

Again, the purpose of this checklist is not to discount what we, our families and fore parents achieved. But we do need to question any assumptions we retain that everyone started out with equal opportunity.

The opposite of a benefit is a disadvantage. People of color face distinct disadvantages many of which have to do with discrimination and violence. If we were to talk about running a race for achievement and success in this country, and white people and people of color lined up side by side as a group, then every white benefit would be steps ahead of the starting line and every disadvantage would be steps backwards from the starting line before the race even began.

The disadvantages of being a person of color in the US today include personal insults, harassment, discrimination, economic and cultural exploitation, stereotypes and invisibility, as well as threats, intimidation and violence. Not every person of color has experienced all the disadvantages described, but each have experienced some of them, and they each experience the vulnerability to violence that being a person of color in this country entails.

The personal acts of harassment and discrimination experienced directly from individual white people can also take a devastating toll. People of color never know when they will be called names, ridiculed or have comments made to them or about them by white people they don't know. They don't know when they might hear that they should leave the country, go home or go back to where they came from. Often these comments are made in institutions where it isn't safe to confront the person who made the remark.

People of color also have to be ready to respond to teachers, employers or supervisors who have stereotypes, prejudices or lowered expectations about them. Many have been discouraged or prevented from pursuing academic or work goals or have been placed in lower vocational levels because of their racial identity.

They have to be prepared for receiving less respect, attention or response from a doctor, police officer, court official, city official or other professional.

They are not unlikely to be mistreated or accused of stealing, cheating or lying, or to be stopped by the police because of their racial identity. They may also experience employment or housing discrimination or know someone who has.

There are cultural costs as well. People of color see themselves portrayed in degrading, stereotypical and fear-inducing ways on television and in the movies. They may have important religious or cultural holidays which are not recognized where they work or go to school. They have seen their religious practices, music, art, mannerisms, dress and other customs distorted, "borrowed", ridiculed, exploited or otherwise degraded by white people.

If they protest they may be verbally attacked by whites for being too sensitive, too emotional or too angry. Or they may be told they are different from other people of their racial group. Much of what people of color do, or say, of how they act in racially mixed company is judged as representative of their race.

When we talk about the unequal distribution of benefits and disadvantages, we may feel uncomfortable about being white. We did not choose our skin color. Nor are we guilty for the fact that racism exists and that we have benefited from it. We ARE RESPONSIBLE for acknowledging the reality of racism and for the daily choices we make about how to live in a racist society. We are only responsible for our own part, and we each have a part.

Sometimes, to avoid accepting our part, we want to shoot the bearer of bad news. Whether the bearer is white or a person of color, we become angry at whoever points out a comment or action that is hurtful, ignorant or abusive. We may accuse the person of being racist. This evasive reaction creates a debate about who is racist, or correct, or good, or well-intentioned, not about what to do about racism.

It is probably inevitable that, when faced with the reality of the benefits and the harm of racism, we will feel defensive, guilty, ashamed, angry, powerless, frustrated or sad. These feelings are healthy ad need to be acknowledged. Because they are uncomfortable we are liable to become angry at whoever brought up the subject.

Acknowledge your feelings and any resistance you have to the information presented. Yes, it is hard and sometimes discouraging. For too long we have ignored or denied the realities of racism. In order to make any changes, we have to start facing where we are and making a commitment to persevere and overcome the injustices we face.

+====================================================+

| http://www.amandla.org/osepp/ osepp@amandla.org |

|OSEPP - Org' for Sensible & Effective Prison Policy |

+====================================================+

"Building more prisons to fight crime is like
building more graveyards to fight a fatal disease."

To learn more:

See the Prison Issues Desk webpage at
.

MODERNITY RULES, OK? - CHARLENE SPRETNAK

2006-02-09T14:50:00.000-08:00

Communism or capitalism, Labour or Conservative,
democracy or dictatorship, republicanism or monarchy,
rule by any name, we are ruled by modernity.

from Resurgence issue 186

WHEN Eastern Europe dissolved into postcommunist democracies, they were said to be in need of modernization. It was an ironic ending for the political tradition that had prided itself on carrying forth the modern project more rationally than anyone else. "Scientific socialism" rapidly industrialized previously agrarian countries, installed productive systems of social engineering and bureaucratic management, and all but eliminated the "medieval superstitions" called "religion".

But the goal of passing through progressive stages of modernity has come into question It has even been rejected outright as an orientation for the future by one of the most widely respected leaders of the postcommunist nations. In February 1993, Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, delivered an address to the World Economic Forum entitled The End of the Modern Era. He asserted that the end of communism brought an end to the modern age with its positivist, scientistic, rationalist view of life. On July 4, 1994, Havel went further, in a speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He suggested that the industrialized societies have entered a transitional, postmodern period because the modern, scientific relationship to the world has "failed to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience."

Havel went on to observe that postmodern science is transcending the limits of modern science and is anchoring the human once again in the cosmos, through such discoveries its the anthropic principle in physics and the Gaia hypothesis in geobiochemistry. Turning to the political implications of this recovery of our "lost integrity", he concluded that "the basis for the new world order must be universal respect for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from respect for the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence."

Havel is conversant with various analyses of modern and postmodern conditions. The same cannot be said of most citizens in the postcommunist democracies. Their attention is claimed, for the most part, by problems of great immediacy related to the economic free-fall that followed the revolutions.

I learned a good deal about their situation when I was invited to give a series of talks there in the summer of 1993. I spoke over a period of five days to a gathering of young professionals held near the Malta Fatra Mountains of northwest Slovakia, was then driven to the southwest corner of the Czech Republic to address a protest camp at the construction site of a nuclear power plant (opposed by sixty of the sixty-two local mayors but pushed through by new federal government in Prague), and was subsequently driven back across the southern Czech Republic into Slovakia to address a group of philosophy professors in Bratislava. For all three audiences, I ended up putting aside my prepared lecture notes until I had addressed a subject that came up repeatedly during my stay, a perplexing paradox that seemed to weigh heavily on everyone I met.

MY FIRST INKLING of the matter occurred during the thirty-minute drive from the Vienna airport to Bratislava. I was met by two members of the Green Party of Slovakia (later called the Green League) a female biophysicist and a male engineer. After we had crossed the border into their country, they were pleased to point out among the rolling hills several picturesque villages, Baroque towns, and ruins of medieval castles on high bluffs above vigorous rivers.
When we passed by the first cluster of high-rise apartment buildings jutting starkly from a distant ridge, the engineer pointed toward it and declared contemptuously over the engine noise, "That's socialism!", sitting in the back seat, thought to myself, "No, that's modernity. Do you think we don't have those sterile, towering boxes in Western Europe, the US and Japan?"

In the days that followed, as I became acquainted with more and more people living through the postcommunist experience, I saw that they regarded State socialism as a historical aberration best forgotten. Moreover; they were largely battled that so much of the texture of daily life has remained the same since they made that 180-degree shift from communism to capitalism, which had always been portrayed by both sides as polar opposites. An entirely different world was supposed to have manifested, a new society sparked by unleashed human potential.

The implicit promise of the capitalist West had been that of a radically different existence; the proposed euphoric scenario portrayed liberation from a paralysing malaise, followed by the unfettered dynamism of a modernized economy and unbounded prosperity for all. Factories, banks and retailing would have to be modernized in the former Eastern bloc, of course, but then it would be full speed ahead. Already, by the time of my visit, Viennese advertising agencies had plastered Bratislava with commercial posters, one of them so "advanced" as to skip the car altogether and feature only an attractive young woman and huge lettering: TOYOTA.

AS WE NOW KNOW, the various postcommunist countries were fated to suffer through severe economic crises. That aspect of the new era, however, was not the main cause of the unarticulated puzzlement I encountered in Slovakia and the Czech Republic that summer. Although many people I met were facing grave financial uncertainty and possible devastation, many others were in occupations that apparently would weather the transition. Considering the profound differences between living in a communist police-state or a democracy, why, they wondered, did so much feel similar to what they had known under the old regime?

The answer lay in an understanding of the larger context: modernity. Marxism-Leninism was one of several economic systems that share the assumptions of the modern worldview. If one were to plot these systems on a spectrum of left-to-right political economies within modernity, "Marxist-Leninist socialism" and its variations would occupy the far left, to the right of which would be "democratic socialism", followed by "regulated capitalist democracies", followed by "laissez-faire (corporate controlled) right-wing capitalist democracies", followed by "fascist corporatism in quasi-military dictatorships".

Modern ideology asserts that each of these orientations shapes life in a mould that is entirely different from the others. That perception, however, reflects a central bias of modernity: economism, the tendency in modern societies to regard economics as the fundamental determinant of everything else. Such a perspective obscures the common ground shared by all of those political economies: they each subscribe to the following values of modernity:

The human is considered essentially an economic being, homo economicus. Consequently, the arrangement of economic matters is believed to be the wellspring of contentment or discontent in all other areas of life. Economic expansion, through industrialism and computerization, is the Holy Grail of materialism, the unquestioned source from which follow abundance, well-being, and the evolution of society. That evolution is understood to be decidedly directional: the human condition progresses toward increasingly optimal states as the past is continuously improved upon.

Modern socialization structures our understanding of the world via objectivism, rationalism, the mechanistic world-view, reductionism and scientism. The design and organization of work in modern societies are based on standardization, bureaucratization and centralization. Modern interactions with nature are anthropocentric and are guided by instrumental reasoning. Above all, modern culture defines itself as a triumphant force progressing in opposition to nature. As such, it harbours contempt for non-modern cultures, which are seen to be "held back" by unproductive perceptions such as the "sacred whole" and reciprocal duties toward the rest of the Earth community.

Modern life is compartmentalized into discrete spheres: family life, work life, social life, political life, love life and spiritual life, the last of which is devalued for being the furthest from rationalism. In modern societies, higher education is also tightly compartmentalized into insular disciplines. There, as in law and government, intensely agonistic modes of discussion shape all possibilities. The preference for competition and a dominance-or-submission dichotomy as the structure of relationships in all spheres of modern life reflects the extent of patriarchal socialization. Modern societies are sometimes called "hypermasculine" because "masculine" traits, such as the persona of rationalism, are valued much more highly than "feminine" traits, such as empathy.

The faces of my audiences in Slovakia and the Czech Republic lit up with recognition as I spontaneously rattled off the above characteristics of modernity. Seeing them nod and smile, I said, "This is what you were taught in school, right? It's what 1 was taught in school, too! Even though we were each assured in the strongest possible terms that our two systems were almost unimaginably alien to one another!"

Extracts from The Resurgence of the Real by Charlene Spretnak. This new book is published in the USA by Addison-Wesley ($22.00) and is available in the UK from Schumacher Book Service at #15.99 + #2.40 p&p (Tel: 01803 868547).

Wild Duck Review: Interview with Charlene Spretnak - by Casey Walker, Editor

2006-02-09T14:40:00.000-08:00

Wild Duck Review
Interview with Charlene Spretnak

by Casey Walker, Editor

While a marvelously diverse range of human cultures is possible, human societies are either engaged or disengaged from the natural world. The latter orientation is both delusional and pathological.

CW: Will you begin by speaking to your main goals in writing The Resurgence of the Real?

CS: The central thesis of the book is that some of the very elements most strenuously devalued by modernity -- the knowing body, the creative cosmos, and the complex sense of place -- are, in the mid-1990s, breaking through the overarching ideologies that denied them. A profound correction of the destructive aspects of the modern worldview has gathered intensity from the very last places modern thinking would have expected: significant challenges were expected from left or right contenders in the political economy, not from sites of "dumb matter." Yet the assertion of the true nature of our bodies and the rest of the natural world are finally, after 350 years, nudging aside the mechanistic model. I explain why this began to occur in medicine on a large scale around 1995 and in natural science with the past decade of discoveries in complexity studies, chaotics, and systems dynamics. As for the resurgence of "place" in the 1990s, it is now key in two regards. First, the ancient nations, with cultures deeply embedded in the land, are demanding independence from the modern states, which were invented relatively recently and simply absorbed the ancient nations as invisible components in modern realpolitik. Those independence efforts are ususally baffling to the modern media, who refer to them as "unfathomable ethnic squabbles." Second, community-based economics and place-based education are emerging as a counterforce to the globalized economy and global monoculture. It's become very clear in the last two years that the new world order under GATT (and NAFTA, which is son-of-GATT) leaves all communities worldwide vulnerable to the transnational corporations, who can now challenge and supercede all local and national laws protecting the environment, labor, or sustainable development. Such a business!

In addition to identifying the crises of modernity -- particularly in the areas of economics, politics, and education -- as well as the corrective efforts that are emerging now, I sought to clarify the conceptual infrastructure of modernity, that is, its interlocking systems of beliefs and assumptions. You'd be surprised how many people are oblivious to that ideology, even though it shapes our socialization from day one and all our institutions. We're taught to regard it as "just natural" for an advanced civilization. Ecological activists, for instance, are often puzzled to find that their efforts seem to bounce off a brick wall; that's because they're deflected handily by the ideologies of modernity -- not corporate capitalism alone. On the contrary, rapacious industrialism, whether capitalist or communist, is embedded within the values of modernity. I explain how that entire worldview -- and the "modern condition" -- came to be. Needless to say, it's a somewhat different version than we received in modern schooling.

In the book I also propose a reframing of the lineage of movements -- including several in the arts -- that resisted the destructive aspects of modernity (Chapter Four, "Don't Call It Romanticism!") because so little is known, even among eco-social activists, about that impressive heritage. The final chapter then presents a pragmatic eco-social vision, by means of a story of an American heartland city set in the near future, the year 2024. My editor was somewhat alarmed that a nonfiction book ended with fiction, but, thankfully, he bit the bullet.

In a sense The Resurgence of the Real can be considered a companion volume to my previous book, States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age (1991) because they both engage with the crises of modernity. States of Grace, however, interprets four of the great spiritual traditions with regard to our understanding of the bodymind, nature, and social justice, whereas The Resurgence of the Real focuses more on cultural history, current affairs (how to read the news of the day!), and eco-social thought.

CW: Will you articulate the key forces of modernity that derail an ecological worldview?

CS: That's rather complex and ended up requiring an entire appendix, "Modernity Is to Us as Water to a Fish." A shorter version appears in Chapter Two, but here's an even shorter one. A core assumption of modernity is that the human is essentially Homo economicus. Consequently, the structure and quality of all other endeavors in life are thought to derive from the economics of a society. "Unfettered" economic expansion, through industrialization and computerization, is believed to yield abundance, well-being, the solution to social problems, and the evolution of culture and society.

In addition, three of the foundational movements of modernity -- Renaissance humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment -- were inspired by a widely influential text known as the "Ancient Wisdom" or "Egyptian Wisdom," the main part of which was the Corpus Hermeticum. It "revealed" that humans have a different source from nature: we were created directly by God, but nature was created by the Demiurge. Nature was newly understood, from the 1460s on, not as the holistic cosmos of divine creation but merely as raw material to be used by humans as we come into our true role of terrestrial gods on earth. The thing about such hubris, of course, is that it hates humility. Hence the respect and reciprocity with which nonmodern peoples, such as traditional agrarian communities and indigenous cultures, regarded nature was perceived as an affront, a "backward" vestige of history deserving of being crushed for the good of Progress. For generations upon generations, both groups were indeed crushed and assimilated by modern industrial states, whether communist or capitalist.

In light of the deeply held modern belief that society progresses in opposition to nature, it's extremely difficult for voices for ecological sanity to capture the public attention for a sustained corrective effort. Eventually, even the most pressing ecological issue is resolutely brushed aside -- often with metaphors insinuating that the real grown-ups of society are restoring "balance." That sort of dismissal of ecological concern as an immature fixation seems natural and correct to the public since nature has so long been considered a mere "externality" by the modern mindset. That thinking is very deeply rooted.

CW: I appreciated your drawing distinctions between the modern, the deconstructionist postmodern, and what you call the "ecological postmodern" as fundamentally different ways of seeing the world. Will you briefly describe those terms and differences?

CS: I focus in this book on "the real" -- the realities of our physicality -- in order to reground our conceptualizations. The conceptual beliefs of both modernity and deconstructive postmodernism are extremely ungrounded. The contrast I offer is the emergent orientation I call "ecological postmodernism," which regards culture as a dynamic extension of the natural world, or Earth community. Human society is embedded in the processes of the Earth community, in this view, rather than oppositional toward it or oblivious of its presence in our lives.

I summarize these three orientations in a chart in the book. [below] The first column cites the core beliefs of modernity, with which we are all familiar since they are still the dominant influences today.

"The Rise and Fall of Modern Images of Denial"
MODERN	DECONSTRUCTIONIST POSTMODERN	ECOLOGICAL POSTMODERN
Metanarrative: Salvation, progress	None (They're all power plays)	The cosmological unfolding
Truth mode: Objectivism	Extreme relativism	Experientialism
World = a collection of objects	An aggregate of fragments	A community of subjects
Realtity = fixed order	Social construction	Dynamic relationship
Sense of self: socially engineered	Fragmented	Processual
Primary truth: the universal	The particular	The particular-in-context
Grounding: mechanistic universe	None (total groundlessness)	Cosmological processes
Nature as opponent	Nature as wronged object	Nature as subject
Control over the body	"Erasure of the body" (It's all social construction)	Trust in the body
Science: reductionism	It's only a narrative!	Complexity
Economicts: corporate	Postcapitalist	Community-based
Political focus: nation-state	The local	A community of communities of communities
Sense of the sublime: God the Father	"Gesturing toward the sublime"	Creativity in the cosmos, ultimate mystery
Key metaphors: mechanics, law	Economics ("libidinal economy"), signs/coding	Ecology

The second column cites the beliefs of deconstructionism (also known as post-structuralism, constructivism, or constructionism). This orientation asserts that there is nothing but "social construction" (of concepts such as language, knowledge systems, and culture) in human experience. That is, everything we feel or perceive is merely the result of social construction, a mesh of controlling concepts and beliefs that shape us in various ways. Hence we can know nothing about nature or our bodies, for example, since all we know is the concepts implanted in us about nature or body. All our thoughts are believed to be structured entirely by the language into which we happened to be born. All meaning and "truth," therefore, is strictly relative and utterly groundless. According to this orientation, the trouble with modernity is its oppressive power mechanisms, which "totalize" the particular and the individual by means of the ploy of "fictive unity," such as "metanarratives" about God, Progress, the brotherhood of man, and so forth. Deconstructionists believe that those power plays, or "discourses" or "narratives," can be deconstructed to reveal their oppressive aims so that we can then be free to create ourselves in "pure autonomy," as Foucault advocated.

Not in this universe. Nothing exists in "pure autonomy." Rather, every life-form in the universe -- from self-organizing galaxies to subatomic particles -- exists in an extremely subtle web of dynamic relationships. The third column in the chart, Ecological Postmodernism, cites values and beliefs that derive from acknowledging our embeddedness in the processes of the Earth community and the cosmos. Ecological postmodernism changes the gestalt: our field and grounding is neither the "modern project" nor extreme relativism but the cosmos itself. This orientation replaces freedom from nature with freedom in nature. It acknowledges the enormous role of social construction but also recognizes our constitutive embeddedness in subtle bodily, ecological, and cosmological processes.

CW: Would you explain how you see deconstructionism continuing the value system of modernity?

CS: You mean other than the fact that it's an idealist projection, pitifully solipsistic, escapist with regard to body and nature, insupportably abstract, and trades biological determinism for social determinism? Well, yes -- there is something far more serious than all those considerable problems with deconstructionism. It asserts that the main problem with modernity is the subtle power mechanisms. Now, all societies have power mechanisms; the more transparent, democratic, and accountable they are the better. As an activist, I find it tremendously important to analyze our society's assumptions and power structures -- which, believe me, was being done here long before deconstructionism was imported from Paris in the seventies. A formalist critique of modernity, which focuses on the various forms of power and control, however, cannot address the problematic content of modernity. The fundamental problem with modernity is that it intensified the perception of three core discontinuities present in Western thought since the Greeks: that there is a radical break between humans and nature, body and mind, and self and the world. The conceptualization of those core discontinuities -- which are not present in nonWestern, nonmodern cultures such as Eastern philosophy and native peoples -- shaped all our institutions, beliefs, and power structures. Yet that crucial aspect, which Bateson called the Western epistemological error, doesn't register at all with the deconstructionists. Why? Because, to them, whether a culture feels connected or disconnected from body and nature is just a matter of relative concepts. On the contrary, I believe that, while a marvelously diverse range of human cultures is possible, human societies are either engaged or disengaged from the natural world. The latter orientation is both delusional and pathological.

CW: You quote Max Weber's opinion of twentieth-century modernity: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved." Will you speak to this observation?

CS: Weber's analysis of the effects of capitalism has been cited approvingly by left academics since 1905, but rarely do his fans exhibit the sensibility he displayed with regard to what had been lost when the West abandoned spiritual depth, as well as community bonds, for a largely unregulated market economy that transformed Protestant asceticism into bureaucratic sterility. Weber displays an appreciation of the religious grounding of premodern society and a poignant awareness of what has been lost on a deep level -- far deeper than Marx's observation that modern workers are "alienated" from the disposition of their production.

CW: Many people justify the processes and values of modernity by pointing to better health and longer lives, greater levels of literacy, more material goods, helpful technology, etc. How are these "modern benefits" perceived from an eco-social point of view?

CS: To assess the effects of industrialization, computerization, mass media, or high-tech healthcare, one needs to make a systemic analysis. That's exactly what we're discouraged from doing by fragmented modern culture, with its what's-in-it-for-me? frame of reference coming at us relentlessly from every direction via the advertising industry. With regard to computers, for instance, all we hear from the industry, through their ads and planted op-ed pieces, are the benefits of various devices. People are conditioned to joyfully associate the word computer with the fact that there's an entire encyclopedia miraculously residing in their personal computer, that they can now buy books on-line (thereby putting local bookstores out of business), that they can buy airline tickets on-line (thereby putting local travel agencies out of business), or that they're suddenly free to swap duplicitous narratives in "chat rooms." All true, but who has benefited most from this technology? Computerization has made possible huge centralized data banks of information about all of us, huge flows of currency speculation sloshing around in the globalized economy and destablizing governments galore, and astounding capabilities for surveillance.

People socialized in a hypermodern society -- which is the term I use for the intensified version of modernity we now live with -- are socialized to have an amazingly uncritical attitude toward new technologies. We're carried along in the blind faith that technological innovation by its very nature delivers us to an improved future. In fact, we need to develop skills of critical analysis about technology so that we could perceive negative effects at the outset. Moreover, the burden of proof should rest with the manufacturer, not the public, regarding the harmlessness of a new device. Instead, we and our children are the guinea pigs.

We continue to take the "immense bribe" of the "Megamachine," as Lewis Mumford put it thirty years ago: the absorption of every human activity into the technological realm by seductive assurances of ever-increasing ease, power, and abundance. We seem oblivious to the dependence being created. Now that we have pocket calculators, few people master or remember basic arithmetic. Now that we have "spell-check," young people see no need to master spelling. Industrial arts classes, wherein boys and (at long last) girls learned the pride of accomplishment that comes from working with one's hands and natural materials, have been replaced in most schools with computer labs. Many young people can push a button on a microwave oven but cannot cook at all. Social skills and various subtle benefits of human interaction are also in decline, as growing numbers of us spend more time each day talking to machines than people -- and as children who log a great deal of computer time exhibit shyness and withdrawn behavior.

My point about technology, in the book, is that it's neither evil nor value-free. Rather, the design of every new technological device reflects our cultural history. An awareness of that history is essential if we are to recognize dangerous tendencies and chart an eco-socially wholesome future. Failing that, we're vulnerable to all the Empower-the- Autonomous-Individual hype that basically lets everything else go to hell -- and, in the bargain, diminishes to pathetic proportions the individual's full experience of being.

CW: The ability to read and discuss ideas, to lead lives of passionate interest, to engage in "the great dialogue," or even to think and employ vocabulary of an accomplished level of literacy all seem to be slipping out of the focus of mainstream culture.

CS: Very true. One of the major challenges of the computer age, surely, is to keep children reading. Shrunken vocabularies have all sorts of undesirable ramifications. It seems that the democratic dream of universal literacy through free education, which seemed to be cruising on an endless, if hard-won, plateau, is being challenged by an increasingly oral, post-literate -- and highly commercial -- culture. What's a realistic projection for the future? How about a young person sitting in front of a wall of tremendously powerful and sophisticated personal computer equipment, instantaneously transmitting messages worldwide such as "Me like gud. Yu want?"

I'm definitely a grinch about keeping computers out of elementary school, except for one or two in the library. Those machines operate on a binary logic system, for heaven's sake! Instead, kids in their formative years should gaining skills in tacit knowledge and engaging with their physicality: learning about relationships in their backyard or nearby park, the school yard and environs, and their bioregion, then gradually expanding to include their macroregion, their continent, and, eventually, the whole Earth community. If those and other studies are limited to the sort of data that can be fed through computers -- and, remember, the goal of several Silicon Valley foundations is to get a computer on the desk of every schoolchild -- then everything else, including intergenerational and community wisdom, becomes "low-status knowledge," if it is acknowledged at all. I think the best analysis of this sorry development is Chet Bower's The Culture of Denial.

I'm surprised by the silence on these issues. Very basic questions about the meaning and quality of our lives and about our interactions with other people and other life forms have been swept aside by hyped-up claims about how much faster we will be able to do things. There hardly seems to be a vocabulary for addressing what's being lost in exchange for shrunken and increasingly technologized options for the unfolding of the person. We experience spiritual and ecological yearnings, but we have only a diminished modern sensibility with which to think about the mounting crises. We need deeply evocative language to awaken the modern mind.

CW: Some research shows that children today between twelve and fourteen years of age are far less capable than their predecessors of perceiving metaphor, such as grasping more than the literal meaning of a rolling stone gathering no moss. It seems that modernity is cultivating in young people a certain kind of logic that silences the intuitive, the embodied, the rich resonance of language that is culturally bound to the earth. I find this troubling, especially since one of the diagnostic tools for schizophrenia is this very skill, the ability to interpret metaphor in a nonliteral way.

CS: Yes. There's a good deal of research -- much of it gathered in Evolution's End by Joseph Chilton Pearce -- showing that exposure to too much television too early can result in impaired neurological development in children, with the result that they have limited abilities to think and reason imaginatively. In later years, they often have learning problems and a tendency toward violence to settle disputes. Both of those conditions, however, improve after remedial work in imaginative, or conceptual, thinking.

Your concern about the eclipse of metaphoric literacy among young people reminds me of the related losses identified by Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies. In teaching a course on 19th- and 20th-century American short stories to undergrads at a Boston-area college, he found they had trouble with allusion and with passages presenting a character's interiority. He also noticed that they have a fragmented sense of time and have largely lost the "duration experience," the depth phenomenon associated with reverie. Also, because they have a reduced attention span -- and have trouble slowing down from immersion in music, videos, and TV -- they are impatient with sustained inquiry. Imagine what that means for democracy in a complex world. Birkerts, like many other college-level teachers today, found that these students, the first generation to have been raised with electronic saturation, feel divorced from a vital sense of history, a geographic sense of place and community, and a personal or collective vision of the future.

I cited the work of Pearce and Birkerts in the section in my book on the state of education in our hypermodern world because they are in sync with countless surveys, books, and articles these days on the psychological state of the "plugged-in generation." These kids are variously described as disengaged, bored, sweet and slightly depressed, lazy, and unacquainted with academic hard work. Many feel entitled to effortless A's and become angry if lesser grades are given. They are careful not to commit the most uncool error of showing enthusiasm -- that is, intellectual passion -- about anything. Worst of all, it seems to me, they often have no vitality. It's as if the life force in them atrophied during years of sitting passively in front of endless streams of fleeting images -- of violence and banality -- so that they now have little sense of context or depth or embodied reality. Needless to say, extreme relativism substitutes for moral reasoning. In a sense, much of that generation has been sacrificed to the exorbitant claims of the telecommunications industry and the mind-numbing media. It remains to be seen whether the unfortunate results of young people's having been fed into the "wired world" from an early age will come to be regarded as a cautionary tale or accepted -- "Who can stop progress?" -- as a portent of passive cyborgian generations to come. We need to do more, though, than merely hope for the best. It's easy to feel that modernity is simply an unsteerable juggernaut, as Anthony Giddens put it, careening over everything in its path.

CW: With regard to your sense of "ecological postmodernism," how does the wild, and qualities of the wild, influence the values you've discussed? Is it related to the admiring mention in your book of Edith Cobb's book, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood?

CS: The emergence of the modern worldview convinced us that we advanced humans live in a glass box on top of nature; the modern focus of our attention is the human projects within that box. Deconstructionist postmodernism shrinks the box to even tighter proportions: everything's really just a matter of the "language games" within those human projects. In contrast, ecological postmodernism proposes that we move in the opposite direction: open the box and reconnect on many levels with the rest of the Earth community and the cosmos.

"The wild" -- that is, the dynamic creativity in the cosmos, its novelty and continuity, its self-organizing, self-regulating capabilities from galaxies to mountain ranges to cells -- is the dance of "universe life" from which human existence derives and in which it participates. Educating children in the wonders of that existential truth is crucial. Toward that end, Edith Cobb's work was an ecologically healthy correction to Freud: she asserted that child development is not a matter of moving away from relationship to an autonomous state of a lone individual but toward an integration of self and environment. Such exploration of one's surroundings, she believed, was an intersection of cosmology and biology. Earlier, Maria Montessori had also developed a cosmological sense of a child's maturation. Today lots of bioregionalists and ecological educators are developing "place-based education," in which children learn about the embeddedness of their town or city in the natural systems of the ecocommunity.

CW: Do you think the environmental movement should be critiqued for operating as a branch of the modern worldview, which is generally antagonistic toward the wild?

CS: Parts of the environmental movement, yes. Ever since the Pinchot vs. Muir debate, we've had environmentalists who believe the key problem is how to agree on resource management that isn't too rapacious versus those who are dedicated to preserving the ecological integrity of habitat. The first group, loosely speaking, don't really believe that the underlying assumptions of industrialization and a consumer society can or should be questioned, so they're trying to fine-tune modernity. The second group, loosely speaking, calls for a profound rethinking about the way in which our species behaves in the Earth community; they try to move beyond the suicidal modern assumption that advanced societies are brilliantly at war with nature and can't afford to "get soft." In that work, I think it's very useful for ecological activists to be knowledgeable about the historical evolution and conceptual infrastructure of modernity.

CW: What did you mean in The Resurgence of the Real when you wrote that to be truly postmodern is to be ecological and feminist?

CS: Ah. I could not help but notice that the values of modernity fit hand-in-glove with those of male socialization in patriarchal cultures: low regard for reason that includes emotion; for females and "feminine" empathy; and for nature and body, both of which will supposedly do you in if not disciplined. Conversely, a high premium is put on dominance, control, and uniform results wherever possible. Obviously, many spiritual and ecological men have freed themselves from that mold and found better ways to be male. The more closely a man's identity is wrapped up with modernity, however, the more he resents any critique of it. I encountered an example of this reaction when I sent the proposal for this book to a dear friend of mine from college, who is, in his own words, "a bureaucrat and a damn good one." I was curious about what his comments would be. Well, he just went ballistic. Why in the world was I criticizing modernity? After all, it was working for him (although not entirely, if I may say so). It was then I realized that most people are so deeply embedded in the modern worldview that they cannot easily see all that it has devoured. So I composed the remembrance for the casualties of modernity. [See "A Memorial Prayer"]

As for the ecological component in truly postmodern thinking, I believe that the antidote to the hypermodern worldview is the ecological worldview (in a deep and broad sense).

CW: Will you speak to the difference between the what you call modernity's "Lone Cowboy" notion of individualism and the individuating self-actualization that Arne Naess and Paul Shepard write of as a process of self-in-nature? Can we dismiss individualism?

CS: It's the "ism" that's the problem. Individualism is an ideology, which posits the Autonomous Individual as the norm and measure of all values in the modern era; other considerations were made secondary. The concept of the Autonomous Individual, a product of the Enlightenment's impulse to break free in every way of "the ties that bind," is an intensification of the Greek ideal of the fully rational man. The hero of modern novels boldly escapes his place of origin -- site of the "constraints" of community, family, tradition, religion, and the requirements of the bioregion -- and heads for the new promised land: the city, where he is anonymous and can act with full autonomy. Or so goes the model, a rather pathetic patriarchal fantasy. As I mentioned earlier, life in the Earth community just doesn't work that way; every life form benefits every moment from subtle interdependence with other life forms.

The ecological sensibility is well aware of that interdependence, hence the terms self-in-nature (from the ecological philosophers) or self-in-relationship (from the feminist philosophers). Within a web of relationships of universe life (both the "animate" and "inanimate"), every organism unfolds, reaching toward its fulfillment: interaction, creative response to perturbations, maturation, reproduction, play (yes, birds and mammals play!), and waning. The universe unfolds in novelty and continuity, as Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme observe in The Universe Story. The human individual is no exception. Fr. Berry has written a lot about the deep interiority of every organism, its profound subjectivity. Both Berry and Swimme feel that every one of us has a cosmological responsibility to unfold as fully as possible; to hold back and do less is to fail the universe. Now, that's individuation. It has a lot of common ground with Arne Naess' concept of enlarging one's sensibilities to realize your "ecological self" and with Paul Shepard's observation that nature-deprivation causes the human mind to become unbalanced and diminished.

The Native American perspective suggests a healthy alternative to the alienated Lone Cowboy. They generally view the individual (who is encouraged to individuate in many ways, such as a vision quest upon coming of age) as derivative of the family, which is derivative of the clan, which is derivative of the nation, which is derivative of the land, which is derivative of the cosmos. The unfolding stories of all those entities are nestled, not cut off. Since contextual embeddedness is our physical reality, why not reflect that in our cultural concepts?

CW: I appreciated your discussing in the book Goethe's model of "a science of qualities."

CS: He was someone who definitely grasped the profound meaning of the subtle interrelatedness of the Earth community. He thought of himself, by the way, as primarily an organic scientist, although we think of his as the foremost poet of the German Romantic Movement. On both counts, though, he was a hero in the lineage of resistance to the mechanistic concepts of modernity.

I also cite the work of Brian Goodwin, one of the leading theoretical biologists today, who is dedicated to bringing forth and developing Goethe's notion of a nonreductionist, postmechanistic science. Goodwin's work with complexity studies in morphology, a field invented by Goethe, refutes the current genetic reductionism in biology, returns the focus to the holistic behavior of the organism itself, and enlarges our grasp of the complex dynamics of evolution, which are far less mechanistic that previously thought. (Goodwin is author of How the Leopard Changed its Spots and is director of a new masters degree program in holistic biology at Schumacher College in England, cosponsored by the University of Plymouth.)

CW: Will you speak briefly about your attraction to the Arts and Crafts Movement (including John Ruskin and William Morris), which figures so prominently in The Resurgence of the Real?

CS: It shows up twice in the book, but I guess you can tell I became moderately fanatical about it for quite a while. I first present the movement, and my thoughts about it, in the lineage of resistance movements in Chapter Four. I encountered it on a fluke -- what some people might call predestination, I guess -- when I had some spare time in London after a conference in 1992. Going on nothing but the fact that I just barely remembered William Morris's name from my English major days long ago, I was curious to see some of the renowned patterns he had designed for fabric in the 1870s and 1880s. So I tracked them down in the Victoria and Albert Museum and various departments within Liberty's and absolutely fell in love with those of his designs that are ecosensual, such as "Honeysuckle," "Pimentel," "Bluebell," and "Snakeshead." Once I was hooked aesthetically, I began to do research -- including lots of field trips -- on the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain, Europe, and the United States. Ruskin, the preeminent art critic of Victorian England, and Morris, who was greatly influenced as a young man by Ruskin's writings, were profound eco-social philosophers and activists who refuted the destructive assumptions of modernity and created alternatives, quite in sync with the orientation I call "ecological postmodernism." They went far beyond an economic analysis and countered the corrosive effects of the modern project by focusing in immediate and accessible ways on work, home, art, nature, vernacular culture, and the unfolding of persons in relationship. California, by the way, was perhaps the largest, most varied site of the Arts and Crafts Movement in this country -- until the values of modernity reasserted themselves after World War One with the machine aesthetic in design (Art Deco and other varieties) and the sterile "dumb box" of "Heroic Modernism" in architecture.

When it came time to present my positive vision, in the last chapter as I had promised the reader, I found myself gripped by the idea that that vision should be related as a story and that the story should pay tribute to our heritage of resistance: a story of the future that honors the past and suggests a course of action for the present. Specifically, I pay homage to William Morris's famous utopian novel, News from Nowhere (1892). As he often did in his long historical poems, he used the device of a time-traveller who wakes up in a strange time and place and is shown around. This time, instead of waking up on the banks of the Thames in 1952, the Morris character finds himself on the banks of the Scioto, the river that bisects my hometown, Columbus, Ohio, in 2024. He is escorted on a long walk over several hours, during which time he sees and hears about the ways in which that city of a million people began in the late 1990s to develop community-based economics and a local currency (both of which protected them from the vagaries of the global roulette wheel) and grounded its education and other institutions and programs in eco-social wisdom.

All the innovations described in the story are pragmatic and are already in place today in various locations; I merely brought them together and situated that Green vision in the near future in the hope of inspiring stronger efforts in that direction. So -- is it, horrors, didactic? Well, sure -- but I also had a lot of fun with it, showing William that his influence lived on in numerous ways, plus playing with the relationship between William and the woman on the bank who shows him around and -- have you guessed? -- has long been in love with his ecosensual designs. Around midnight, she invites him back to her apartment (which, of course, is in an ecologically correct, straw-bale-wall, co-housing building) for a surprise. More than that I dare not say.

* * *

Wild Duck Review

Wild Duck Review / www.wildduckreview.com / PO Box 335 Davenport, CA 95017 (831) 471-9246

The Problem With New Age Celtic Stuff

2006-02-08T08:50:00.000-08:00

If you got to the link below you'll find a great article about the problems of much of the new age Celtic spirituality. It's by Michael Newton, author of A Handbook of the Scottish Gaelic World.

http://www.saorsamedia.com/soapbox/satan.html

BOOK: Journey to the Ancestral Self - Tamarack Song

2006-02-03T10:53:00.000-08:00

Spiritual Life Close to Nature

by Jonn Salovaara

June 1999

There are books that may be summarized and there are books you just have to read for yourself. Tamarack Song’s Journey to the Ancestral Self is one of the latter.

Song’s ancestors were native to Europe, not America. Yet he resonates with the old ways practiced by indigenous North Americans. He comes to learn that there is really nothing too surprising or contradictory about this.

"...My ancestors, the Native People of Europe, Walked the Old Way just as did the Native People of America. In the same ways they hunted and foraged, sought Vision, entered the Sweat Lodge, and lived in Clan-Circles around the Drum and Moon. One not specializing in their study would be hard-pressed to distinguish their wigwams, arrowheads, and clothing one from the other. The lifeways of both were crushed by the Civilized Conquerors; both were forced/coerced to take new ways and shun their own as being of the Devil.

"The Drums of both were destroyed, shearing their connectedness with the Earth and each other, robbing their collective source of Power. The voices went on to say that the only significant difference between me and my regional Native neighbors is the number of generations we are removed from our Earth/Clan roots." (p.37)

The problem with city-based cultures, says Song, is that they lose touch with our furred, winged, and clawed fellow creatures, from whom Native people learn much essential wisdom. Our own civilization has also lost touch with the cycles of the moon — our calendar no longer corresponds to lunar months. According to Song, this fact has a great impact on many aspects of our lives. It should be noted that Song makes a distinction between Indians who live in close contact with animals and those who, like the Aztecs and Incas, developed extended civilizations.

The return to the "Old Way" described in this book is achieved through working with a suitable guide, whether a human from local people living in the Old Way, or one of our furred, winged, and clawed brothers and sisters. Song points out that no one can know the essence of a land like those whose ancestors have lived on it, and with it, for centuries. Song’s own guides are the Raven and a woman named She Who Talks With Loons.

The book is divided into four sections: Finding the Trail, The Old Way Culture, People of the Old Way, and Attunement — Stepping Out of Time.

Through it all, Song promotes awareness of life’s circularity: "Any approach to the Old Way begins with this awareness of the Circular view of life, which is shared by all Native People." For your own experience of American Indian spirituality, this may be the best place to start.

Journey to the Ancestral Self: The Native Lifeway Guide to Living in Harmony with Earth Mother,
by Tamarack Song, 1994, Station Hill Press: Barrytown, NY, 214 pages, $14.95 paper.

What is Your REAL Ancestry?

2006-02-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

Think your ancestors were ancient Scots?
Think your ancestors were Native American?
Uncertain if what part of the world your
"deep ancestry" comes from?

Find out.

A cool research project
by National Geographic
tracing the "deep ancestry"
of people:

https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/participate.html

The Scottish Gaelic World According to Michael Newton

2006-01-17T13:15:00.000-08:00

- Michael Newton -

Reading Michael Newton's book "A Handbook of the Scottish Highland Gael" was a profound moment in my life. It was one of only two books I had ever read (the other being "The Mist Filled Path" by my friend Frank MacEowen) that spoke so deeply to my own experience as a white person working to reclaim some sense of my indigeneity. It spoke with such lucidity that I was stunned. Who WAS this man? He had written a book I thought I might have to write myself. He deftly weaved together themes of anti-racism, indigeneity, post-modernism and much more into one . . . well Handbook is the right word I think. He put it all together.

"Must read" is putting it mildly for me.

I have yet to see another book unpack the current situation of the Gaels with more clarity. A stunning political analysis.

BIO: Michael Newton was awarded a PhD in Celtic Studies by the University of Edinburgh in 1998. He has written a number of books and articles on Scottish Gaelic culture (see below), and has recently focused on the hitherto untold story of the Scottish Highlanders in the United States.

He has given lectures and taught workshops on a number of Scottish topics - from Scottish Gaelic language lessons to Scottish cultural geography - at venues such as the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, Slighe nan Gaidheal in Seattle, and the Toronto Scottish Gaelic Learners' Association.

* * *

Dear Tad -

From reading your blog, we clearly have common values and ideological orientations.

I entirely agree with your assessment of the direction of the world, and I fear what fallout will come of it. There are many people around the world whose oppression and dispossession rightfully makes them want to resort to violent means to overthrow the institutions (often masquerading under names such as “free markets” and “democratic reform”) that keep them poor and powerless.

I had hoped that 9/11 would wake Americans up to the reality of the lives of people outside our hall of mirrors, but, alas, the current war-mongers in power in the US exploited the event to peddle fear and militarism and entrench their own hegemony.

I don't think that violence is a valid solution to violence. Plenty of post-colonial societies show that too often the revolution only replaces the oppressor rather than removing the pattern of oppression.

I expect that as the man-made technosphere further spreads across the globe in our vain pursuit to become the "Lords and Possessors of Nature" (in Descartes’s words) the whole system (and the resources upon which the infrastructure is dependent) will collapse due to the detrimental environmental and social side-effects. These and other things I tried to hint at in my Handbook, but was not able to fully express them, as they would have been somewhat tangential, not to mention controversial.

My own intuition is that the redemption of the world will come from what we will be able to salvage from indigenous cultures. And as I wrote in the Handbook, by "indigenous" I mean cultures that are rooted in and sensitive to their environments. It has nothing to do with skin colour or the number of body piercings or tattoos you have.

My own involvement with Gaeldom has given my life depth and a tangible connection to those things that are real. It has made me more human. It has also increased my capacity for empathy, but empathy with a beautiful but endangered thing is not a comforting experience.

I’ve talked to many Scots who belittle the tragedy of the decline of Gaeldom. To them, it is but an insignificant blip in the suffering in the world. Of course, if we look merely numerically, it is a small number in comparison to, say, the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. However, just as every human being is a miracle of God and an expression of that divine spark, so is every human culture the creative gift of generations of imagination and experience rooted in the real world.

Why is a culture with 60,000,000 people more valid than one with only 60,000? I think the criteria by which people judge “civilisation” is severely stupid. Apparently, a human society which makes an enormous environmental impact and leaves behind huge rubbish piles (variously labelled “pyramids”, “coliseums”, or “ziggurats”) is an "sophisticated civilization" while those who tread lightly on the soil - those whose cultural foci are storytelling and hospitality, for example - are treated as not worthy of study.

I would rejoice if I saw the end of mass media, petroleum-based transport, and consumerism. It would mean that I could follow closer to Thoreau's goal of "sucking the marrow out of the bones of life" - there would be more time for dancing, singing, being in and of a community of real (and not virtual) people, being aware of the cycles of the seasons and the state of the moon. I look at people whose identities and life energies are submerged in corporate culture, whose whole personal experiences are mediated by consumerism (following the lives of celebrities or the cache of marketplace logos) and I feel pity for their lifestyles. Not that they are always conscious of the choices...

Unfortunately, few Gaels have been given the intellectual tools to question the Anglocentric grand narrative around them; they have been brainwashed in schools that denigrate the local and celebrate the Imperial. In the US there is a sense (at least amongst the educated) that ethnic minorities have a legitimate point of view and cause for grievance. This is, I believe, a natural consequence of extending America's ideals of liberty and justice to all people (not that this hasn't happened without a struggle!). The rhetoric of the inherent worth of every individual and their capacity for self-realisation is at least there to be argued. No such "liberation theology" exists in the British political mindset to empower the Celtic "fringe" - it is and has always been "Progress = Anglicisation : Celticisation = Barbarism".

In my last book "We're Indians Sure Enough”: The Legacy of the Scottish Highlanders in the United States I write further about racism and whiteness and cultural amnesia and oppression. It is something of an extension of the Handbook into American territory.

One of the reasons why I was compelled to write the Handbook was because I didn't think many people (inside of or outwith Scotland) saw the big picture of Gaelic culture and why it matters. I had been inspired by books about other indigenous cultures, or critiques of colonialism, and was amazed that so little had been written in defense of Scottish Gaeldom. Books in particular that inspired me included The Cultural Conquest of Ireland (Kevin Collins), In Absence of the Sacred (Jerry Mander), Stolen Continents (Ronald Wright), Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Friere) and The Myth of the Machine (Lewis Mumford), as well as the whole dialogue that opened up in the US in 1992 regarding the legacy of Columbus.

Being a writer can be a very solitary pursuit. It is reassuring to know that the ideas that emerge from the chaos of my brain actually have an impact on people!

Is mise le meas,

Micheal Newton

You can learn more about Michael At:

http://www.saorsamedia.com/index.html

Indigenous Science: Another Way of Knowing - Apela Colorado

2006-01-17T10:01:00.000-08:00

- Apela Colorado -

Criteria for an authentic rendering of indigenous science include:

1. The indigenous scientist is an integral part of the research process and there is a defined process for insuring this integrity.

2. All of nature is intelligent and alive, thus an active research partner. We do not act on nature, rather we communicate and work with nature.

3. Compared to western time/space notions, indigenous science collapses time and space, with the result that our fields of inquiry and participation extend into and overlap with past and present.

4. Indigenous science is concerned with relationships, we try to understand and complete our relationships with all living things.

5. Indigenous science is holistic, drawing on all the senses, including the spiritual and psychic.

6. The end point of an indigenous scientific process is a known and recognized place. This point of balance referred to by my own tribe, as the Great Peace, is both peaceful and electrifyingly alive. In the joy of exact balance, creativity occurs, that is why we can think of our way of knowing as a life science.

7. The purpose of indigenous science is to maintain balance.

8. When we reach the moment/place of balance we do not believe that we have transcended, we say that we are normal! Always remain embodied in the natural world.

9. Humor is a critical ingredient of all our truth seeking, even in the most powerful rituals. This is true because humor balances gravity (Colorado, 1994).

(Colorado, p. 7, “Native Science”: A Necessary Antidote to Western Science?)

Fake Shamanism or Sacred Initiations? - Ohki Simine Forest.

2006-01-17T01:21:00.000-08:00

an excerpt of a book "Dreaming The Council
Ways", by Ohki Simine Forest.

http://www.redwindcouncils.org/HTML/shamans.htm

Tad's Intro:

As white people begin to decolonize there is a strong tendency amongst some to seek out alternative spiritual paths that feel more real and authentic. Some of these are "new age" and now - the new New Age - "Shamanism".

To me what is interesting here is the way that so many of these practices become used by white folks to simply continue living their life without questioning any of their privileges or their lifestyle to any significant level.

Also interesting is the belief that "everyone can be a shaman." Though - if most people really understood what most shamans had to go through to become one they'd opt out fast.

In truth, most people, deep down, aren't shamans. Not really. But, perhaps out of the need for significance, people clutch to this. It is seeming to me that more important for most of us is the simple common wisdom of right living.

I received this article from a dear friend of mine Frank MacEowen (author of "The Spiral of Memory and Belonging"). These were his reflections:

Having gotten my start with shamanic experiences
specifically within an indigenous context -- sometimes
called "the long way around" -- there is something
about the way she words things here that captures or
expresses some of my own trepidation about shamanism
in the modern milieu. As many of you know, I've never
felt quite right about *some* of *certain* elements of
the Harner trainings, and other popular training
programs in shamanism, and this is just another
perspective from someone truly practicing as a shaman,
day in and day out, in an indigenous context -- not to
mention one that is under serious threat as we speak.

Her article does not address directly what Westerners
should do in lieu of such popular shamanic programs,
or in lieu of receiving quick weekend transmissions of
"shamanic techniques," but I, at least, thought it
might promote some good inner reflection, for those of
who practice, and those of you who teach.

I've shared this with two friends, one of whom had a
very strong reaction in the negative, and the other
(an indigenous person) a strong reaction to the
positive. So, I think there is something to it worthy
of reading.

On my own path, at present, I would have to describe
myself as 99.5% focused on mindfulness practice and
the artist's journey (poemcraft and visionary
painting).

Nearly a year ago now, on Brighid's Day 2005, I set
aside the practice of shamanic journeying. In part
this was because I began to grow suspicious that my
own ego, with its psychologically savvy way of
co-opting ANYTHING to serve itself, was starting to
lead my journeys...rather than my gaining authentic,
untarnished, or pure guidance from wisdom sources
beyond myself. From talking with several people I've
come to the conclusion that this happens for everyone,
and those who are unaware of this feature, or who say
it doesn't happen for them, are most likely the most
profoundly hooked in under the ego's sway.

I also began to have the sneaking suspicion that with
the sheer amount of shamanic journeying I had been
doing that this was one of the reasons my dream life
had practically gone away. So, in service of a healthy
dream life, and in service of kicking the ass of my
own ego, I elected to take a different road for a
while...one that has an ancient track record for
addressing such things.

In lieu of shamanic journeying, I decided to pick back
up --as a singular focus-- the Buddhist practice of
shamatha-vipassana meditation (which I'd trained in
off and on for ten years in both the Shambhala and
Japanese traditions). I did so for the purposes of
weighing that path against the litmus test of my own
present experiences.

What I can report is that, having walked this circuit
for close to a year, my conclusion is that I think one
of the most valuable things a shamanic practitioner
can do is to either START their path of shamanic
exploration, or augment a pre-existing path, with the
shamatha-vipassana approach. It is a 2,600 year old
fool proof method for gaining mastery over the wild
horse of the mind, learning to track its tendencies
(and how we habitually seek distraction and
entertainment), helping us to observe potent emotions
without getting hooked by them, as well as for opening
the energy gates of the heart.

As I began to contemplate the potentially invaluable
linkage between shamatha-vipassana meditation and
shamanic work, a kind of seed thought arose: Closed
Heart, Confused Mind, Unexamined Ego, Questionable
Journeys. That is not a commentary on anyone else,
only my own path and the continuing process underway
of stripping away the extraneous to get to the real
heart of my life. Needless to say, it has been an
interesting, humbling, sometimes painful, but
otherwise priceless process.

So, I just wanted to share a few of those thoughts, as
well as Ohki's article.

I wish each of you well and pray you are healthy and
warm.

Frank

S A C R E D M A R K I N G S:
Poetic Imagination Meets the Dreamtime

http://sacredmarkings.blogspot.com

* * *
Fake Shamanism or Sacred Initiations?

"I must express an important caveat about some of the workshops given on power animals in the Western world. I have found some of these teachings to be extremely incomplete and not well taught in regard to our ancient ways. Unfortunately, these techniques are among the most popular on the international scene of shamanic interest. One of my major aims in writing this book is to assist people in discerning between what is false and what is true, between fake and real shamans, between good practices and hazardous ones. There is so much shamanic “stuff” out there. Some of it makes my hair stand on end each time I hear stories of people receiving inadequate practices improperly imparted. Just the fact that these ancient practices are announced as power animal “techniques” is a good sign of a lack of true appreciation, divesting these noble traditions of their sacredness. The Spirit Animal teaching is one of the most sacred matters for us and is, by all means, a way of living and of finding our soul. Describing our very soul as a “technique” is, therefore, aberrant and totally out of place. I often meet people who have attended such seminars and workshops, and I always hear the same story. The teaching material of the so-called shamanic practitioners imparting these seminars consists of an “Americanized” or Western technique of power animals and spiritual journeys, probably copied from ancient knowledge, but which has, without a doubt, suffered a process of serious “injury.”

Dozens of people who have participated in these workshops have told me that these instructors incite everybody to journey, a form of inner meditation with drumbeat, teaching that whatever animal the student finds in visualizing a tunnel, is their power animal. Apparently, no one is verifying any of the participant's findings to ensure that they have the proper animal. Deplorably, sincere and innocent aspirants may believe whatever they hear in these seminars. This is critical to me. I have led numerous private meetings with people in order to “replace” the spirit animal for people who were genuinely convinced they had found the correct guardian animal by themselves.

One of the most serious examples I recall is that of a lady who joined a teaching circle I offered a few years ago. This woman was silent in the circle, and everyone was asking me what was wrong with her, as her energy was so heavily “off” and depressing. I was glad when the lady asked to speak privately with me. She then shared that she had participated in one of these “famous” workshops eight years ago and found a bear in her journeying tunnel. Having been told that the animal they would meet in the tunnel would be their own spirit animal, she adopted the bear she saw as her animal and started a process of intimate identification with it. This error was causing her major problems. I expressed to her that we need not talk more, that the spirit animal I was seeing as she was talking was one of a completely different nature. I told her then that her animal guardian was a red hawk and not a bear. For a long minute she did not say a word, seemingly puzzled. Then her face simply illuminated. She told me she remembered in her adolescence that she had a most striking dream of a red hawk flying directly at her face, looking straight into her eyes. There was no more to say on the subject. A year later, I saw this lady. She was very radiant and her depression had lifted. It is no wonder! How could a hawk needing to fly live happily in a bear's cave for eight years?

I have countless examples similar to this lady's misfortune. To surrender to an erroneous spirit animal as your essence and call its attention to you on a daily basis may bring deranging consequences for the rest of your life, if not amended promptly. This can become quite dangerous.

In traditional ways, the medicine people always point out the animal spirit to you, depending on their own vision or your own visions. Even if you receive a vision of a certain animal, this may not necessarily signify that you have encountered your true spirit animal. Often an animal may come as a strong sign in your life, but that doesn't mean in any way that this is your own animal. Even when you dream about a particular animal, however lucid the dream, you must confirm your findings with the shaman guide or a competent medicine person. Moreover, the power to determine or “catch” spirit animals for others is not given even to all shamans or medicine people. Traditionally, this capacity belongs to certain shamans gifted in this art. Permission for a future shaman to recognize spirit animals for others is only entrusted to them by the main shaman teacher when the time is ripe. Furthermore, each medicine person possesses his or her own gift or medicine specialty, as we will see in the next chapter, and not everyone is dedicated to the same shamanic occupations.

In addition, some of these practitioners have established what they call “shamanic institutions” that offer instruction in these supposed “techniques.” I ask myself, how can people institutionalize shamanic ways? If the spirit animal teachings are a sacred way into life, how can life be institutionalized? Life is a wondrous reality of transient qualities, and there exists no way to retain it in a cage like a bird or in a “building” as a captive. From ancient times, shamanic ways could never be contained in any societal or religious classifications, for they reflect the great ways of Earth and nature.
Furthermore, anyone who lacks the maturity of these ways may experience all sorts of animals in the journey's tunnel. The inexperienced may even encounter the animals of other persons present in the room with them, all trying to undertake their first journey. A beginner is as a child, fresh and open, not always possessing the aptitude to discern what is real. Many animal guides may surface in the tunnel. Your own fears may be disguised as spiders, rabbits, or snakes, reflecting your own psychological complexes. Angry animals may represent your emotional traumas and ravens, among others, may appear if you are pursuing a healing at some level. But these do not signify in any way that you have unearthed your true power spirit animal, the one that will dwell with you for the rest of your life.

In these questionable seminars, a “technique” of Soul Retrieval is also taught. The instructors have people work in pairs, and one of the two partners must journey to find the power animal, as well as their partner's soul in the Underworlds. This is done simultaneously, as the other pairs also attempt to accomplish the exercise in the room. These students, hardly knowing each other, are assisting one another in retrieving their Souls. They are not taught to discern the significance of an animal or entity encountered in the tunnel, yet the novices are expected to bring it back and blow it into the body and chest of the partner. For instance, if someone finds an illness in the form of a spider or, by chance, the animal of someone else in the room, whatever animal is found in the journey is then blown into the partner's chest as if it were the power animal of that person. When I hear these stories I do not know if I should laugh or cry!

It is important to understand the magnitude of the emotional damage such “methods” may produce for someone inexperienced in these practices. First, not everyone possesses the natural gift of soul retrieval. It is given to specific types of shamans or healers who indubitably must undergo years of hard training. As I have experienced myself, soul retrieval ceremonies performed by native shamans generally last a few hours, during which the shaman, in a deep trance state, suffers and endures the anguishes of the ill person. Upon his return, he is sweating, considerably exhausted.

Second, not everyone suffers a loss of soul. This practice is the latest vogue, poorly divulged by all sorts of false shamans. Many are led to believe that their souls are lost. Regularly, people ask me in their healing to retrieve their souls, when, in reality, there is nothing wrong with them at that level. These doubtful seminars announce: “Let's have everybody retrieve their souls, now!” Why do people allow an unfamiliar and inexperienced person to blow anything into their chest, their heart center, the seat of their spirit, and one of the most delicate and subtle organs of their emotional lives?

This flimsy emulation of native ways exhibits no respect or discrimination. I can only urge people to be careful. These supposed practices are imparted with the assumption that whatever emotional blockages or past traumas we have suffered have caused a soul loss. A true native perspective of soul loss would be more discerning and not so generalized. Consistently, all the Maya, Mongolian and Native American shamans and healers I have met, have taught me that when someone suffers a complete loss of soul, he or she usually lingers sick in bed, physically depleted as the days go by. They would, therefore, certainly be physically unable to attend any seminars! In the case of a partial loss of soul, the patient is commonly quite emotionally disturbed, seeming far away and totally incapable of functioning properly on a daily basis. I frankly doubt that everyone who attends these seminars finds themselves in such a state.

Of course all humans have, at some point, suffered a strong trauma, the reality of their emotional blockages and past ordeals. Who has not? But this in no way implies that your soul is kept captive by a spirit, is missing, or must be retrieved. Time reveals itself to be the best healer for these emotional problems. And for this, you must find an appropriate internal path to liberate you from them through the course of your life. But the soul generally remains fixed in the body. Though it may be wounded, it is nonetheless there. Often, life situations may create a catharsis, allowing us to purge past hurts, injuries or sentimental bruises, much the same way that our bodies will create an ailment such as a high fever. With the majority of people, it is not retrieval that the soul needs, but to be freed. This naturally involves an entirely different type of healing and spiritual practice. So it is important to place your emotional and spiritual life in the hands of competent healers or shamans when you seek guidance to uncover your inner puzzles and understand your illnesses.

The worst and most critical fact is that all sorts of people “graduate” from these seminars after only a few of these classes, claiming to be shamans, when, in reality, they have no real gift, no true vocation and no veracity, nor any real understanding of these ways. In turn, they may only create more ungroundedness and imbalance within those they instruct or heal. The universe has not chosen everyone to be an enduring shaman, one who must strive along the road to obtain these special ways and develop medicine powers. Even among natives, the medicine people develop their own distinctive field. There are the prayer people, the healers of all sorts, the retrievers, the removers, the blowers, the transformers, the shakers, the shape-shifters, those who pulse, those who perform limpias, the seers of the spirit world, sweat lodge leaders, and the vision makers. In actuality, there are not many true retrievers. This skill is only mastered after many, intensive years of self-healing, through various arduous initiations which corroborate whether someone possesses an authentic spiritual tenacity and vocation.

So it is absolutely essential that ancient power animal teachings be taught properly, with sound guidance, to enable the true and serious seeker to reach, through animal integration, the true gifts of their essence."

Gaidhlig Proverbs

2006-01-13T10:55:00.000-08:00

Perhaps one of the best inititial ways into a understanding a surface view of indigenous wisdom of any peoples are their sayings and proverbs - the well worn grooves in their minds that show how they think, what they value and their view of how the universe works. In Gaelic, these are known as the seanfhacal (lit: old word). Enjoy a small selection.

* * *

A smooth tongue will blunt wrath.

Brisidh an teanga bhog an cneath.

Three kinds of men who fail to understand woman, -- young men, old men, and middle-aged men

Tri shaghas fear go dteipeann ortha bean do thuisgint, -- fir oga, fir aosda, agus fir mheadhon-aosda.

The three most imcomprehensible things in the world -- The mind of a woman, the labour of the bees, the ebb and flow of the tide.
Na tri ruda is deacra do thuigsint san domhan, -- inntleacht na mban, obair na mbeach, teacht is imtheacht na taoide.

Who won’t take advice is worthless; who takes all advice is the same.

Is diù nach gabh comhairle, ‘s diù ghabhas gach comhairle.

Pity him who has his choice, and chooses the worse.

Ged b’e gheibheadh a roghainn, ‘s mairg a thaghadh an diù

If you wish peace, friendship and quiteness, listen, look and be silent.

Mas math leat sith, càirdeas agud cluain, èisd, faic is fuirich sàmhach.

When the cup is fullest it is most difficult to carry.

An uair as laine 'n cupan, 's ann as dorr' a ghiulan.

A man may force a livelihood, but cannot force fortune.

Bheir duine beath' air eiginn, ach cha toir e rath air eiginn.

Neither draw me without cause, nor return me without honour.

Na tarraing mi gun adhbhar, 's na pill mi gun chliu.

Where the stream is shallowest, greatest is its noise

Far an taine 'n abhainn, 's ann as mo a fuaim

Vanity is not without trouble.

Cha bhi uaill gun dragh.

There never was great news, But was a loss to somebody.

Cha robh naigheachd mhòr riamh, Nach robh na chall do dhuin'eigin

Sorrowing always is not good, And music (mirth) always is not good.

Cha'n fhiach bròn a ghnàth, 'S cha'n fhiach ceòl a ghnàth.

No door closes without opening another door.

Cha d' dhùin dorus nach d'fhosgail dorus.

In the face of inevitability, "There is not usually sunshine without shadow."

Cha dual grian gan sgaile

Truth is often harsh to tell.

Is minig a bha an fhirinn searbh ri h-innse.

The medicine (or liniment) that hurts the most Is generally the best healer.

A'chungaidh leighis is goirte, 'Si is moth'tha deaneamh feum.

No fumes from the pot, but from what it contains.

Cha tig as a phoit ach an toit a bhios innte.

If it is a lie I told, it is a lie I got.

Ma's breag uaim i, Is breag chugam i.

A man's faults will be as large as a mountain ere he himself sees them.

Bithidh cron duine cho mòr ri beinn mas leir dha fhèin e.

A friend's eye is a good looking-glass.

Bu mhath an sgàthan sùil caraid.

"Honey may be sweet, but who would lick it from the top of a briar?"

Ge milis a' mhil, cò dh'imlicheadh o bhàrr dri i?

He that is rude thinks his rudeness bad manners.

Am fear a bhios gun mhodh, saoilidh e gur modh am mi-mhodh.

Youth foresees not poverty, nor the fool his mischief.

Cha tuig an t-og aimbeart, 's cha tuig amadan aimhleas.

too much rush causes delay.

Luathaid gu deanamh maille

Raindrops come heavy on a house unthatched.

Is trom snighe air taigh gun tughadh.

Long sleep makes hot rowing.

Is e 'n cadal fada ni 'n t-iomradh teth.

He who will not look before him, Will look behind him.

Am fear nach seall roimhe, Seallaidh e as a dheigh.

Do not light a whisp (fire) that you cannot yourself put out

Na las sop nach urrainn duit féin a chuir as

A blessing feeds no one.

Cha bheathaich beannachd neach 's am bi.

Good is not obtained without trouble.

Cha'n fhaighear math gun dragh.

All the keys in the land do not hang from one girdle.

Chan eil gach iuchair san tir an crochadh ri aon chrios.

The first story from the host, And tales till morning from the guest.

A cheud sgeul air fear an taighe, Is sgeul gu làth' air an aoidh.

Better than gold is the tale well told

Is fhearr na'n t-òr sgeul air inns' air chòir

A good tale is not the worse of being twice told.

Cha mhisde sgeul mhath aithris da uair.

Great gaps may be filled with small stones

Lionar bearn mór le clachan beaga

A small spark has often kindled a great fire.

Is tric a bheothaich srad bheag teinne mór

Say but little and say it well.

Abair ach beagan agus abair gu math e.

He who holds his tongue keeps his friend

Am fear a ghleidheas a theanga, gleidhidh e a charaid

Don't lift me up until I fall

Na tog mi gus an tuit mi

Don't interfere with something that doesn't belong to you.

An rud nach buin duit na buin do.

It is no secret when three know it

Cha sgeul rùin e is fios aig triuir air

The manners of the folk where thou art thou must adopt.

Beus na tuath, far am bithear se nithear.

The best apple will be on the highest bough.

Bidh an ùbhal ìs fhearr air a mheangan is

Tell not thy mind to thy foolish friend, nor to thy wise enemy.

Na innis do run do d'charaide gorach, no do d'namhaid glic.

On an unknown path every foot is slow.

Is mall gach cos air chassan agn eolus

Necessity will get something done.

Bheir an èigin air rud-eigin a dheanamh.

If the messenger be worthy, the business is.

Mas fhiach an teachdaire, ‘s fhiach an gnothach.

He will make of you a tool, and of me a liar.

Ni e dhiotsa feumannach, ‘s ni e dhiomsa breugadair.

A person in need gets nothing

Cha tig spilgein air fear eiginn

A man can sleep on every hurt but his own

Caidlidh duine air gach cneadh ach a chneadh fhein.

A favour often costs more than what's hard-bought.

Is tric as daoir' a' chomain na 'n dubh-cheannach.

Remember the people whom you come from.

Cuimhnichibh air na daoine bho'n d'thainig sibh

The man who is known as an early riser can sleep late/sleep until noon.

Am fear a gheibh ainm na mocheirich, faodaidh e cadal anmoch /gu meadhon latha

Renown is more lasting than life.

Is buaine bladh na saoghal.

He who is late rising will be in a hurry all day

Am fear e bhios fada gun eiridh, bidh e na leum fad' an latha

There is no deceit/fraud so great as the promise unfullfilled.

Cha'n eil fealladh ann cho mòr ris an gealladh gun choimhlionadh.

Promising but not fulfilling, is worse than refusing.

Gealladh gun a'choimhghealladh, is miosa sin na dhiùltadh

He that promises the most will perform the least.

Am fear as mò a gheallas, ‘s e as lugha cho-gheallas.

Better not to begin than stop without finishing.

B'fhearr gun tòiseachadh na sguir gun chriochnachadh.

A promise can never be tied (or tethered.)

Cha chuirear gad air gealladh.

Quick to promise often deceives.

Am fear a tha grad gu gealladh, ‘s tric leis mealladh.

Like Ossian after the Feinne.

Mar Oisean an dèidh na Fèinne.

If it is worth taking, it is worth asking for.

An rud is fhiach a ghabhail, 's fhaich e iarraidh.

Anger may look in on a wise man's heart, but it abides in the heart of

a fool.

Faodaidh fearg sealltainn a stigh air cridh an duine ghlic, ach còmhnaichidh i an cridh an amadain.

What cannot be helped, Must be put up with.

An rud nach gabh leasachadh, 'S fheudar cur suas leis.

Patience will get relief or reward

Gheibh faidhidinn furstachd

You cannot pull a cow backwards,

Cha tharraing tu bò an comhair a h-earball

Sweet sings each bird in his own grove.

Is binn gach eun 'na dhoire fhein.

Night is a good shepherd, it brings home man and beast

Is math am buachaill' an oidhche, bheir e dhachaidh gach beathach is duine

Men will meet, but the hills will not.

Tachraidh na daoine, ach cha tachair na cnuic.

Every flood will have an ebb.

Chan eil tuil air nach tig traoghadh.

A great sea comes not through a narrow strait

Cha tig muir mhor tron chaolas chumhann.

See that your own hearth is swept before you lift your neighbour's ashes

Feuch gu bheil do theallach fhéin sguaibte, ma's tog thu luath do choimhearsnaich

It's easy to keep a castle that's not besieged.

Is fhurasda caisteal gun seisdeadh a ghleidheach.

Although you would put the fool into a wine press, foolishness will not part from him.

Ged a chuireadh tu an t-amadan ann an amar-bruthaidh, cha dhealaich amaideas ris

Though separation be hard, two never met but had to part.

Ge cruaidh sgarachdainn, cha robh dithis gun dealachadh.

Save, and for whom? Remember death?

Caomhain, is cò dha? Cuimhnich am bàs.

A man with neither strength nor art is worth nothing.

Chan fhiach duine gun neart gun innleachd.

One cow breaks the fence, and a dozen leap it.

Aon bho a bhristeas an garradh, 's a dha dheug a leumas

Wrong cannot rest, nor ill deed stand.

Cha bhi suaimhneas aig eucoir, no seasamh aig droch-bheairt.

The more you get of what's good, The less you will get of what's bad.

A mheud 'sa gheibh thu gu math, Se'n lughad a gheibh thu de'n olc.

Three that come unsought - fear, jealousy and love

Trian a thig gun iarraidh - eagal, iadach is gaol

Nothing asked, nothing learned.

Chan fhiosrach mur feòraich.

The herb that cannot be found will not give relief.
An luigh nach fhaighear cha'n ì a chobhras.

Everything but the right thing.
A h-uile rud ach an rud bu chòir.

Bailing the sea with a creel.
A taomadh na mara le cliabh.

All is not lost that is in peril.
Cha chaillear na thèid an cunnart.

Who farthest away e'er did roam
Heard the sweetest music on returning home.
Am fear, is fhaide chaidh bho'n bhaile,
Chual e'n ceòl bu mhilse leis nuair thill e dhachaidh.

The man who farthest away did roam, heard the sweetest music on
returning home

Am fear is fhaide chaidh bho'n bhaile Chual e'n ceòl bu mhilse leis
nuair thill e dhachaidh

A house without a dog, a cat or a little child, is one without affection or merriment.

Taigh gun chù gun chat gun leanabh beag, tigh gun ghean gun ghàire

Sickness needs many things which health requires not.

Is ioma rud a dh’fheumas an euslaint nach fheum an t-slàinte.

Better rise early than sit late.

Is fheàrr èirigh moch na suidhe anmoch.

The best of nursing may overcome the worst disease.

Ruigidh an ro-ghiullachd air an ro-ghalar.

To live life to the full, though you would only live a half hour.

Bhith beò beathail ged nach bitheadh tu beò ach leth-uair.

The contented person has no needs but to be born and brought up.

Chan eil air an duine sona ach a bhreith agus àrach

The deaf will hear the clink of money.

Cluinnidh am bodhar fuaim an airgead.

It is not the quietest sow that eats the least.

Cha'n i a mhuc is sàimhche, Is lugh a dh'itheas de'n drabh.

He that gets most will ask most.

Am fear as mò a gheibh, ‘s e as mò a dh’iarras.

Due civility never broke a man's head,

And great the pity to be at any time without it.

Cha do bhris deagh urram ceann duine riamh,

Agus is mòr-am-beud a bhi uair 's am bith as aonais.

A request merits no reproof.

Cha toill iarratas achmhasan.

The hand that gives is the hand that will receive, Except when given to a bad man.

An làmh a bheir 'si a gheibh, Mar a d'thugar do dhroch dhuin'e.

Borrowing and lending have always been world-wide habits.

Bha iasad ga ghabhail 's ga thoirt riamh air feadh an t-saoghal.

‘Tis when food is scarcest it should be divided.

Is ann an uair as gainn’ am biadh as còir a roinn.

During the year when meal is scarce Let big bakings be few.

A bhliadhn' is gainne a mhin, Dean fuine mhòr aineamh.

Friendship is as it's kept.

Is ann a tha 'n cairdeas mar a chumar e.

A friend in court is worth more than crowns in the purse

’S fheàrr caraid sa chùirt na crùn san sporan

What is got by guile will disappear with the wind.

An rud a thig gu dona falbhaidh e leis a ghaoith.

The long clean road, and the short dirty road.

An ràthad fada glan, is an ràthad goirid salach.

Quickness and neatness do not go together.

Cha bhi luathas is grinneas còmhla.

Quick and fine don't combine.

Cha bhi luathas agus grinneas an cuideachd a' cheile.

The three dearest things there are: hen eggs, pork and old women’s praise.

Na tri rudan as daoire a th’ann: uighean chearc, feòil mhuc, glòir chailleach.

Honour belongs to old age.

Buinidh urram do'n aois.

He who won’t take counsel will take a roundabout way.

Am fear nach gabh comhairle, gabhaidh e cam-lorg.

Better be without being than without instruction.

B'fhearr a bhi gun bhreith na bhi gun teagasg.

If you are a man of skill, let us hear your masterpiece.

Ma tha thusa ‘nad fhear-ealaidh, cluinneamaid annas do làimhe.

Fingal's sword never had to cut twice.

Cha d'fhag claidheamh Fhinn riamh fuigheall beuma.

The man that went farthest from home had as far to come back.

Am fear as fhaide chaidh riamh on taigh, bha cho fad’aige ri tighinn dachaigh.

Neither seek nor shun the fight

Na sir 's na seachainn an cath

His shore of Paradise to him.

A chuid de Fhlaitheanas dha.

Fear is worse than fighting.

Is mios' an t-eagal na 'n cogadh.

Desperation will give courage to a coward.

Bheir eu-dochas misneachd do'n ghealtair àirde.

A day's work - getting started

Obair là - tòiseachadh

It's difficult to draw pure water from a dirty well.

Is duilich burn glan a thoirt a tobar salach.

You will never know a man, Until you do business with him.

Cha'n aithnich thu duine, Gus am bi do ghnothaich ris.

Where a good man is, he is a man, whether in company or alone.

Far am bi an deagh dhuine, is duin’e ‘n cuideachd ‘s na aonar.

What's done in the corner will come to the hearth.

An rud a nitear sa chuil, thig e dh'ionnsaigh an teine.

There is no concealment of evil, But by avoiding it.

Cha'n eil cleith air an olc, Ach gun a dheanamh.

The man who would strike my dog would strike me.

Am fear a bhuaileadh mo chù, bhuaileadh e mifhéin.

Do not judge by appearances, a rich heart may be under a poor coat

Na toir breith air réir coltais faodaidh cridh beartach a bhi fo chòta bochd

A wise man will form a year's judgement from one night's knowledge of another man

Bheir duine glic breith bliadhna air fear na h-aon oidhche

A man is known by his company

Aithnichear duine air a chuideachd

He that is courteous will be courteous to all.

Am fear a bhios modhail, bidh e modhail ris a h-uile duine.

Praise the good day at the close of it.

Mol an latha math mu oidhche.

Better the small scone with blessing than the large scone with cursing.

’S fheàrr am bonnach beag le beannachd na am bonnach mòr le mallachd

Better a small portion with a blessing than a large portion with a cursing

Is fhearr bloigh bheag le bheannachd, na bloigh mór le mallachd

Peace to your soul, and a stone on your cairn.

Sìth do d'annam, is Clach air do Chàrn

The world will pass away, but love and music will endure

Thig crioch air an saoghal, ach mairidh gaol is ceòl

Shun evil company.

Seachain droch-chuideachta

Pride with nothing to back it up

Bosd gun chur leis

A conceited fellow and a laird's tyke, Two who should not be allowed their own way.

Balach, is balgaire tighearna, dithis nach còir a leigeil leòtha.

He thought the ocean his own under his spells.

Shaoil leis gum bu leis fhein an cuan fo gheasaibh.

Good sword has often been in poor scabbard.

Is minig a bha claidheamh math an droch thruaill.

Timely advice is better than a late gift

Is fhearr còmhairl na thrath, na tiodhlac fadalach

Often has wise counsel comes from a fool's head.

Is minig a thainig comhairle ghlic a ceann amadain.

Council can be given, but not conduct.

Bheirear comhairle seachad ach cha toirear giùlan.

Silence is consent.

Is ionnan tosd is aideachadh.

Say that, when you have spent a stack of peats along with it.

Abair sin, nuair a chaitheas tu cruach mhòine còmhla ris.

What is well done will be shown by results.

An rud a nithear gu math, chithear a bhuil.

The oar that's nearest at hand, row with it.

An ràmh is fhaisg air laimh, iomair leis.

One hapless act may undo a man,

And one timely one will re-establish him.

Cuiridh aon bheart as an duine gu lom, is gun bhonn fo cheill,

Is cuiridh beart eil' e ann, ach a bhabhail am féin.

It's better to try than to hope.

Is fhearr fheuchainn na bhith san duil.

It is not the nodding of heads that does the rowing.

Chan e gogadh nan ceann a ni an t-iomradh.

I would know your gift by your graciousness.

Dh'aithnichinn air do sheirc do thabhartas.

That were a star on a dark night.

B' i sin reul 's an oidhche dhoilleir.

Better to hear the evil than see it.

Is fhearr an t-olc a chluinntinn na fhaicinn.

Tad's Top Ten Books for Healing Whiteness

2006-01-12T03:35:00.000-08:00

Over the past decade, I feel like I've been somehow guided to just the right book at the right time. Each one taking me deeper in my own understanding and further along my own life path. Not in any linear sense, but more in a spiraling shape. Each one peeled back a different layer and allowed me to see new things. I've listed them in roughly the order I read them.

Of course, each of our journeys is so unique and the books that mean so much to one may not to another. Indeed, books themselves may not be useful to some.

But for what it's worth . . .

The Mist Filled Path: Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers and Seekers - Frank MacEowen

This was one of the first books I read on Celtic spirituality and one of the most meaningful to me. It was neither abstract nor academic, but deeply personal. It shared Frank's profound story of reconnecting with his roots. Given that i was looking into my roots from a frame of healing racism and whiteness, the fact that Frank spoke directly and clearly to these issues in his book meant a great deal to me. Frank and I have since become dear friends. This is the book that convinced me a Celtic Indigenous Path did indeed exist.

A Handbook of the Scottish Gaelic World - Michael Newton

This book was a god-send. As I read it i kept thinking, "YES! I can't believe someone has written this book." It seemed to speak to every question i was living with. Right from the start he challenges modernism, racial contructions, and speaks directly to the dynamic of colonization as it existed for the Highlanders. With impeccable and detailed research he lays out the Gaelic worldview on a wide range of issues from: nature, to language, to belief, tradition and the structure of society, the oral tradition and a kick ass first chapter with some very good thoughts about "thinking about culture". This book delivers what too many lack - a political analysis for the historical and current realities of the Gael and how it all relates to the "modern" world in which we live.

A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen

You will notice that Derrick takes four spots on my top ten list. There's a reason. Derrick is perhaps the most skilled, artful and powerful author I have ever experienced in his weaving together of some many of the strands of questioning i was living with: racism, indigenous issues, how did it all come to this? what's the way back home?, environmental issues etc. This is the book that truly broke my heart open and showed me the state of the world more clearly than i'd ever seen it. Devastating in its implications for civilization but brimming with hope in its belief of the higher possibilities in humanity. For me, the core of this book is how violence requires silence to continue - to abuse others, indigenous people and the natural world - they must be silenced in our experience.

The Culture of Make Believe - Derrick Jensen

Immediately after reading LOTW i read this. I think that this was the book that convinced me that there was no hope for modern civilization. Zero. It's the book that helped me see The Machine more clearly than ever and what it does to us - how it dehumanizes us. It helped me see that trying to save civilization is not only impossible but undesirable. It helped me see - contrary to new age claims - that the masses were not going to suddenly shift, voluntarily, to a sustainable way of life. Given that, the solution had to lie somewhere else. As the review says, "The book makes clear that it is only through understanding these atrocities, and by feeling the sorrow and despair caused by them, then moving through that despair, that we will be able to make significant movement toward halting them."

Listening to the Land - Derrick Jensen

This was actually Derrick's first book. It is a collection of interviews with environmentalists, feminists, theologians, philosophers, and Indians centering around the question: If the destruction of the natural world isn't making us happy, why are we doing it?" Starhawk, Jerry Mander, Ward Churchill etc. The wide range of responses from such elders and luminaries is incredible and gives so many lenses through which to look at the current situation.

The Four Fold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Teacher, Healer and Visionary - Angeles Arrien

This book is a weaving together of many spiritual and indigenous approaches from a cross cultural standpoint of "what is the common ground?" I can not speak to its accuracy but i can speak the the simple power of it. This is a book I will return to throughout my life for it's core wisdom on right living with a good heart.

Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom - Taiaiake Alfred

I got an email from my friend, Shalene Jobin, who told me about the booklaunch for this is Edmonton and described Taiaiake's philosophy as "anarcho indingenism". I went to the website (www.wasase.org) and was blown away. There were PDF's, audio files and ten hours of video of Taiaiake teaching at his Indigenous Governance (iGov) program at UVic. I was blown away. I've never heard a more lucid analysis of colonization and what is required for decolonization. He unpacks and dismantles the economic, legalistic and armed resistance approaches and suggests another paths based on returning to the original teachings and engaging in a process of non-violent contention with the settler society. Taiaiake's work not only gave me a deeper understanding of the north american indigenous reality but also gave me so many frame works and goof thoughts for the process of decolonization that whites must go through as well.

Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing - Deena Metzger

I have many issues with the new age movement - it's dismissal of worldly, politica engagement as negative, people getting a week's worth of reiki training and opening a practice etc. Much of the new age seems to be a way for white folks to justify and maintain their current lifestyle. Deena (an american jew) delves deeply into the recovery of her indigenous mind and an indingeous perspective on healing. She lays out a view of healing that suggests a truly healing gesture is one that heals on every level. "Any one individual who is suffering a disease such as cancer or environmental illness, is also carrying it for the community, or as a member of the community. Their suffering reveals what is awry in the country at large." This book reminded me of the importance of spirit in this work. I've never read a more integrated perspective.

The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature and Place in a Hypermodern World - Charlene Spretnak

As I've read these books, the question has always been, "What is the heart of this all? What is the seed from which this sprouted? And what is the name for this illness that has changed us so deeply?" I think that modernism is as good a name as any. Charlene unpacks the modern worldview in the clearest and most explicit way i've ever seen done.

endgame: the collapse of civilization and the rebirth of community - derrick jensen

Of course, once we understand how very deep the problem is, what do we do about it? If civilization is inherently violent - then by not doing anything we are allowing that violence to continue.

This book deals directly with the question, "how do we stop the juggernaut?". My favorite part of this book are the 16 premises he lays out in the beginning. This book pushes you to agree or disgree. If you want a book to take you off the fence - this is it.

A World Gone Mad

2006-01-11T14:19:00.000-08:00

www.dalgarnoart.com/gallery.htm

I think the world has gone crazy.

To be more specific: I think humanity has gone crazy.

Maybe that’s not specific enough: I think those raised within western civilization are crazy (with “extra special” crazy status reserved for those who most benefit from its exploitations).

And I’m not trying to be humourous. I have come to believe that the vast bulk of us (and by “us” I’m referring to those of us who fit the last set of criteria above and, specifically, this piece will speak to those of primarily Celtic descent) are truly not well. We are sick.

By any measure you can point to, we’re doing insane things to ourselves and to the planet.

If any alien invader came and did what we are doing they would be fought, resisted and a war waged against them. If aliens came and: enslaved 27 million humans (creating more slaves than have ever existed before on Earth), rapidly deforested our planet to create fuel for its ships, worked to destroy our ozone layer, created and then deposited nuclear waste - which would last up to 500,000 years (in barrels that, being optimistic, might last 200 years) – near our water supplies, if they polluted our air, water and food supply and depleted our topsoil while intentionally creating the 5^th great wave of extinction the planet has ever seen there’d be revolution in the streets over night.

If, in order to rule us, they worked to destroy our unique cultures and languages and make us conform to their own (one that was totally and literally alien to us) we’d resist (just as indigenous people’s around the world resisted the onslaught of civilization).

If, to weaken us, they intentionally addicted us to toxic substances that would result in the vast majority of the population dying of painful and debilitating diseases well before their natural time (in fact doing this to such an extent that “death by natural causes was no longer considered statistically significant) we’d never take it. Especially not, if as an instrument of torture, they ensured that we lived longer – so that we’d suffer more (prolonging not so much our living but our dementia and dying).

But, because it is Western Civilization doing these things, and worse, then OH! all the above are, of course, signs of great progress and a booming economy.

And it really is that bad. There's an old saying "if one person calls you a horse’s ass, punch them in the face. If two people call you a horse’s ass, think about it, three people call you a horse’s ass -- get a saddle." If one person were depressed that would be one thing. If it were only 100 or thousand people that's another -- but when it's so many that it's impossible to count because it's become normal, it's time to look at the system producing that.

I think we’ve gone crazy.

* * *

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Milan Kundera

"We must never cease our exploring. For perhaps the end of all our exploring will be to return to the place where we first began in to truly know that place for the first time."

-- T.S. Eliot

How can one understand one's place in the world without understanding the world? And what good is it find one's place in a world gone mad? And, what if the world we are normally shown is not, indeed, the real and natural world? Just as fictional characters like Superman have no place in this world, nor do real people ever truly have a place in the fictional world. And, what if we live in a culture of make-believe?

And what if its synthetic soil sustains us only at the barest levels? What if, like any plant, we only grow in proportion to the soil in which we find ourselves? What if the depleted soil of civilization is growing depleted people? What if civilization is not the beginning of our story is humanity but merely the latest [and hopefully not last] chapter? And what if we're so miserable because we have only read this last chapter [it's not a very happy chapter -- it's full of slavery, rate, depression, oppression and abuse of all kinds]?

Is it possible that civilization itself – the very thing that was supposed to make us all happier, healthier and wealthier - is making us miserable, sickly and impoverished (in all the ways that matter most)?

And here’s a question that will keep you up at night: How have we collectively created a world none of us wants individually? No one wants polluted air, water, land or energy sources. That’s not anyone’s end goal for their life. Is it possible that we don't want the ends but were addicted to the means? We don't want air pollution but we are addicted to cars?

Is it possible that we misunderstand our place in the world and what it is to be human because we understand too little of our history? And what, I wonder would happen if we knew?

I am beginning to suspect that we are not who we were. Perhaps, who we think we are is not even really who we are. And if that’s true then what has become of us? How did it get to this? How did we become such domesticated sleepwalkers?

I am beginning to suspect that what we consider normal is far from what is natural. And I’m beginning to suspect that the problem goes deep to the very heart of what call civilization - to the heart of the Western Mind.

* * *

I don’t think we understand where we fit anymore. I think we’ve lost any real sense of the greater story of which we are a part. I think most of us sense the craziness in the world (and have experienced it in our own ways) and are actually living in trauma.

But we don’t know where the pain is coming from. In our darker moments, and perhaps our sanest ones, just before we fall asleep, many of us secretly hold a variation of the last sentiment of Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich, “Is it possible that our whole world has been wrong?”

* * *

Caitlin Matthews, Celtic scholar and author, poses the question like this:

"How can the soul or the world be re-enchanted once it is lost the enchantment? Only by returning to the story of the soul and retelling it up to the point of fracture; only by placing our story within the context of the greater song.

She tells that when Merlin is exposed to the terrible carnage of the battle of Arfderwydd "he becomes mad and runs into the depths of the forest. Within the forest's embrace, he becomes one with the trees and seasons and puts aside the terrible sights he has seen to focus upon the gifts of the wild world, becoming rusticated and "uncivilized."

Ever pertinent and prophetic, he sees through the pretexts and pretensions of those who come to lure him back to civilization with the sure instinct of an animal,”

He does not respond to anyone except his friend, the Welsh poet, Taliesin who comes to sit with him. Only then “does Merlin respond, asking the odd question, "why do we have weather?" This seemingly trivial query is all that Taliesin needs to help his friend. He begins to recite the creation of the world. At the end of Taliesin's recital, Merlin is restored as the sacred context of his story is given back to them." - The Celtic Spirit, Caitlin Matthews, page 70 and page 225

Except for most of us - there has been no Taliesin. There has been no grandmother. No one has rewoven us into the fabric of creation. So, what the hell are we supposed to do? Can the sick heal themselves? Can the traumatized un-traumatize themselves? Can the sleeping wake themselves? Can the dead resurrect themselves?

Who saves us when we’re all in trouble?

“Child go off from the herd

go beyond the lowlands

leave the valley of shed antlers

the elders are sick

it is your time now.”

- “Listen to the Wind”,

Barnie McCormack, Bard of Craigencalt