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Comments (135):

1. Sean Swan says:

   July 31, 2007 at 5:03 am

   Sue,

   “Einsteins famous equation (E=MC2) tells us that everything is a modification of Light—or rather Conscious Light.”

   Oh God! Please, please, please!

   Energy = Matter x the Constant speed of light travelling in a vacuum squared.

   It means that, at the atomic level, matter can be changed in to energy (as in nukes) and, conversely energy can be changed into matter – which is why it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light – if your doing C and you put your foot down the extra energy transforms into mass, so you just get more massive, not faster. Nowhere is there anything about ‘conscious’ light – in fact light itself is not that significant, it just happens to travel at C (the fastest possible velocity) in a vacuum.

   Einstein got into god in a different context when he said – in relation to quantum mechanics – that he didn’t believe that God plays dice with the universe (the use of ‘God’ in this context may well have been metaphorical for a rejection of the uncertainty principle). he then spent the latter part of his life trying – totally unsuccesfully – to disprove Quantum Mechanics. While he remained great in the popular mind, amongst physicists he totally discredited himself with this and had become something of a joke by the time of his death – though nobody denied that his earlier work on relativity had been brilliant and profound. But trying to make E=MC2 say ‘Cosmic Light’ is a misunderstandin on a par with believing that Constable was later promoted to Seargent because his paintings were so good.

   Please, please drop it … it’s just soooooooo…No, I’ll leave it there.
2. Sean Swan says:

   July 31, 2007 at 5:09 am

   PS Sue, this one’s for you http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/
3. bill harris says:

   July 31, 2007 at 5:38 am

   HI Sean,

   re 30 july 7:18 AM

   So what about Heidegger?
4. Sean Swan says:

   July 31, 2007 at 5:47 am

   Truepeers

   “leaving aside the question of when an embryo or fetus becomes human, all humans have at least some development (however disordered the individual) of a kind of (big)brain that has co-evolved over the millenia with language, in order to serve the development of language. So in bringing up the question of our common ancestors we can’t escape the language question by clinging to DNA. Our DNA, at least some small part of it, assumes the existence of a uniquely human language.”

   Chimps also have ’some development’ towards a standard human brain – far more so than some humans who have virtually no brain – no, there is no sarcasm of any sort in that, there are living people, who are otherwise NORMAL who have virtually no brain matter. Here’s the story, complete with photos of the scan of such a ‘brain’ http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html

   Now doesn’t that raise a few questions? I have no idea what the answer is, though just because this blows a big hole in lots of things, I’m not going to take refuge in a simplistic ‘god-of-the-gaps’ – thought I do admit that it fills me with a certain awe. Heidegger is very relevant here, but while I can sometimes understand him, I can never explain him – my Heidegger vocabulary is passive, not active, to use a linguistic explanation.

   Now everybody take a look at ‘Mr No Brain’ who is actually of slightly ABOVE average intelligence … feel that tingle at the back of your neck…
5. bill harris says:

   July 31, 2007 at 6:04 am

   Hi Sean,

   Re conscious light; it’s interesting how people still confuse this metaphor for reality; which is, I suppose, the basis for believing myths in the first place!

   Goethe started it all by famously writing that “life is but light in many- hued reflection”. Yet this, too, was taken perhaps all too seriously from Spinoza’s analogy of the three knowledges: Formal /shaddow, descriptive/prismic, and divine/blindingly white.

   Planck units were established as quanta of energy in 1900–the year of their discovery by…Planck. What’s unique about Einstein’s Spec Rel is explicit in his written description: “All Newtonian mechanics contain a third coefficient (Gamma), the Lorenz Transformer”. Because Lorenz was integral to Maxwell, therefore Spec Rel unified wave and particle mechanics into one set of equations.

   Einstein did not try to refute QM as such, rather insisting that it was incomplete as a theory. This is his EPS work which was later lain out by Bell as a conjecture that could either be proven or falsified. Alain Aspect proved that all of Bell’s conjectures are establishhed and “complete”, thereby ending the debate some fifteen years after Einstein’s death….at leat for most!
6. Sean Swan says:

   July 31, 2007 at 6:24 am

   Hi Bill

   I’ll defer to your obvious familiarity with this subject and say just that (I had though) that what Einstein thought ‘incomplete’ about QM was the uncertainty theory – that is, he thought it should be possible to KNOW both velocity and position. But the point of uncertainty is precisely that it is a sort of intellectual speed of light – it marks a boundary to the knowable.

   To be honest, I sometimes suspect that ultimate reality is, literally, ‘unspeakable’ because we can’t catch it in the net of our metaphores/symbols and thus can’t say it – though maybe it is to some extent knowable on the level of … ‘intuition’ for want of a better word, something sort of in the realms of poetry or dreams.

   Re Heidegger, there’s a certain resemblance to taoism – if I may vulgarise and simplify

   What do you make of ‘Mr No Brain”??
7. Andrew Burridge says:

   July 31, 2007 at 9:04 am

   I liked this article but I couldn’t grasp why *now* it is important that what Scruton called “the sacred” should have any relation to religion – to the mythology which every person of faith I know buys into, and uses to inform their thinking.
8. truepeers says:

   July 31, 2007 at 9:26 am

   “there are living people, who are otherwise NORMAL who have virtually no brain matter.”

   “look at ‘Mr No Brain’ who is actually of slightly ABOVE average intelligence …”

   Both of these statements are contradicted by what the article actually says.
9. Sean Swan says:

   July 31, 2007 at 10:14 am

   Truepeers

   What ever way it’s chopped he had a ‘tiny brain’ yet could function well enough to work as a civil servant, etc. It doesn’t change the fact that it raises some fundamental questions

   Here be the full text from physorg

   “French doctors are puzzling over the case of 44-year-old civil servant who has led a quite normal life — but with an extraordinarily tiny brain.

   In a case history published in next Saturday’s Lancet, doctors led by Lionel Feuillet of the Hopital de la Timone in Marseille say the father-of-two was admitted to hospital after suffering mild weakness in his left leg.

   Scans by computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed that the man’s cerebral cavities, called ventricles, had massively expanded.

   “The brain itself, meaning the grey matter and white matter, was completely crushed against the sides of the skull,” Feuillet told AFP.

   “The images were most unusual… the brain was virtually absent,” he said.

   The patient’s medical history showed that at the age of six months, he suffered hydrocephalus, also called water on the brain, and needed an operation to drain this dangerous buildup of spinal fluid.

   Neuropsychological testing revealed the man had an IQ of 75, with a verbal IQ of 84 and performance IQ of 70. The bulk of people in society have a minimum IQ of 85, although the benchmark and the way it is measured are sometimes contested.

   Despite this, “the man has been able to lead a life that can be considered normal,” said Feuillet. “Even if he has a slight intellectual handicap, this has not hampered his development or building social networks.”

   (c) 2007 AFP

   This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com
10. Sean Swan says:

    July 31, 2007 at 11:17 am

    Roger Scruton

    The philosophical and scientific implications of the existence of Mr No Brain are surely huge. It has been assumed that a brain of certain size is necessary for human consciousness (leaving aside the whole problem of mind/brain duality and consciousness for the moment). This assumption is quite understandable – almost all humans have ‘human sized’ brains and almost all of those who don’t are profoundly retarded. But now we seem to have a case of a ‘black swan’ – an individual that, certainly looking at the pictures of the scan in the Fox article, (we’ll have to wait for the Lancet article for proper measurements)has a brain much smaller than that of a chimp, BUT is essentially normal. Perhaps his brain developed some fantastic compensatory wiring, though that would seem hardly likely to be enough to compensate for such a lack of brain matter, or, if that can’t explain it, all current thinking of the relationship of brain to consciousness has to be re-thought. The potential implications for everything from neurology to genetics to philosophy are huge – if consciousness cannot be explained solely in terms of the brain then..then a million questions arise – is there any way you can ponder this, obviously when there’s more info from the Lancet article on which to form some preliminary assesment, and say what you think the implications/questions might be?

    (I have just re-read what I’ve written and it seems ridiculous. surely there must be some mistake about Mr No Brain … but if there isn’t…)
11. Sean Swan says:

    July 31, 2007 at 11:59 am

    Actually the article was published in the lancet on 21.07.2007. It’s very short and makes not comment, just states the facts. It has four pictures of brain scans of Mr No Brain. It’s in pdf here ->
    http://www.eurekalert.org/images/release_graphics/pdf/brain.pdf

    Any neurosurgeon types out there who can comment on this?
12. Patrick Wallace says:

    July 31, 2007 at 2:05 pm

    There’s a point of – no doubt trivial to some – comparison with the current furore over “deception” in the pursuit of “good” TV (which seems to mean that which gives some sort of “closure”).

    Much of Scruton’s article is of interest, even if, in its primary thrust, it was no great surprise even to this non-expert: the whole point of the Anglican settlement, surely, was to allow a multitude of beliefs and cultural practices within a common ceremonial form, even to the point where the commonality of the experience seems to be more important than anything which is stated to be belief.

    The trouble, however, is that the loudest public voices of the religious are not those with a subtle understanding of its cultural significance, but those who not only insist that what they preach is literally true, but also seek to derive material consequences for the rest of us, whether it be the horrors of a bomb on the bus, the absurdities of a an indiscriminate climatic retribution for a curiously fine choice of human failings for which divine judgement is to be exercised (which somehow manages to exclude judgement on the church for appointing idiots as bishops), or the imposition of creationism in schools.

    In the face of that insistence, then respect for truth, no less than for liberty of conscience or plain old common sense, demands that there has to be as literal a response.

    Respect for the cultural significance of others’ beliefs is a two-way street. Subtle is as subtle does.
13. bill harris says:

    July 31, 2007 at 3:40 pm

    Hi Sean,

    The entirety of QM is about probability of distribution. Heisenberg’s indeterminacy imposes a lower boundary on said distribution in terms of what might be observed. Below this, the entire “wave function” collapses not metaphorically as an equation, but also in a physical sense.

    Einstein objected to the entire notion of a statistical science, period; saying that QM was “incomplete” because it lacked the means of predicting outcomes without leaving anything to chance. Criteria for what he thought a complete science of quanta would look like are called “EPR” (Sorry, I mistakenly said EPS in my last message!).

    So for the sake of argument–and although he talked in far more gentlemanly terms about how Spec Rel “revised ” F=ma with a third coefficient– I would accept that in his own eyes he desired to overturn QM from the bottom up. This is simply to say that my math is simply not good enough–by a long shot–to comprehend how/if the insertion of a hidden variable might somehow convert a statistical model into one of certitude….

    “No Brain” might be explained best by Gould’s explanation of the H.Sapiens brain as basically a huge spandrels. Simply put. we don’t use much of it, anyway. Moreover, citing Edelman, what we do understand is that the brain is not wired in any sense with a set circuitry. More like a jungle in there than an electric power grid. Therefore, destroyed parts might be to a certain extent circumvented.

    I still don’t understand your reference to Heidegger. Please help!

    Bill
14. Sean Swan says:

    July 31, 2007 at 11:32 pm

    Hi Bill

    Thanks for that. I was forgetting Schrodinger’s pussy cat! – I suppose what ties it all together is certainty, that is our need for a belief system that provides certain knowledge. This was the role of religion up to the Enlightenment. It was suceeded by science, which seemed fine in Newton’s clockwork universe, but then Einstein makes it relative and QM adds to this by making things ‘uncertain’ and a question of ‘probaility’. Once again the ground of certain knowledge has been cut from under our feet. If it is the observer who collapses the wave function of probability, it also implies that we, if not create at least define or ‘interfere with by mere observation’, reality.
    Re Heidegger, his question is this ‘What is ‘is’?’ What does it mean to say that something exists? A fairly basic question that goes to the heart of the points of departure of science and religion. He asserts that man is constituitive of Being, that man has care of Being and that man is a gap in the clearing of Being to which Being gives itself – think of the observer and the wave function in this context. His position on the dangers of techne has been related back to Prometheus, but does it not then also relate to the Serpent in the Garden of Eden – and thus, ultimately, to the Fall?
    I hesitate to mention this because somebody is sure to point out that he said in an interview with Stern that ‘only a god can save us now’, and that can so easily be vulgarised into a simple pro ‘religion’ statement.
    re No Brain, yes, that’s true – but that needs to be set against absolutist claims about the relevance of size in hominid brains. If it is not simply a question of quantity, then presumably it is a question of quality – that the h Sapins brain somehow differs in quality from that of other apes/homos. That is a radically different position from the one in the standard versions of human evolution. Incidently, isn’t there some recent research that implies that memory is not located exclusively in the brain?
15. Sue says:

    August 1, 2007 at 2:07 am

    In general, what the world wants, and therefore what religious institutions tend to provide is SOCIAL ASSOCIATION and OPTIMISTIC TALK, perhaps in combination with self-applied techniques that people can use as a means for consoling themselves in their fear and trembling.

    The “modern” world is a fragmented world—full of individuals who regard their own presumed separateness and independence as “absolute”, who demonstrate no profundity, and who are not moved by profundity. What profundity? In this “modern” world, human beings are becoming progressively more and more preoccupied with “self”, and with all of the “whatevers” than can be pursued within the framework of gross level egoity and gross level worldliness.

    The exclusive preoccupation with what is “out there” is a disposition that is now manifested everywhere on Earth—with dreadful results. Listen to the global “daily news” of terrible violence and threats. Look at the absolute emptiness of “consumer egoity”. It is madness.

    And yet this “consumer egoity” now rules the world. It is championed by the proponents of the so called “free” market. Scruton is among them—and he wonders why everything is disintegrating!
16. Sean Swan says:

    August 1, 2007 at 2:23 am

    Sue, your criticism is valid. If you see capitalism as the ideal then you can’t complain if all human relations become reduced to a naked cash nexus, as Marx put it. Its end point is the ‘commodification’ of everything. Here’s how Charly put it in the Communist Manifesto

    ” The bourgeoisie [the capitalist class], wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
17. Sue says:

    August 1, 2007 at 2:46 am

    Floowing on from my last post:
    Conflict and destruction take all kinds of forms in the human world and in human history. There has already been a long chain of terrible tyrants in the human sphere—but people everywhere seem to be unaware of the fact that the latest tyrant is EVERYBODY–or “Everyman”.The latest—and the LAST—tyrant is “Everyman. The last tyrant is “the People”. In this late-time, “the People” hac=ve, as a collective, become merely another ego-driven, manipulatable, chaotic, and entirely mad entity—a kind of lunatic “herd”, a chaos of gross collectivity. That tyrannical “herd” is subject to the same whims and absurdities as any individual tyrant ever was or is. That terrible “herd” know no limits and is completely confused and deluded about quite literally everything. The “herd” that “the people” have become is simply another tyrant—and the last to rise and fall in human-time.

    The “tyranny of everybody” is what is happening NOW. In the now, every individual wallows in the “narcissistic self-idea”, demanding immediate satisfaction of the every wanting-nedd and random impulse in the body-mind, and threatening everyone else with consequences to come, if separate “self” is still found wanting or unsatisfied at end of any day. The “neighbourhood wars” between all egos, tribes, and cults (large and small) are what is happening now. The private wars of “Everyman”, the society of “Everyman”, the “righteous religiosity of “Everyman” is what is happening NOW. The “everyman” is “Narcissus”, the last tyrant—the ego itself. When the tyrant becomes EVERYBODY, that IS the end-time. When the tyrant is just somebody-in-particular, then there are revolutions, ups and downs in cycles. However, at the last, when the tyrant has become everbody, there are no more cycles, but only the linearity of sames—and everyone and everything disintegrates in stops. Such is the awful nature of the present time, of ego’s rule of all.

    The handling of real business is not being done by anybody at the present time. Certainly not by the benighted ghouls that mis-lead us.
    Now, everybody is on the brink with every body else. It IS everywhere like that. The daily “news” is that. Everyone’s daily life has become something like an insane sporting event—that is played to the death. The human world of nowtime is like a collosal Reality-TV—a dreadful mini-series, a few weeks until death. The common world of nowtime is mere insanity—Reality-madness. Everyone and everything is mad with “Everyman” now—mad with ego, mad with “Narcissus”. The LAST tyrant is EVERYBODY—everybody at war with everybody, to the death. If the present madness continues unabated then “Everyman” is going to destroy not only human-kind, but all life, and the Earth-world itself.
18. Sean Swan says:

    August 1, 2007 at 3:27 am

    Yes Sue, a truly appalling vista – though a fews deaths hardly matter if , as you suggest “we are always already immortal light beings”. So there’s no problem really.
19. Sue says:

    August 1, 2007 at 3:29 am

    Sean, Why not E=MC2.
    When its true implications are taken into account, Einstein’s equation of energy and matter represents the possibility of a multi-dimensional interpretation of (and human participation in) of the total universe, in which the so-called “material” universe is REALIZED to be a paradoxical enity or process.

    If we would approach the “matter” of the universe as honest physicists, as scientists who are truly sensitive to the subtler physics of things, we would realize that the “material” universe IS energy, that is light,that “matter” is itself energy, that it behaves as energy, that “matter”, and the universe, and therefore, MAN and every individual being, are, each and all, a paradoxical manifestation of infinite Energy and Being.

    E=MC2 is the modern left-brained or verbal-analytical expression of multi-dimensional thinking—a way of entering into the realization that the physical universe is a PARADOX OF LIGHT. The “material” universe is a present expression of light. Matter IS light: matter, or the Realm of Nature, emanates presently from the Matrix of Light.

    The physical universe, therefore, is actually a speck floating in a Realm of Light-Energy. The entire psycho-physical universe, including you as you now appear, is a free non-binding expression or apparent modification of the Absolute, All-Pervading, Radiant Divine Consciousness.

    The higher and spiritual implications of (potentially) revolutionary contempoary physics must be understood relative to Man as a Process. Our scientists must therefore move the frontiers of science from theoretical physics to biophysics.
    What is the significance of E=MC2 for the human body-mind? How to we promote and establish cultural ideals that enable men and women to function and grow as light or energy rather than as lifeless matter?

    Then what about our understanding and application of biochemistry, biophysics, human anatomy, human life and culture altogether?
    What will we do when we take the discovery of the relationship between matter and energy seriously?
    How do we make medicine out of the understanding that the human body is a complex multi-dimensional energy system?
    How will we practice ordinary diet, sexuality, and social relations on that basis?

    Such questions are never even discussed nor even considered possible or even imagined in the dim-witted “religion” and religioisty that Scruton (and all of his friends) promote.
20. Sean Swan says:

    August 1, 2007 at 3:35 am

    But the converse of this is that light is matter …

    Contemporary science already accepts that the universe is a strange place see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6308228560462155344
21. Roger Scruton says:

    August 1, 2007 at 10:06 am

    I have three comments on this most interesting, though somewhat wild debate: 1. Mr No Brain actually has a brain. I don’t see that he presents a particular philosophical problem. Those functions of the organism which we attribute to consciousness can be performed by a brain like his – even if we don’t have a theory which explains exactly how. Consciousness is exhibited in the face, the speech, the personal relations of the person who has it; it is a myth to suppose that there is some part of the brain in which it is located. That would be like thinking that the meaning of Bach’s D minor Chaconne was located in the four strings of the violin, just because these are necessary to produce the sound and the things that we hear in that sound.
    2. EPR stands for ‘Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen’, in recognition of the joint article in which they presented not a real experiment but a thought-experiment, designed to suggest that there are ‘hidden variables’ which explain the quantum probability equations in non-probabilistic terms. As someone pointed out, this was all blown apart by Bell’s inequality and Alain Aspect’s (approximate) experimental proof that the inequality (which is incompatible with the hidden variable hypothesis) obtains. But this again presents no particular philosophical problem. Why should not the fundamental laws of the universe be probabilistic laws? And why, if this is so, should this cast any doubt on the objectivity and independence of the physical universe? People are disposed to see mental opereations where there is no need to suppose that they are manifest.
    3. Sue blames the free market for social anomie: not a new idea. And she blames me for defending the free market. Well, I defend a highly qualified version of the free market, and one from which the most important things – love, sex, and the like – are withdrawn and ring-fenced. Ring-fencing such things is one of the functions of the sacred, and therefore of religion. This is the point that people need to see, in my view, and why we should read Girard.
22. Sean Swan says:

    August 1, 2007 at 11:40 am

    Roger Scruton

    The ‘meaning’ of Bach depends on the hearer or, on the other hand, what Bach intended to convey. This is a very poor analogy. It is not the ‘meaning’ of consciousness that is put in question by the size and structure of No Brain’s brain, but the accepted orthodoxy of evolutionary theory as it relates to brain size and intellect. You say “Those functions of the organism which we attribute to consciousness can be performed by a brain like his – even if we don’t have a theory which explains exactly how”. The point is exactly that not only do we not have a theory as to how, but that it seems to dis-prove a lot of currently accepted theories relating to the role of brain size and structure – and that possibly means a revision of materialist theories of consciousness as solely a function of the brain. (which is not to say I’m claiming the answer lies in idealism)

    Re relativity, uncertainty and probability. I am NOT arguing that it casts “doubt on the objectivity and independence of the physical universe”. The point is epistemological, not ontological, about knowledge, not being. What it does is mark a boundary to the domain of certain knowledge. It means that we cannot simultaneously know the position and velocity of certain particles, it means that we can only say what will ‘probably’ happen under certain conditions. Nowhere is there the implication that there is not an externally and independently existing universe, though there is the implication that human knowledge of certain aspects of it are conditioned by human observation – at the sub-atomic level we cannot know it ‘as it is’ because we cannot observe it without interfering with it. This is not exactly ‘esse est percipi’, but it is still the observer who collapses the probability wave function. Thus perhaps in a sense the universe – at least at the sub-atomic level – can never appear in its independent form (uninterfered with by the observer) to us. Of course in a strict sense, Einstein destroyed the notion of an ‘objective’ universe in the proper sense. It is ‘relative’.
23. Stubo72 says:

    August 1, 2007 at 3:31 pm

    Whilst I feel poorly qualified to comment, I have read the article and ensuing discussion with interest.

    Not withstanding my feelings of inadequacy, I did feel moved to ask a question; why is religiosity or pursuit of the ’sacred’ seen as a ‘natural’ human condition/need?

    Surely it is simply a learned dependency, and one which has been promoted by those whose ends it suits to have the masses cajoled, reassured and quieted by whatever they can get away with telling them?

    In less scientifically advanced times it was no doubt reassuring to find order by positing some sort of supernatural ‘father figure’, but, now that we live in more ‘rational’ times (i.e. since about the 17thC), surely religion can be seen for what it is; simply a control mechanism used to keep the unempowered in their ‘proper’ place (to keep the market going/keep defending the ‘right’ way of life)?

    To my mind it is profoundly wrong to seek to defend a system of thought that allows human beings to divorce themselves from responsibility for their actions, by allowing themselves or others to believe that it was ‘divinely’ inspired or sanctioned.
24. Daniel Taghioff says:

    August 1, 2007 at 7:14 pm

    I like Scruton’s basic argument that religion can be seen as a response to violence, it squares with discussions of how groups deal with avoiding violence when they are large enough for many of those you meet to be strangers, rather than friends and relatives.

    However, one point from Anthropology to be borne in mind is that it is very hard to say that any social institution has a “purpose”. The contribution of the post modern (post-structural) turn in Anthropology was to call attention to the very specific ways in which idea are mobilised in instances of social practice. When you look carefully, ideas and the “purpose” of their use in practice is very contingent on specific circumstances.

    But yes it is naive to paint religion as the main cause of violence. The past was more violent, the past was more religious, therefore the religion caused the violence. That’s just a bad argument based on a loose sense of what a correlation is, without a careful analysis of causes and effects based on evidence. It is ironic that atheists, who often seem to stand for such intellectual carefulness, would advance arguments that seem flawed in this basic way. So Scruton has a point in challenging the way those ideas are glued together so blithely.

    My point in response to all this is that yes, it is clear that humans need a sense of the sacred in their lives, even atheists find areas of their lives that allow them contemplation and connection to something greater than themselves etc…

    I also tend to agree that humans do tend towards having collective values, and that this has value in easing the social, and value in keeping the peace. Whilst specific beliefs may go out of date and out of context, this overall value in belief systems seems very enduring.

    But why not try and go for something closer to universal human value sin this day. Why must we choose between parochial religions, and an atheism that denies the value of collective values, and the sacred? Can we not have collective human values, such as universal declarations of human rights, and hold them sacred because they allow us to transcend parochialism, even if they are not actually “universal” and thus true in an infinite sense.

    Those values may suit the times, and be of great value, and thus be worthy of being sacred in some sense. If we cannot transcend this parochialism vs individualistic atomism divide, it will be hard to have meaningful rallying points for collective human challenges such as climate change. Ultimately, we now live in a very big tribe, the human race, that faces external threat, and needs strong common values to rally around in order to find a strong collective response. And a form of humanism that holds human lives as sacred might be a good starting point.

    http://www.taghioff.info/dant/
25. Sean Swan says:

    August 1, 2007 at 11:24 pm

    Perhaps what’s missing in this consideration of the ’sacred’ is an examination of its opposite – that which is taboo. Somebody somewhere has, I’m sure, drawn a corelation between a taboo – canibalism – and the communion in which the body of the Christ is eaten. And there’s probably a lot that could be, and probably has been, said about that. What are our taboos today, and what is their origin?

    expressions of (overt) racism are taboo in the US. Why? Almost certainly part of the reason has to lie in the desire to avoid social conflict. This creation of a taboo has arisen outside of religion and relates to violence prevention. Similarly the taboo on homophobia has some relationship to activism by gay organisations. These taboos are normally expressed in terms of the right to equaity and liberty in the US constitution (despite the fact that racism, etc were endemic for most of the time since it was created). Does this tell us anything about the role of violence and taboo/the sacred?
26. John says:

    August 2, 2007 at 2:45 am

    Roger, what you say about consciousness is true.
    Unfortunately the word consciousness is seldom if ever discussed in any of the organisations that you associate with.

    The fundamental assumption at the root of all of modern western culture is the primacy of the brain as the seat, focal point, and origin of human intelligence. The rapidly grown field of neuro-science is testimony to this. But what about the infinite intelligence/consciousness that pervades every cubic millimeter of space time. One of the functions of the brain is to close off access to the vast realms of consciousness beyond and prior to the brain.

    Despite their sometimes religiosity all the organisations you associate with are all fully paid up subscribers to and proponents of left-brained thinking and as such are identified with the notion that the brain is the centre of consciousness and the be all and end all of everything—you know Stand To Reason. And that “religion” can be “explained” and defended by appeals to left brained thinking—everything else is fundamentally “irrational” and should be studiously resisted.

    They seldom if ever even venture into the multi-dimensional possibilities of a right brained understanding of,or participation in the world as an open ended psychic process–Stand To Reason represents a very thick wall against that possibility of that ever happening—”one more brick in the wall” Pink Floyd. Their publications and blogs are full of left brained “reality”, and conversely, totally devoid of anything truly inspiring or inspired—about from all the usual tosh about “jesus” and his (or god’s) “plan” for humanity

    Despite its inherent chaos such psychic participation in the world process is the well spring of our individual and collective sanity—and the well-spring or source of inspiration for truly great art. Which is why most contempoary art is so flat, boring and banal.The dismal mortal “vision” only.

    Human beings have an inherent urge to transcend the deadly confines of identification with their meat-body persona. Traditionally various means were provided for that to occur. Such means no longer exist—Stand To Reason — the brick wall of socially defined “reality” makes such an exercise TABOO. Nevertheless people will always find ways to transcend themselves in pleasurable ways—however vicariously. And not just through the grim humourless way of never ending work and organized socially sanctioned outlets.

    Why do you think trance/dance parties with copious amounts of “ecstasy” are so popular with young people, and conversely so anathema to the puritannical Stand To Reason mentality.

    And then there is sexuality. Despite the seeming sexualisation of everything we still fundamentally live in a “deeply” pleasureless puritancial “culture” where any kind of bodily pleasure is entirely suspect—Stand To Reason guarding (against) the outbreak of ragged pleasure or ecstasy.

    Thus sexuality becomes the only source of pleasure for most people and the only way in which they can feel merged beyond the confines of their own seeming separateness, however temporarily,
    with someone, something else.
27. Sean Swan says:

    August 2, 2007 at 5:59 am

    (I know I really shouldn’t do this, but I’m going to do it anyway…)

    John
    “But what about the infinite intelligence/consciousness that pervades every cubic millimeter of space time. One of the functions of the brain is to close off access to the vast realms of consciousness beyond and prior to the brain.”

    What leads you to believe that the universe is ‘conscious’? Could you elaborate?
28. truepeers says:

    August 2, 2007 at 10:23 pm

    Stubo72: “Surely it is simply a learned dependency, and one which has been promoted by those whose ends it suits to have the masses cajoled, reassured and quieted by whatever they can get away with telling them?”

    -no, the sacred is simply the means by which any community, however religious or secular, establishes shared meaning. We have to understand how language is generated on a shared human scene to appreciate this. Meaning can only be generated through figuring transcendence on our scenic consciousness – and this is why things like words and music cannot be located in the brain: our brains merely associate letters or sounds; words are not imprinted on our brains; they only exist in a transcendent domain, unlike their referents in this world. I type at a keyboard, but the word “keyboard” does not exist in the same domain as my keyboard. It is a symbol – quite unlike an animal signal – that can serve many purposes in human language; for example I can use it to create a shared consciousness of a situation in which there are no keyboards

    Respecting the sacred should have nothing to do with avoiding responsibility, in the guise of deferring to the gods. Responsibility is what the sacred gives us,or calls on us to perform; and both are only well understood once we understand the human freedom to create culture through (an attempt at) representing the sacred on our shared scenes of consciousness. Thus, for example, we may have ethical codes pertaining to advertising practices, which are attempts to figure the sacred.

    Sean.

    “Perhaps what’s missing in this consideration of the ’sacred’ is an examination of its opposite – that which is taboo.”

    -a taboo is not the opposite of the sacred, it is rather a quality or possibility of the sacred, the thing which is deemed desirable but untouchable. The opposite of the sacred is generally assumed to be the profane, or sometimes the secular, though I think these are usefully conceived as just another stage that the sacred takes on its sojourn in human history.
29. truepeers says:

    August 2, 2007 at 10:31 pm

    So the reason “homophobia” is today a taboo is because the victim, or victimary position, is sacred. The making of homosexuals into victims of homophobia – in the cultural history of recent years – is an example of how the sacred comes to be represented on a shared scene of consciousness, for which we are responsible quite apart from God. Homophobia is a taboo i may profane by saying, e.g., let’s take back the word “gay” from its present homosexual conquest.
30. Sean Swan says:

    August 3, 2007 at 12:40 am

    No, the reason (well, one of the reasons) that homophobia, like overt racism, is taboo today has more to do with the fact that those affected by it won’t take it anymore. Rosa Parks won’t give up her seat anymore. It is NOT because the status of victim is sacred, it is because the victim refuses to be a victim any more (that is not to say that victimhood is a status that is often desired for propoganda reasons, but it is only successfully claim by those who are no longer victims). So in order to ensure social harmony these things are made taboo.
    Your definition of a taboo as “the thing which is deemed desirable but untouchable”, raises two questions: 1) WHY is it deemed untouchable? 2) As cannibalism is a taboo, does this mean that we all have a desire to eat human flesh? (leaving aside the rather special sense in which we might like to eat someone delicious like Sophie Raworth)

    This brings me to John – sorry for pulling your leg and, essentially, asking you to describe (what is for you) the ineffable, but this is the internet, after all. It is always possible that people are being slightly tongue in cheek. Maybe the popularity of raves and ecstacy has something in common with the shamans of old tripping on magic mushrooms or peyote and having a bit of a boogie – that is, it certainly COULD have a transcendental element to it. On the other hand, drugs of all sorts, from caffein to alcohol to speed, have always been popular – and so has music and partying.

    I’ve been thinking of what Roger said about wanting the ‘free market’ (hrmp) but wanting to ‘ring fence’ certain things from it, like love and sex (I wonder how that’s possible). He also wants to discount or ‘ring fence’ Mr No Brain, even though he is, quiet possibly, the exception that disproves several rules. One starts to get the impression that Roger likes to ring fence a lot of things that are not conducive to his position – but can an enquiring mind, that is, a philospher, legitimately do this?
31. John says:

    August 3, 2007 at 5:31 am

    Some comments on mind and words.

    REAL Intelligence is tacit, or instrinsically wordless, living existence. Always prior to any thinking process.

    Mind is artificial intelligence. Mind is the first robot that human beings ever made. In the usual discussions of such matters, artificial intelligence is presumed to be something generated by computers. In actuality, however, LANGUAGE is the first form of artificial intelligence created by human beings.

    There is no mind. Mind is a myth. There is language which is programmed by brains, and which, in turn, programs brains. However, there is no tangible existence to “mind” itself—absolutely none. Nevertheless, human beings identify with “mind” AS “self”.

    Mind is an interior projection of a language-program that, in its imaginative elaboration of itself, conceives of purposes and ideas (in the realm of illusion) for which there is no corresponding physical data. Human beings are all living in a “virtual world” of mind. Human beings are, characteristically, self-identified with a robot of artificial intelligence.

    Much is made by some commentators (Roger) of the uniqueness, and alleged superiority, of the “western” mind and the “christian” mind.
    All the wars that rage are in effect wars of mind and as such completely absurd. Full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

    We are also about to destroy ourselves via such mind-created fight to the death global warfare.

    The human mind is a facsimile machine. This machine merely replicates language-forms in the illusion of mind. The mind has no substantial existence. The mind is simply stored language-bits, or patterns of language and remembered perceptions,in the brain. When a particular brain dies, other replicating machines carry on the language-mind, contunuing it from one generation to the next.

    If you were TRULY aware of mind, you would not want it to go on. It is a terrible, horrific source of bondage. It is a dreadful trap. Human beings are not only trapped in the mortality of their physical bodies, they are trapped in the absurdity of mind.
32. John says:

    August 3, 2007 at 6:13 am

    On the ineffable or Remembering the Mystery.

    The first thing to remember a lot when you are awake is to FEEL the Mystery, and so FEEL Reality—or the One and Only Real God. Feel that you dont KNOW what even a single thing IS. You may know the name of something or someone. You may know about all kinds of somethings and someones. But you do not—and you cannot—KNOW what anything or anyone IS. Nobody does—and nobody can. It is important to remember and feel this a lot. When you do this, and feel quiet, and you forget all the names, and you forget to be afraid, and you stop thinking—and you only feel good, and true, and full of love, and radiating.

    When you remember to feel the Mystery real strong, then you can also remember to breathe the Mystery. The Mystery is good feeling, full of light and happiness and love—isn’t It? So, when you breathe the Mystery, remember always to breathe in all the good feeling and breathe out all the bad feeling. And, if you remember the Mystery stronger and stronger, you start to feel so good after a while that it seems like you aren’t remembering and feeling and breathing the Mystery anymore—but the Mstery is remembering and feeling and breathing YOU!

    What A Mysterious Great Happy Mystery The Mystery IS!

    The second thing to remember a lot every day is that you are always MORE than what you LOOK like. The part that is the way you look is only you while you are awake and alive. But the rest of you goes on while you sleep and dream—and, after the body dies, or goes to sleep for good, the rest of you goes on in the Mystery.

    The third thing it is good to remember every day is that YOU do the feeling and breathing and listening and looking and naming all the time. YOU aren’t anything you know of feel or see or hear or look like or name or think. All these things just happen—and YOU get to watch or know or think them. YOU feel and see your own body. You feel and see inside sounds or lights or dreams—or all the places that come up.

    Well, what ARE you, if you only WATCH all of these things?

    You ARE the Mystery! YES!. And you dont even know what YOU ARE, either. YES! there is ONLY the Mystery! And you yourself—in your Real Heart, and up and down and in and out—ARE the Mystery. It IS All ONE FEELING!.

    If you will remember every day to feel and breathe the Mystery, and if you will remember to feel that you are more than what you look like, and if you will remember to BE the Mystery Itself—then you will be happy every day. And all kinds of more-than-wonderful happenings will come up for you. You will feel happy, and you will always help and love others—even those who are having trouble feeling happy, and are even trying to make you forget the Mystery.

    Happiness is the now-and-forever Mystery that IS the Real Heart and the Only Real God of every one.

    PS: All of this may sound incredibly nieve—but have a good read.
33. Sean Swan says:

    August 3, 2007 at 8:17 am

    Language…yes, it does seem to pop up a lot in religion, usually in relation to creation.

    “In the beginning was the word …and without him [the 'word'] was not made anything made that was made”
    John’s Gospel

    “The Tao which can be spoken is not the Tao …
    Tao te Ching

    “The nameless is the origin of heaven and earth:
    Naming is the mother of the ten thousand things”
    Tao te Ching

    Heidegger argues that ‘language is the house of Being’, but also
    “But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless”.

    Maybe it’s all a way of saying that ultimate reality is ultimately ‘nameless’ because it’s beyond our comprehension and consequently can’t be put into thought and thus can’t be put into words. So all we can know is what can be spoken – that is, what we can percieve/concieve and thus can put into words. It’s an old debate, Plato and the shadows in the cave, Kant and the division between the phenomenal and the noumenal, they all relate in a way to this. It’s all epistemology – and it tends to end in either scepticism or god.

    It’s not worth thinking about because it can’t be conclusively demonstrated either way. You just get a headache thinking about it – best avoided.
34. John says:

    August 3, 2007 at 11:02 am

    One final rant/rave.

    As the ego-”I”, you function as the body does with reference to Consciousness Itself—in ignorance of the Consciousness-Position. It is as if the cells of the body “meet” together in order to determine how they are going to “dictate”—in an entirely insubordinate manner—the pattern of existence for Consciousness Itself! Then, Consciousness, without direct and intuitive understanding of Its Own Condition, “goes along” with these “demands”—as if the body WERE, in fact, the Identity of Consciousness Itself. Such is the essence of our egoic and our normal dreadful sanity.

    In Reality, the body is NOT senior to Consciousness Itself. In Reality, Consciousness Itself is Senior—subordinate to nothing and no one.

    However, in the human world, everything is patterned by ego. Once the ego-pattern “gets rolling”, it replicates itself automatically. Without the intrusion of Divine Grace, and the subsequent forever response, the ego-pattern replicates itself endlessly, relative to everything whatsoever—and you remain trapped in the ego-possessed domain of “point of view”—forever! The ego-patterning of each individual human being, and even the collective ego-patterning of humanity as a whole, is ceaselessly replicated—very much in the manner of cellular reproduction.

    As soon as there is the ego-position, there is the entire conditionally manifested universe. When there is no ego-position, there is no conditionally manifested universe.

    You are “Narcissus”. You are looking at an image, and you think the image is actually “there”—as something outside you, as something that has nothing to do with you, except that you are seeing it as an “object”.As “Narcissus” you are controlled by that “object”. Everything new that you see is digitalized into the checker-board that extends from your little block of presumption.

    In the ancient Greek myth, Narcissus is absorbed in an image—but he does not even notice that it is an image in a mirror. The key to understanding “Narcissus” (or the ego-”I”) is not that the self-image is an image of onself. Rather the key to understanding “Narcissus” is that the self-image is an image REFLECTED in and by a MIRROR.

    The entire world of apparently “objective” reality is a mirrored (or reflected) thing. What is its Source?, What is its Source-Condition, or Root-Condition?

    The Mirror (or Consciousness ITSELF) IS the Source, or the Prior and all-and-All-Reflecting Self-Condition, of all-and-All.

    What Is the State of the Mirror? What IS the Mirror?

    The Mirror Is the Truth. The Mirror Is Reality Itself. The Mirror Is the DIVINE—the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Self-Condition of Reality Itself.

    The MIRROR Is the Truth. The reflected imagery of self and world is NOT the Truth. The State of the MIRROR ITSELF Is the Truth. The “objects” seen in the Mirror are NOT the Truth.

    Looking at the “object”, looking at separate self, analyzing your “case”, living the reptitions of your ego-patterning day to day, until death is a terrifying nightmare is youn really see it. That is the reflection game. That is bondage.

    If you are simply bodily present, you do not have a shape. In order to see yourself as a shape, you have to abstract yourself from your own Intrinsic Position, because you have to see yourself reflected from the outside. In other words, you have to look in a mirror—either a literal mirror or (otherwise) the mirror of perceptual processe and social associations that give you a sense of outline, a sense of space and time, and so forth.

    Every perception takes time. Therefore, remarkably, you are NEVER in the present moment, with reference to conditional appearances. You are always “afterwards”—because it takes a fraction of a second for any perception to register in the brain. Therefore, NONE of your phenomenal experiencing is in the present time. ALL phenomenal experience is mirrored—and you are CONSTANTLY occupied with your mirrored (or reflected) existence. You never ever see the universe as it REALLY IS, beyond and prior to objectified and objectifying “point of view”.

    According to the conventions of human language and thinking, the universe is “one thing”, which is organized in every detail—and which is “given” to human beings for the paradisical pyrpose of their own self-fulfilmennt. All such thinking is nonsense—an utter fabrication, with no basis whatsoever in Reality.If the universe is so orderly, why does everyone die. Why is everyone subject to so much suffering? This orderly universe IS suffering. In and of itself it is totally intolerable.
35. truepeers says:

    August 3, 2007 at 7:28 pm

    Sean,

    “the reason (well, one of the reasons) that homophobia, like overt racism, is taboo today has more to do with the fact that those affected by it won’t take it anymore. Rosa Parks won’t give up her seat anymore. It is NOT because the status of victim is sacred, it is because the victim refuses to be a victim any more (that is not to say that victimhood is a status that is often desired for propoganda reasons, but it is only successfully claim by those who are no longer victims). So in order to ensure social harmony these things are made taboo.”

    From whence the power of a taboo if it does not refer to something sacred? Sean, I can only recommend you read Rene Girard who, especially in his recent work, e.g. the book “I see Satan Fall like Lightning” has a good analysis of how the postmodern age turns the traditional scapegoat into a new kind of pomo “victim” who is sacred just because he is the kind of “victim” people now want to be – someone who won’t take it anymore (which is not the same as someone who remains unmarked, e.g. “white”, “straight”, “male”, by any kind of normative victim status). Different kinds of “victims”, same old power of the sacred.

    Sean: “Your definition of a taboo as “the thing which is deemed desirable but untouchable”, raises two questions: 1) WHY is it deemed untouchable? 2) As cannibalism is a taboo, does this mean that we all have a desire to eat human flesh? (leaving aside the rather special sense in which we might like to eat someone delicious like Sophie Raworth)”

    - the selection of something as sacred is always somewhat arbitrary, irrational, as the above comment on pomo “victims” suggests; it is the product of historical contingency, though it will be deemed untouchable because it has become the focus of a competing, mimetic, desire that cannot be resolved unless everyone involved renounces their desire, by making the thing they all want to appropriate into something sacred, desirable but untouchable, untouchable at least until the proper preparations for a sacrificial feast (or modern economic rationalization thereof) and a priestly division of the potentially divisive object have been performed.

    We certainly don’t all have a desire to eat human flesh, though arguably in certain societies, historically, there was such a widespread desire. Desire, unlike appetite, is never universal: it is created in human societies where some desires are accented, by mimesis, over other potential desires. Unlike Rene Girard, I don’t think human sacrifice is original to the human; i think it is a later historical development, and that the original sacrifices were animal. For a society to come to practice cannibalism, they either have developed a need to sacrifice their big men, witches, etc. for reasons having to do with the fact that resentment at social differences has reached such a height that only things like an occasional regicide can bring (temporary) peace, or they have grown to a number where local non-human animal protein resources are not sufficient to keep them alive. In the latter situation, the sacred, however horrific, has a rational element – children are sacrificed because they cannot all be fed or enemies are eaten, as appears to be the case with the Aztecs, as both a means of social ordering and physical sustenance. In either case, though, the victim will be made sacred through all kinds of ritual preparations. Without all that preparation to make the victim desirable, we would have no natural “desire” to eat our fellow humans, at least as long as there were alternative food sources.
36. truepeers says:

    August 3, 2007 at 7:41 pm

    John: “All the wars that rage are in effect wars of mind and as such completely absurd. Full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.”

    -Now that’s absurd; if you don’t see that war has a basic animalistic component – competition for limited resources – you must truly be living all in your disembodied mind. Human conflict is also real on more human levels, as the clash of competing desires over (sometimes irreconcilable) understandings of the sacred (understanding without which no human society and order can exist) and cannot be wished away with easy spiritual rhetoric. The choice we face today between the desires for a renewed Umma and Caliphate, and/or leftist Utopia, and for the modern Western-led global free market system, cannot be wished away. It is very real, physically and spiritually, and can only be transcended by a political process that will require much respect for the fundamental human and sacred realities involved.
37. Sean Swan says:

    August 3, 2007 at 11:41 pm

    “I can only recommend you read Rene Girard who, especially in his recent work, e.g. the book “I see Satan Fall like Lightning” has a good analysis of how the postmodern age turns the traditional scapegoat into a new kind of pomo “victim” who is sacred just because he is the kind of “victim” people now want to be – someone who won’t take it anymore (which is not the same as someone who remains unmarked, e.g. “white”, “straight”, “male”, by any kind of normative victim status). Different kinds of “victims”, same old power of the sacred.”

    Perhaps the reason ‘white straight males’ do not have victim status is simply because they’re not victims? When have people ever been persecuted simply for being ‘white straight males’? BTW There’s a ‘not’ missing from what I said above “(that is not to say that victimhood is NOT [this is the 'not' that was missing] a status that is often desired for propoganda reasons, but it is only successfully claim by those who are no longer victims)” – a typo on my part. In other words true victims are not seen as victims, that’s part of the reality of being a victim. Anti-Semetism (at least as it relates to Jewish Semites, the Arabs are a different matter) was not taboo in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Jews WERE the victims, that is, they didn’t have victim status when they were victims. But it is taboo today when they aren’t victims. Of course it has its uses today in the field of propoganda in that it is often used to silence criticism of Israeli foreign policy by claiming that it’s ‘anti-semetism’. Because Israeli foreign policy is in harmony with the US, the US reinforces this relationship. It’s all very simple and has nothing to do with the reality of victimhood – if it did, there would be a big fuss about the fate of the Gypsies.

    However, the Holocaust was real and Jews were real victims; ’straight white males’, as such, were never victims. ‘Straigh white males’ have ALWAYS been the ones who ‘weren’t going to take it anymore’ – even when they were the only ones giving it. False claims of victimhood are always used by the agressor to justify their agression, Hitler, for example, claimed that the Jews represented a mortal threat to Germany (But then Blair claimed that Iraq posed a threat to Britain, what with its ‘WMDs’ and such – isn’t it all so bloody predictable?) BTW, I’ve no idea what ‘pomo’ means.

    Re ‘taboo’ – I’m not really very engrossed in this. Things are taboo for a number of reasons, incest for genetic reasons, other things for irrational religious/ideological reasons, like the Greek sect that wouldn’t eat beans because they believed their ancestors come back in the form of beans. The human mind’s capacity for abstract thought is an amazing thing, unfortunately it also leaves us liable to believe an awful lot of ideological, religious and idealist twaddle. The trouble is we can concieve of, and thus believe in, the non-existent, like unicorns. Reality isn’t about the sacred and the taboo or good and evil, 999 times out of 1000 reality is about electricity bills, rainy wednesday afternoons, work, women, children, pubs – that’s reality, and it’s neither good nor evil, it just IS. Those who want to talk of good and evil are usually working to some agenda of their own and all their kant is just part of their strategy to gain or maintain power. Unfortunately the gullible can’t see that.
38. John says:

    August 4, 2007 at 12:50 am

    Speaking of cannibals and other flesh eating monsters.
    I would recommend a Google search on the topic “Columbus and Other Cannibals” by the native-American scholar Jack Davis.

    His thesis is that we whitey’s have been cannibalising everyone “else” for a very long time. He knows from the direct historical experience of his own people—the original inhabitants of the USA before the white cannibals arrived with their genocidal all consuming war “god”.

    Compelling and sobering stuff.

    Meanwhile I dont deny that there is an unspeakably dreadful drama now being enacted on the world stage, which if allowed to run to its “logical” conclusion WILL destroy life on this planet.

    And if you think I am disembodied try the exercise in feeling-contemplation that I posted yesterday—that is an exercise in total present time embodiment. It also allows one to FEEL that there is not the slightest jot of separation between my body and yours or between “me” and the world process altogether, or between “me” and Real God. True Sanity exercised for real.

    The reason that we westerners (in particular) have monstered everyone “else” is because we were too brutally insensitive to notice of FEEL what we were REALLY doing to our victims.

    And by the way consumer capitalism is pure animalism (and also paradoxically a totally dis-embodied ideology)—the “glorification” of cannibalism dramatised on every last square inch of the planet—-we are quite literally consuming ourselves to death, that is, destroying the planetary ecological and biological systems that support life.
    The word consume means to DESTROY—and that is exactly what we are doing.

    It (capitalism) relies on its “success” and continued “growth” on the fact that the former seven deadly sins are now the cardinal virtues—even given “god’s” blessing by the ghouls who infest the AEI etc etc.

    By the way have you come across “Blasphemy: How the Religious Right Is Hijacking Our Declaration of Independence” by Alan Dershowitz.
    A thorough-going demolition of the self-serving pretentious (and dangerous) “religious” lies peddled by the AEI ghouls.

    Truepeers–Checking out your website I would suggest that the AEI etc is your “spiritual” home. The “world”-view or really totally DISEMBODIED ideology that the AEI promotes is 100 per cent toxic to all living beings.

    Psychotic madness in fact—the mirror image of the psychotic madness of the would be world conquering Islamicists. You are really the best of friends and feed each other in a deadly multiple feedback loop of psychotic projections.
39. truepeers says:

    August 4, 2007 at 3:24 am

    “Anti-Semetism (at least as it relates to Jewish Semites, the Arabs are a different matter) was not taboo in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Jews WERE the victims, that is, they didn’t have victim status when they were victims. But it is taboo today when they aren’t victims. Of course it has its uses today in the field of propoganda in that it is often used to silence criticism of Israeli foreign policy by claiming that it’s ‘anti-semetism’. Because Israeli foreign policy is in harmony with the US, the US reinforces this relationship. It’s all very simple and has nothing to do with the reality of victimhood

    If it were so simple, so many people would not be deluded. If antisemitism were a strong taboo today, fewer people would be practicing it in the guise of calling Zionists dirty Jews. If killing Jews were a serious taboo in Germany in 1940s, presumably the Holocaust would not have happened, even as it went industrial and was hidden from view in part because soldiers became demoralized by the evil they were being asked to do in the fields and streets of Eastern Europe. In any case, if you read Mein Kampf or Nazi propaganda more generally, you will see an obsession with the Jews and their supposed power over the world that marked these people out (a racism unlike other kinds of racism). There was undoubtedly something sacred about the Jews, their claim to a first covenant with the one God, that the Nazis aimed to profane or contest. If the victim status is sacred, after the fact, so the process of preparing a sacrifice requires the potential victims be marked appropriately. The sacrificial marking takes various forms, as I have said.

    There is very little difference between what the Nazis did and what the international left is presently doing with Israel. In both cases we may see a deluded obsession, turning the present or future victims of an irrational hatred into the evil enemy who must be destroyed to bring on the promised utopia. Far fewer Palestinians have been killed by Jews (generally in a very restrained self-defense against an orthodoxy that refuses to recognize the Jews’ right to control any piece of what is deemed Islamic territory) than by other Arabs. But you never hear the international left crying about the crimes of the Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, etc. The appropriate sacrificial meaning does not inhere in these crimes. SO you are quite right to suggest we need to be able to distinguish the truth of victimhood from the many claims that in the postmodern (pomo) world are made on a much desired victim status. But it is not a simple matter in the sense that many refuse to look honestly at the anthropology involved.

    “Reality isn’t about the sacred and the taboo or good and evil, 999 times out of 1000 reality is about electricity bills, rainy wednesday afternoons, work, women, children, pubs – that’s reality, and it’s neither good nor evil, it just IS. Those who want to talk of good and evil are usually working to some agenda of their own and all their kant is just part of their strategy to gain or maintain power. Unfortunately the gullible can’t see that.”

    -you’re right to rejoice at the fact that the sacred has less of an awful effect on us than it did our primitive forebears, but it still infuses everyday life. Electricity bills: money originates as a token of the sacred, and it still is that, though we often forget it today; and what are you using that electricity for – at least in part to surf the internet to read Scruton on the sacred. Rainy Wednesday afternoons: when we say “it rains”, to what does “it” refer if not to a sacred Being, again something we readily forget today? Work: what drives people long past their need to insure basic sustenance? Women: do you think their beauty is for us a strictly a natural phenomenon? If so, you are indeed ignorant of the power of the sacred and its concomitant esthetic effects. Children: I saw a boy hit his mother today, in the midst of a conflict over power and authority: in short, over claims on the sacred. Pubs: why are bars so often styled as classical altars?

    There is good and evil in all of this and it is not explained so crudely in terms of a lust for power and control over the gullible. History and culture is not a conspiracy but our shared participation in the sacred means by which humanity operates to keep itself from destroying itself.
40. truepeers says:

    August 4, 2007 at 3:44 am

    John writes: “Truepeers–Checking out your website I would suggest that the AEI etc is your “spiritual” home. The “world”-view or really totally DISEMBODIED ideology that the AEI promotes is 100 per cent toxic to all living beings.

    Psychotic madness in fact—the mirror image of the psychotic madness of the would be world conquering Islamicists. You are really the best of friends and feed each other in a deadly multiple feedback loop of psychotic projections.”

    -John, how do you know you are not the one with mental problems? Maybe it’s me, but how do we really know? You can call me a bunch of names, but what does that prove other than that maybe you can’t make serious arguments? – a fault my website occasionally commits, I admit. But we also sometimes do much more. Seriously, what is the intellectual process by which the truth may out? If you care to believe that free, open, and honest debate will reveal truths, come to Covenant Zone and contest our or your points. But if all you can do is call us names, you will be dismissed. I read what you say here and I think it is a load of rubbish. I could go on at length with I think some strong arguments. If you care to choose but one of your points, I will engage it an open and honest debate and we will see if that has any effect on revealing where the madness lies. But you have to defend the names you call me with reason and good faith, as demonstrated by an honest attempt to engage my side of the story.
41. Sean Swan says:

    August 4, 2007 at 7:20 am

    “If antisemitism were a strong taboo today, fewer people would be practicing it in the guise of calling Zionists dirty Jews. If killing Jews were a serious taboo in Germany in 1940s, presumably the Holocaust would not have happened, even as it went industrial and was hidden from view in part because soldiers became demoralized by the evil they were being asked to do in the fields and streets of Eastern Europe.”

    Who’s calling Zionists, or anybody else for that matter, ‘dirty Jews’? I can honestly say that I have actually never heard ANYBODY EVER, left, right or centre, use that expression – I’d love to hear where you actually heard it. You say that if anti-semetism were a serious taboo in Germany in the 1940s, then presumably the Holocaust would never have happened. Duh! That’s exactly what I said – the status of victimhood can only successfully be claimed by those who are no longer victims, part of what being a vicitim entails is not being recognised as a victim. As to the bit about the Holocaust being hidden from view, I’m afraid I can’t agree. Holocausts don’t start in gas chambers, they end there, it’s just the terminal point. There was nothing hidden about Krystalnacht, not from the Germans or anybody else for that matter.

    “There is very little difference between what the Nazis did and what the international left is presently doing with Israel.”
    Quite right! (apart from minor details like Auschwitz, Sobibor, etc)

    “Far fewer Palestinians have been killed by Jews (generally in a very restrained self-defense against an orthodoxy that refuses to recognize the Jews’ right to control any piece of what is deemed Islamic territory) than by other Arabs.”
    Good, then everythings fine, just like far fewer Americans have been killed by Al Qaeda than by other Americans.

    “when we say “it rains”, to what does “it” refer if not to a sacred Being, again something we readily forget today?”
    We ‘forget’ it because it has everything to do with the conventions of English grammar and zilch to do with the sacred.

    “Work: what drives people long past their need for basic sustenance?”
    I give up … could it be the ’sacred’? Or could it possibly be anything from the following list : responsibilty, greed , ambition, enjoyment, the desire to give your kids a good life?

    “Women: do you think their beauty is for us a strictly a natural phenomenon? If so, you are indeed ignorant of the power of the sacred and its concomitant esthetic effects.”
    I’m ignorant of it because it has everything to do with biology and nothing to do with the sacred. Were it not so, Paxo would be as pleasing on the eye as Sopie Raworth (sorry Jeremy, but you know what I mean)

    “Children: I saw a boy hit his mother today, in the midst of a conflict over power and authority: in short, over claims on the sacred.”
    It’s called ‘being naughty’ and the sacred has naff all to do with it.

    “Pubs: why are bars so often styled as classical altars?”
    Eh? (Dear reader, please pause here and try recall when you last saw a bar styled as a classic altar…)

    I’m afraid you live in an alternate world where people go around muttering ‘dirty jew’ in strange pubs full of Altar bars where naughty children engage in disputes about the sacred with their totally asexual estheticly sacred mothers.

    BTW you never did explain what ‘pomo’ means, or was it a typo for ‘homo’?
42. truepeers says:

    August 4, 2007 at 9:32 am

    Sean,

    “Dirty Jew”, as in dirty with money, is a traditional figure of speech, which I use to point to a certain historically recurring mindset. If you investigate the criticisms people conventionally make of Israel today, you will find that they are the same criticisms, in new dress, people made of “dirty Jews” in the 1930s and 40s: the Jews/Israel are too successful, aggressive, domineering, conspiratorial, shifty, money grubbing, market oriented, market transforming, disloyal, etc. The logical distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism collapses when you consider the formal similarity of the underlying resentments.

    Kristallnacht was hardly the Holocaust. There was in fact a concerted and intentional effort on the part of the Nazis to not only destroy the Jews but also the memory of them. The resentment that motivated the Holocaust also had to be forgotten – an impossibility, a utopian dream, but that is what they attempted in hiding and giving no publicity to the mass murder that was performed so as to appear as if the equivalent to exterminating vermin – clean, efficient, industrial, forgettable. It wasn’t forgettable, but the Nazis were wrong about a lot of things.

    The international left has yet to achieve the Second Holocaust, to be sure, but the present demonization of Israel and their toleration of the present-day would-be vermin removers who attend World Without Zionism Conferences, and manipulate the UN to their cause, points in that direction.

    “We ‘forget’ it because it has everything to do with the conventions of English grammar and zilch to do with the sacred.”

    -And what is your theory of language origin and history? In fact, language begins with ostensive gestures that point out phenomena as sacred. “God” “Rain” “Fire!” Read Eric Gans on the Origin of Language. The “it” of “it rains” is traditionally the evocation of the Being who guarantees the shared significance of the (e.g. weather) scenes that language allows us to share.

    “responsibilty, greed , ambition, enjoyment, the desire to give your kids a good life?”

    -there are of course sociobiological “just so” so stories that attempt to explain these phenomena as just natural consequences of evolution. If you find these stories convincing, I’m not sure I can help you. But if you really want to understand ethics you need to explain its historical co-emergence with religion. And invoking the “God Gene” for what is obviously a cultural, not genetic, phenomenon will only make me laugh .

    “I’m ignorant of it because it has everything to do with biology and nothing to do with the sacred.”

    -And how does that explain the evident differences with which humans and animals treat beauty and sexuality? Ever seen a male chimp going crazy looking for the perfect female? The entire history of art is reducible to biology? Why are male nudes preferred and idealized in classical times? Have we undergone a biological shift from an era that geneticallly favored homosexuality to one that favors heterosexuality, and female beauty, in only 2000 years? Or rather is the answer that we witness a shift in what is most commonly sacralized?

    “It’s called ‘being naughty’ and the sacred has naff all to do with it.”

    -which is why the near-hysterical mother informed this 10-11 year old that “even murderers don’t hit their mothers; you’re completely out of line”

    “Dear reader, please pause here and try recall when you last saw a bar styled as a classic altar”

    -you need to look more carefully, it’s very common, though perhaps the effect is more truly neoclassical since the typical bar is designed to figure a self-conscious scene within a scene – never seen a bar centred on a mirror (or some kind of symbol) framed in classical arch and columns? Where did the idea of a bar for organizing the activity of drinking come from anyway? A bar is an altar, to put it plainly. A bartender is a modern, secular form of priest. Do a survey: ask bartenders what they think of the idea and see how many say there’s soemthing to it.

    “BTW you never did explain what ‘pomo’ means, or was it a typo for ‘homo’?”

    - I explained: postmodern
43. Sean Swan says:

    August 4, 2007 at 11:36 am

    I’m afraid you demonstrate none of your points. You asserted that the people were calling Zionists ‘dirty Jews”. I asked who was saying this and you reply that it’s ‘a traditional figure of speech’ – in other words the expession is yours. You have no example of it being used by anybody today. As to ‘mindsets’, once again, I’d like to hear some specific example of this rather than nebulous gushing. Who is saying that Jews are money grabbing, dis-loyal, etc? Give me a concrete example. As for anti-zionism equating with anti-semetism, I’m sure in some cases it does, but find it hard to believe that it applies to Noam Chomsky or ‘True Torah Jews Against Zionism’ (see http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com ). If Jews, including Rabbies and Orthodox Jews (see Neturei Karta – Orthodox Jews United Against Zionism at http://www.nkusa.org) can be opposed to Zionism, the automatic equation you want to portray just doesn’t exist.

    You imply that the ‘international left’ (who, exactly?) want a ’second holocaust’, once again, wild allegation – what concrete fact do you base this on? Yet you dismiss Krystalnacht because it “was hardly the holocaust” – tell that to the hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews who died that night. But of course you’re just dismissing it because it doesn’t fit in with your claim that ‘nobody knew’.

    Have I ever seen a male chimp going wild for the perfect female – no, and I’m not sure I’d recognise it if I did. The ‘perfect female’ makes sense in monogamous societies, but the chimp is a promiscuous little monkey and all choice is only choice for a few minutes, then on to the next. But you’re shifting the goalpost with your ‘perfect woman’, you point was why we find women’s beauty a ’strictly natural phenomenon’ – you made no mention of the ‘perfect woman’. You ask me if the entire history of art is reducable to biology – but the point was about finding women attractive, not about art. More shifting of position. Why were there so many male nudes in classic times? Probably because pederasty was a popular form of recreation at the time. I don’t know that it’s strictly true the male form was the ‘ideal form’ sexually, or just that those statues represented the ideal male form – there’s a difference. As to why there was a change, you say because what was sacralised changed in the last 2000 years – you mean Christianity didn’t aprove and made it taboo? I’d never have guessed. Of course the pederasty continued anyway – just ask any cabin boy (just like sex actually happened in Victorian times).

    As to a theory of language – what, exactly,is the relevance? I could give you one, but it would take more time than it’s worth (I mean to try and make it short without being simple) I could go on, but I’m losing interest and will end on this note – you said bars resembled altars, not that they were ‘neo-classical’, as for barmen being modern priests, isn’t that what they say about therapists? How about seeing them as licensed drug dealers? Mind you, others say that barmen are lay therapists – I bet a few of them would agree with that too. But you see them as priests because you appear to be obsessed with ‘the sacred’ and thus can only interpret the world in ’sacred’ terms, thus barmen must be priests; I see them as barmen, because that’s what they are
44. John K says:

    August 4, 2007 at 1:36 pm

    Just looked at the tail end of this discussion. Regarding aggression towards Israelis and to Jews I think if you check some islamist websites you’ll find plenty of vilifaction of both groups – with any distnction blurred. Leaving aside the political arguments regarding palestine there is a very considerable visible outpouring of hatred of the “Jews” on these websites.
45. Sean Swan says:

    August 4, 2007 at 3:30 pm

    John K, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t – but what else would you expect from bin Ladin & co? Though I’ve actually never looked at an Islamist website, aren’t they all in Arabic? What website was it you looked at? Anyway, the point isn’t what a bunch of Islamist religious nutters say, truepeers was attributing this stuff to what he terms the ‘international left’, though when asked to give details, he couldn’t – it’s typical of mushy thinking. He jumps from asumption to assumption without being able to prove what he’s saying, then when he’s challenged on actual points he tries to shift ground. It’s all a bit like Blair and his WMDs – and didn’t that end well? Detail is important because without it you could just be listening to propoganda, prejudice, lies, myth, fantasy, anything. It also probably explains his addiction to the ’sacred’, people like that tend to need a simplistic childlike world of nothing but black and white, good and evil, heroes and villains. the debate actually has nothing to do with Israel or the Jews (though to make my own position clear, I support a two state solution – though even condy rice seems to support that), it’s about differences in ways of thinking. The other John vibrates on a wavelength of his own, but on reflection there is a certain method in his madness, when he compared truepeers to the Islamists he has a point – they both share at least this much in common, this idea of the ’sacred’ and a view of the world that contains nothing but black and white. For better or for worse, life just isn’t that simple.
46. Sean Swan says:

    August 4, 2007 at 4:22 pm

    And there I must finally leave it. This is all too time consuming, anyway, I think it’s exhausted. If this has taught me anything it has been to remind me of why I had a suspicion of ideas of the ’sacred’ and the ‘taboo’. Not only does it tend towards mysticism and mystification, but to a dangerous over simplification of life which becomes a trap for fools and a tool for rogues – I’m talking about at the political level, it doesn’t matter if individuals find things sacred or taboo – in fact it’s inevitable. But politics should stay well away from the transcendental. Ultimately Hegel was right that what should really be sacred is the law, I’d just add the caveat that the law should be made by the people.
    And sorry Truepeers, I didn’t really mean to compare you to the Islamists at anything more that the rhetorical level, but this is the internet, afterall
    Adieu
    farval
    shalom
    salaam
    slan
    and whatever you’re having yourself

    ———————–FIN——————————————-
47. truepeers says:

    August 4, 2007 at 7:13 pm

    Sean,

    I could give you tons of examples. Here is one I recently wrote about: a Judeophobic Jew (there are lots of them) calling Israel, in so many words (please don’t be so literal), a “dirty Jew”: http://covenantzone.blogspot.com/2007/06/naomi-klein-howard-rothberg-and-fight.html

    “But of course you’re just dismissing it because it doesn’t fit in with your claim that ‘nobody knew’.”

    -again, you miss my evident point. I rather think that most Germans did know what was going on. But my point is that the Nazi strategy for overcoming their resentment of the Jews, once and for all, was to realize the idea that came out of the First World War (often wrongly ascribed to Stalin): one death is a (memorable) tragedy, a million is a mere (forgettable) statistic. The idea that “nobody knew” was how Germans, after the war, recognized, half-heartedly, that there had been an attempt to hide and sanitize the murder of millions, to perform the killing in a way that made the victims anonymous, not potential figures of tragedy. This was quite unlike what happened on Kristallnacht. Why bother to ship Jews to Auschwitz if you can set up ovens in downtown Berlin?

    “The ‘perfect female’ makes sense in monogamous societies,

    –Exactly. There is nothing natural about monogamy. It can only be explained by a historical evolution in some humans’ understanding of the sacred, for better or worse. For much better, in my opinion.

    “But you’re shifting the goalpost with your ‘perfect woman’, you point was why we find women’s beauty a ’strictly natural phenomenon’ [no, i think it is NOT a strictly natural thing, therefore I have to move beoynd nature to explain it] – you made no mention of the ‘perfect woman’. You ask me if the entire history of art is reducable to biology – but the point was about finding women attractive, not about art. More shifting of position.”

    -What I’m saying is that humans are historical, not simply natural, beings. My whole point is that we are creatures who “shift the goalposts”. Why are we such creatures? Because natural instincts are not sufficient for us to maintain a social order. We maintain a social order in relation to the sacred, which is something that is not stable but must be continually re-presented since its power, in any one shape or form, is continually eroded, profaned. It took many thousands of years of art history for us to develop the attitudes, and sacred awe towards women’s beauty we now (though perhaps no longer now) commonly hold. There is nothing natural about putting a pin-up girl or a Mona Lisa on your wall and, in a sense, worshipping it. Sex may be natural on one level, but worship of pin-up girls is a historically specific mixing of natural instincts with the sacred.

    “I had a suspicion of ideas of the ’sacred’ and the ‘taboo’. Not only does it tend towards mysticism and mystification, but to a dangerous over simplification of life which becomes a trap for fools and a tool for rogues”

    -there is nothing mystical in trying to describe human anthropology for what it is. Sure we can mystify the sacred; we can also de-mystify it. Since it’s always there in some shape or form, we have no other choice. It’s always there because it was original and fundamental to the constitution of the human, of symbolic language, at the moment when we stopped being apes and started being human symbol users. The readers can decide what I’ve accomplished. But for what it’s worth, Sean, I think you are the one who is mystifying because you don’t want to see a fundamental human phenomenon. Human symbolic language works by making things sacred. To say that is in fact demystifying because it helps us understand the human propensity to mystify. I do not worship any particular configuration of the sacred. In that sense I am not a mystic. But in understanding human behaviour I see that history is a process of refiguring what is “cool” or no longer “cool”, i.e. what is sacred.

    Adieu,
48. Sean Swan says:

    August 5, 2007 at 2:09 am

    Thanks Truepeers,
    Your example of the ‘dirty Jew’ syndrome, which you say the ‘international left’ is into, boils down to something you wrote about Jews who are ‘judeophobic’ Jews…in other words you, who are not a Jew, can decide who is a ‘real’ jew and who isn’t. I’ve come accross this before, there was a website that was all about ‘SHIT Jews’ (the ‘Dirt List’ it’s been closed down since, but if you google “shit jews” it still comes up in the listings). But who was going on about ’shit Jews’? The ‘international left’? No, here’s a clue – the “SHIT’ stood for ‘Self-Hating Israel Threatening’. Figure it out. You say ’stop being so literal’ – I’m afraid it doesn’t quite work like that. If you claim that certain things are being said by certain people, you can’t complain when you’re asked the obvious question ‘who said what’. Nor can you dismiss it by just saying ‘don’t be so literal’. Naomi Klein criticised certain policies of the Israeli government, so she is implied to be saying ‘dirty Jew’ and wanting a second holocaust – this is nonsense, it’s also emotional blackmail designed to close down any real debate about the issues involved – which are very mundane ones about land. looked at in the cool light of day, Naomi Klein is actually a zionist because she supports Israel’s right to exist. What she doesn’t support is Israel’s right to land-grab. This hardly makes her a Nazi, to really belive that she is is a form of hysteria. Who can be surprise if people who have been deeply traumatised by violence – something the Israelis and Palestinians share – get a little hysterical. Who can blame them? But people who haven’t gone through that experience have no such excuse, and have no business adding to the hysteria.

    But as i said, this isn’t really about Israel at all, it’s about something far wider. It’s about universalism. It works like this, those who want to impose control over a nation or class make a claim as to what it really means to be a member of that nation or class. The problem is that people just can’t be reduced to this (the claim that ‘All Jews are …’ is universalist, and, unless the sentence is completed with the word ‘Jews’, racist.). But when it becomes obvious that the nation or class is actually not ‘nothing but’, those who don’t fit this projected model are demonised in one of the following ways – they are deemed to be ‘criminal’ or ‘insane’ or in the pay of somebody (’agents’) or suffering from ‘false consciousness’. You get the ‘Shit jew’ claim, or you get dissidents in the USSR being put into psychiatric hospitals. Now why are these universalist ‘nothing but’ claims made? It’s simply about power, so that the position of those making these claims becomes the only legitimate one, the ‘real’ one. Thus those who opposed this position, or simply don’t believe it, can be delegitimised and, in extreme cases, killed.

    The recent history of the Islamists in Algeria demonstrate this nicely. Their version of Islam was the only legitimate version, thus anybody who disagreed with them wasn’t really a Muslim at all, they were in fact ‘zionists’ and such like (even when they were Islamic clergy). In other words, if you didn’t agree with their version of Islam you not only were not a Muslim, but you were Haaram and needed to be killed. Eventually it reached its absurd logical conclusion – the different Islamist groups started killing each other.

    Not only do the universalist insist that the group they represent are ‘nothing but’, but they also insist that the groups they oppose are also ‘nothing but’. “All Jews are Zionists!” claim the Islamists … and the Zionists agree with them, because that suits their claims too. “All muslims are islamists”, maintain the zionists, and the Islamists echo it back. Thus both sides agree that Jews are ‘nothing but’ Zionists and that muslims are “nothing but” Islamists. A nice little circle in a black and white world where all that’s really disputed is who the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ are. From there the descent into total war isn’t far away. The extremists on both sides love nothing more than the voice of the extremists on the other side – because it lends credence to their position. The two things they do NOT want to have heard is moderate voices from the other side or from their own side. They have to be silenced or delegitimised because it exposes their universalists claims of ‘nothing but’ as an illusion. Complexity can’t be allowed to ‘cloud’ the issue – though the issue is always complex, because life’s complex.

    In a broader context you get universalist claims of what’s REALLY ‘human nature’. Certain things are wrong because their ‘against human nature’. Well they may well be wrong, but they can’t be against ‘human nature’ if humans are doing them. And you get the same predictable response – OK, humans are doing them, but their bad humans, or mad humans, not really human at all. Unfortunately all it really proves is that humans can be bad and mad and that, too, is part of ‘human nature’. What the stuff about ‘human nature’ is really about is a search for a secular God. Nietzsche said ‘God is dead’, he didn’t say he ‘doesn’t exist’ and what had ‘killed’ god was a lack of belief in him. So along comes ‘human nature’ as the next great normative system, it all sounds very scientific, except that the ‘human nature’ being advocated in only a very limited range of what people actually are and do. you just can’t get a moral framework from ‘human nature’ because you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
    As I said before, the real point is the law. People need no gods, religious or secular, to make crime illegal. But that’s exactly the problem for the universalists. They are elitists and the last thing they want is to give the citizens of a country the right to make the laws, so they have to keep attempting to foist a trascendental god, religious or secular, as something higher that has a right to dictate or influence the laws citizens make (and guess who has the right to interpret these transcendental values …). Unrestrained majority democracy can be dangerous, but that’s what things like the rule of law, constitutions and bills of rights are for. The problem the universalist has with such things is that they are definable, written down for all to see – they prefer ambiguity, innuendo and smoke and mirrors. They hate clarity because when they are their myths are exposed and so is what they’re really up to, it’s usually highly suspect and boils down to a mixture of self-serving power seeking and prejudice.

    I would have prefered to have made these points in relation to Northern Ireland where they apply in exactly the same way, but Israel came up, and more people seem to have an interest in the Israeli – Palestinian issue than in the Irish one. But it is interesting to note the changes in NI today, Sinn Fein and the DUP put eachother in power by promising to save their respective communities from Sinn fein or the DUP, as the case maybe. But lo, what has happened now to DUP claims that Sinn Fein are terrorists or Sein Fein claims that the DUP are bigots? They seem to have been quietly dropped because they are no longer useful – in fact they are now a hinderance. Paisley can hardly boast about being in government with ‘terrorists’ nor can McGuinness boast about having made a ‘bigot’ First Minister. The power game is played out and the propoganda is now no longer useful.

    Most of these ‘universalist’ political concepts originate with Karl Schmitt and Leo strauss – and they originated in 1930s Germany, one was a Nazi, the other a Jew. But the situation in Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland and germany in the 1930s, are all extreme cases which do not reveal universal truths, just what can happen in extreme cases. The point is to make the extreme places like the rest of the West, not to make the West like the extreme cases – which is what some people would like.

    I’m not going to respond anymore to postings from people who don’t use their full names and give a link to something that verifies that that’s who they are – say it openly or just don’t say it.
49. Stuv says:

    August 5, 2007 at 1:52 pm

    Oh good – Sean Swan is going to stop posting. Has he noticed that it’s only he, truepeers and John sustaining this increasingly surreal converzatione? Roger Scruton has long left for lunch and obviously others, like me, have been well frightened off!
50. truepeers says:

    August 6, 2007 at 6:26 am

    Sorry Stuv and anyone who feels marginalized by the direction I have tried to take the discussion. I’ll retire now and look forward to reading what you want to talk about. I don’t know the norms of this site and if I have abused its hospitality, I apologize.

    Sean, no worries, you haven’t been responding to what I say for some time now, including what I actually say about Naomi Klein in the post I linked (I’m not saying the average member of the international left desires the Second Holocaust anymore than the average German of the 1930-40s wanted the first one. Many simply want/wanted the Jews to be put in their place, i.e. humbled a little. It’s a question of who you support and who you oppose. Many people are too dumb to know with whom they are in bed. Resentment is irrational and delusional to some significant extent.) But as for the invidious “truepeers”, it clarifies your position to know you need to change your ground rules once someone upsets you, even if it’s now in defense of a universalist nineteenth-century public ethic and, it seems to me, not the ethic of the kind of anonymous free individualism and exchange of ideas suitable to the internet age.

    By the way, I defend the individual against the claims of group identities. So what to make of Sean’s tangents here on “universalism” and “human nature” (to be sure, there is such a thing) and Israel the “land grabber” (that takes a special reading of history, of the wars Israel has had to fight, not to mention a blind eye to the much greater Arab-Islamic imperialism): it seems to me this is not a man who is attracted to the victim role out of hard necessity (”I’m not going to take it anymore”) but rather someone who takes a positive and vicarious pleasure in victim identities. I could be wrong. But in any case, it should be clear that many today do take such a vicarious pleasure and that should be a worthy topic of discussion for all those interested in the sacred and the human.