Plug for end of consumerism

Thom Hartmann is the renaissance man of the pro-democracy movement. Prolific author, journalist, lecturer, and radio host, Hartmann is erudite, politically astute, and an environmentalist.

One of his greatest skills in this book is to help us learn from wise philosophers and ancient cultures, as we attempt to come to terms with the limited resources of our planet as it faces the onslaught of a consumer society that continues to scar and deplete it.

"The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" is as accessible as it is profound. Hartmann knows that to be didactic is to kill the message, so he never lapses into boring, lecturing rhetoric. He doesn't fashion himself a guru, just an individual who examines the fate of the planet and offers options for saving it.

Hartmann knows that no single person has the answers to the environmental disaster awaiting us if we don't modify our materialistic appetites and predatory corporate destruction of eco-cultures. The subtitle of this informative AND spiritual book is "The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late." That is at the heart of Hartmann's writing: the empowerment of all of us to change the world around us for the better by changing ourselves.

It's rare to read a book this rich, wise and compelling. Hartmann casts a spell with words that bring you closer to the deep issues of coming to terms with living on a planet that we inherited and that others will inherit from us.

Lucas tells the truth...

Two lines from the latest Star Wars movie especially resonate:

"This is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause", as the Senate cheers the dictator while he announces a crusade.

and-

"If you're not with me, then you're my enemy," the line echoes Bush's international ultimatum after the Sept. 11 set-up.

That quote is almost a perfect citation of Bush, a politician trying to increase his power to wage a phony war.

George Lucas said he patterned his story after historical transformations from freedom to fascism, never figuring when he started his prequel trilogy in the late 1990s that current events might parallel his space fantasy.

"As you go through history, I didn't think it was going to get quite this close.
Maybe the film will waken people to the situation," said Lucas.

" The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are unbelievable..."

Lucas began researching how democracies can turn into dictatorships with full consent of the electorate.
In ancient Rome, "why did the senate after killing Caesar turn around and give the government to his nephew?" Lucas said. "Why did France after they got rid of the king and that whole system turn around and give it to Napoleon? It's the same thing with Germany and Hitler.

"You see these recurring themes where a democracy turns itself into a dictatorship, and it always seems to happen in the same way, with the same kinds of issues, and threats from the outside, needing more control. A democratic body, a senate, not being able to function properly because everybody's squabbling, there's corruption."

Galloway tells the truth...

“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies..."

Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection

by Edwin Black
Sunday, November 9, 2003

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called Master Race.
But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the 20th century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the California state Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.

CONTINUED...

Citizenship in times of belligerence

When one’s government is engaged in illegal actions, the moral imperative is to intervene. Especially when one's government is waging illegal war, the duty of the citizen is to oppose the war and to agitate for withdrawal from the invaded land.

I am continually brought to the issue that democracy requires moral assessment and action on the part of its citizens. Failure to respond to moral transgressions of one’s own values, ends in a devaluation of those values. When your leaders make war, the blood spilled stains our reputations and our society. Torture makes all of us torturers

People who disdain to use force in their private relations, sit idle while children are bombed and the peaceful citizens of a foreign land are terrorized and murdered. Upon becoming aware of the cause (namely a criminal government) many of these people accede to the crime by justifying it as “war”.

So the question keeps coming back, “What is the difference between us and the Germans of the late 1930’s and Second World War generation?”

[I find it to be small, whatever difference exists]

To not act, in the face of crimes, makes one heir to the evil produced. It is not possible to justify our means by the ends we wish to achieve. When our leaders accede to do wrong, we are just as much to blame and the wheels of history will revolve until we end up being crushed underneath them.

This is not said from a perch of moral superiority. This is a judgement directed at us all.

Once again we have lost our moral bearings and have become Criminal, at minimum we are Collaborators. Bush's 9/11 was the catalyst to an age of new horrors that will impact us all.

We , who CHOOSE to look away, to deny and to facilitate the horrors delivered daily to the unfortunate people of the lands invaded, are corrupted beyond our own recognition.

We, who CHOOSE to let our moral character be defined by the actions of criminals and murderers, we become just like them through our silence, through our acquiescence.

We, who CHOOSE to hide our own moral turpitude cannot hide from our guilt.

E Verde/ oil on canvas, Jo Heijnen

T Verde/oil on canvas, Jo Heijnen  

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The contingency of convenience

Consider the nature of convenience. Many devices that are made to give us more leisure time, the so-called "labour-saving" technologies, are arrayed to deliver us into dependence. In much the way that a division of labour allows for a diversification of tasks that produce a grueling monotony of production; the convenient steals from us the diversity of our own experience. When the difficult is challenged, the reward is skill and knowledge. When convenience is employed, all that we gain is a void, an ignorance longing to be filled. The impoverishment of our experience is tied to the increase in convenience.
In the same way that a journey provides for a multiplicity of experiences gleaned from a changing landscape, the difficult provides for a new range of powers that arise from the challenges encountered. One can only become what is hidden inside of oneself through a process of exploration and contemplation. The difficult is what offers the road for this peculiar journey.
The old adage (often employed against charity), "Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime" applies exactly to the virtue of rejecting convenience. What we learn to do is never lost. In learning to do something we expand the range of our possibilities, consequently becoming less dependent on the convenient. Furthermore, we fill our time with meaningful activity thereby requiring less entertainment.
This process makes us better. We feel more certain of ourselves, we become smarter and are less apt to fall prey to the chorus of advertisers. Convenience leads to dependence, dependence leads to victimization. To the extent that we seek our own freedom and satisfaction, we serve ourselves best by rejecting the ethic of convenience.

ReedsAbstract/ oil on canvas,100 x 100 cm, E.Gomez y Marth 

Power is not a zero-sum game...(cont.)

Refusal to buy into the consumer mentality is the refusal to be cheapened and negated. Consumption is not only surrender to materialism, it is denial of subjectivity, denial of self.
The continual rush of signals/advertisements that impugn our humanity is the source of much of our unhappiness.
The messages are designed to make us feel inadequate, inferior, incomplete. By successfully planting such absurd notions in our heads, the corporate takes control of the corporeal. The power of choice and the demand of identity are subjugated, replaced with a nagging doubt that serves as a control mechanism over the general population.
As consumer, you give away your self-esteem and your imperatives. In fact, consumer is to corporation what cog is to mechanism.
To reject the garb of the consumer is to consider ones own needs in the sober light of self-awareness. What you do not have, you most likely do not need. Our needs are actually few and classic. Once we have housing, food, relationships with people, we have almost all we need. The rest is distraction-attraction.
But corporatism thrives only when we spend without a true concern for our own interests. When we buy sickeningly sweet sodas we end up thirsting for water. Perhaps we are better off foregoing the intermediate and heading directly for the essential?
There are, in my estimation, few advantages to consumption. Some might argue that it leads to job-creation and higher levels of employment. I argue it leads to GREATER DEPENDENCE ON THE ARTIFICIAL.
Part and parcel of the current mode of production, the consumer is working to produce the "goods" that are bought to fill a void based in the very act of production.
When one's life is dedicated to working for a living in order to acquire the products that will make of their lives a "paradise of want", one never makes a life for oneself. Too busy running on the treadmill of economics, the worker opts for consumption as a stop-gap to the emptiness that economics offers. "False-fullness", like a stomach bloated from too much gas, a form of existential indigestion permeates our endeavours to find satisfaction.
Yet, satisfaction rests in our being as surely as dissatisfaction.
To accept ones "faults" is to accept ones humanity, warts and all. And I fail to see what harm it does to see ourselves in a clear light. Certainly, one of the advantages of age is the sense of satisfaction that comes from experience assimilated and available as wisdom. The wise have little need for what they "lack". They can be seen as rejecting the system of denigration, announcing their emancipation by refusal to be marginalized in the service of the corporate...

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Disposable economy is disposable society is disposable life. The degree to which we are consuming, we are disposing of ourselves and all we actually need. The current rate of environmental degradation and resource depletion is directly related to the failed ethic of disposability. What is easily discarded is not so easily reclaimed. When we toss our own sense of self out by purchasing something that leaves us needy for more of the same, we engage in the destruction of our world. Such activity is appetite, the homonculous of consumerism enlarged in mouth, dreadfully diminished in digestive capacity standing on pinfeet wanting ever more. Pathetic image that it is, this is our portrait as consumers. It is unsustainable as surely as it is unstable.

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My Mother's Mother 

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Dilemma

In response to Istvan Kovacs' analysis pertaining to the human intellect:

Reason is the tool of choice for the doubting mind.

The intellect is built up through the process of dialogue, question and answer give rise to subsequent inquiry and cogitation.

The slow process of epistemilogic accretion/education never produces a static solution.

The process is essentially “de-/ re-constructive”.

As such, we “know” very little, even when we have “studied and learned”.

The stupid among us are not so stupid as we.

Their stupidity is at least an honest reflection of their situation.

Whereas,“well-developed” ideas and theories leave us burdened, embittered and cynical, somewhat the wiser.

The task for us, “the suffering in mind”, is to avoid the sour fruit of fermented ideas and to gain the value of our inquiries while avoiding the hangover of alienation and misanthropy.

Unfortunately, the intellect is poorly equipped for dispensation of compassion.

To the degree we rely on mind, we deviate from the wisdom of heart.

Knowledge is wasted unless we can find a proper practice.

The practice rests on a sympathetic transmission.

Religion is a problem/pt1.

An acquaintance once asked me why “there seemed to be be little or no spiritual development/progress in the last 500 years…”

I responded , at the time, that I believed that the human dialogue had shifted to the material/economic/political factors involved in being human. “The spiritual” was relegated to a lower rung on the ladder of human inquiry. Scientific proof being in short supply for spiritual experience, a material society in need of such proofs slowly rejected the notion of “the spiritual” as being of relevance to “progress”.

I contend that the role of spirituality in contemporary society has been sublimated and has fueled the growth of religion over the last 30 years. What religion and spirituality have in common is sometimes hard to discern, but the increase in religious “feeling” seems to coincide with a sense of “spiritual hollowness” that has been often cited as a characteristic of our times. I believe this is an indictment of the materialist world view and does indicate that a deeper yearning , “the spiritual”, is tangible necessity not addressed ( let alone satisfied) by the conditions of contemporary existence.

In short, our situation leaves many of us feeling unfulfilled. Some of us turn to religion, "the old myths", to reinvigorate our lives. Fundamentalism is mania in this regard.

As for the individual who chooses to “head out into the wilderness and make pilgrimage”, spiritual experience often eludes such directed efforts. People seek, but what they find is often as unsatisfying as daily life.

My own experience of "the search for meaning" has led me to realize that the failure to find spiritual meaning as an exterior phenomenon ( revelation) , the inability to engage in an actual “vision quest” stems , to some degree, from expectations about what such an experience would be. Trance experience is often claimed as proof of the power of the spiritual, but trance experience is essentially chemical experience, corporeal, psycho-physical. Furthermore, the extremes of shamanic experience are often drug-induced.

I take this to indicate that the nature of experience itself is the essential source of spiritual meaning. What we define as spiritual experience is what we derive pre-eminently from experience. The commonplace, the quotidian, the daily and mundane are the fountains from which spiritual experience flow.

To be more precise, all spiritual meaning is “contained” in the experience of being/related.

In contemplation(pure relation), in the seeing of a thing for what it is, in its functions, its “place” in the world, we are seeing ourselves revealed as/in wonder of the other. The Other ( long considered a negative , objectifying force in the existential tradition) takes on the relation of agent, empowering my spirit. By reflecting on/relating to the Other, I find myself as wonder and as curiosity, innocence returns with each new inquiry, and that being “becomes” me through my attention and my sensitivity relative to what the Other is.

Spiritual experience is transferred, enhanced as knowledge, knowledge as awareness. Awareness is opening to the other, a half-circuit. Eyes wide opened we seek to understand and understanding opens our eyes wide to the Other. Sympathy/empathy. The spiritual is generally defined as humble, mild, meak but emphatically convincing, certain and true.

When we see ourselves as relation to all that we encounter, the spiritual is present. No universe is possible without the diversity that is manifest as one. The paradoxical reveals the greatest certainty by revealing the dynamic of ignorance that leads us to knowledge.

I want to avoid drifting into esoteric philosophy, though this essay indicates much found in such documents. The observations I offer here are the product of rational inquiry that leads to the threshold of awe and ecstacy. By opening attentively to the experience of daily life, we can experience the force of the spiritual. The complex unity of the world opens to those who seek it out in the most uninteresting places and in its quietest moments. I believe “the spiritual” that I experience because it fills me with hope and its intuitions remain with me as truths about who I am and where I “belong” in this world.

In conclusion, it's possible that the age of revolutionary and prophetic religious ferment has given way, over several hundred years, to an individualized experience of spiritual searching which has as much potential for meaning creation as had messianic myth-making and visions of the hereafter…

Stolen/borrowed

Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all...

Messiah

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Bangladesh "Muslim Madonnas"/ C.Veltman

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"Par Gandaria"/ Dhaka, Bangladesh

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Old shoes, new feet

To the extent that we wish to see the world in it's complexity and richness, we are obliged to open our eyes, ears and consciousness. Our preferred methods of seeing/hearing/touching, etc. dissuade us from seeking out difference, so comfortable are we with the somnambular quality of the present popular art-forms.
The entire notion of "music television" is reworked pop radio strategies from the last 40 years. The only "development" seems to be the addition of orchestrated video supplements that do very little but provide visual invigoration.
Museums have historically been used to "authorize and certify art". In our present situation, we have inherited the pastiche of a "fine art" while offering cliche as Post/P/P-Modernist masterpieces. The unification of High and Low Art types has "unified" the artworld, so to speak, but done nothing to improve the quality of the artistic discourse.If a picture is worth a thousand words, then our culture is undoubtedly busy obscuring our situation through a veritable deluge of language which serves little to free us from a dependence on the "tried and true".
The imperial push of Western culture defined by an ideal of "diversity in homogeneity", (more notoriously ideologized in the American motto "E Pluribus Unum")provides a vast field of activity, much of it already familiar. But familiarity breeds contempt, and disaffection isn't far behind, yet we are wont to seek the "truly new". The originality of the unorthodox, the art of iconoclasm, the power of rejection and renunciation to affect through dismissal, these revelatory qualities of our curiosity are confined, tamed if you will through the power of institutionalized aesthetics, an actualized ethic of perceptual awareness.
What we have seen will limit what we can see. The paradoxical experience of novelty/judging(assessment of familiarity) is the essence of our dilemma. To see a thing, we compare it to other things we have experienced. The classes of beings in our natural history, all the phylla, genus, families, etc serve as testament to our world-view and the inherent order we impose on the world in order to be able to understand it.
Yet, understanding as a ritual gives rise to a hubris of the intellect. Safe and secure in our preferred cosmologies, we become convinced of the certainty of what we know. Perhaps this explains why we use so little of our brains in the course of living. The comfort of epistemic "certitude" leads to a double bind. We "know", but we have to "unknow"/forget/renounce this epistemology while depending upon its use to acquire new knowledge.

Splitzophrenic

The continuity of experience, the trace of our lives on the background of the physical, on the foundation of the chemical/biological/electrical body is a tale of quantum illusion.
Despite the assurances of quantum physicists that all energy equations are exchanges of quantum packets of energy, thus discreet and separate; our experience, the psycho-emotional quality of our daily lives indicates a continuity of perceptual and cognitive consistency. Sleep, our refuge from the harassment of our senses, should serve to reveal the quantal, but we miss this obvious message as well. The psychology of the unconscious, hidden motivations and the deep seated drives that dictate some of our strongest emotional responses all point at the discontinuity that we unify through incessant "thought-patterning" and meaning-making. If we actually determined all our actions, freely, then the continuity of experience would be the result of launching ourselves, as Sartre suggests, into the future we are not yet. As such , our choices for the future are decided in a blind instant, ostensibly chosen by our freedom but ours nonetheless, despite our being unaware of the very process. In The End of Time, Julian Barbour addresses the continuity illusion by example of his cat Lucy. She is an adept bird-hunter, could spring high into the air, turn somersaults and the usual behaviors of the hunting feline. Barbour reminds us that we see the continual, but we miss seeing the actual and integral. Lucy is a being made of an infinity of atoms, quantum relations and processes occurring so rapidly as to be invisible. Our perception constitutes the totality of our experience of the cat. Named Lucy, she has the quality of identity, even character. But she has acquired these in the context of our perception, not as an aspect of her own being. We name her, surely we must also constitute her in even more extensive ways. The angle of perception, the duration of observation, the accuracy of our judgment all contribute to the formulation of said Lucy. Though our perception "...seems decisive, because we instinctively feel that Lucy has... some unchanging identity. But is the cat that leaps, the cat that lands? Except for the changes in her body shape, we do not notice any differences..."

Lie to me

[It is the language that frames the debate.] As I write these words, I create the argument. Dormant in my head, or perhaps only silent, my ideas have no voice until I speak them. My words seek reference with my thoughts, with the world. My words are not simulations; I "mean" them to carry value.
To the extent which debate is politicized, "meaning" loses value. Polemic is based on the stage of the disingenuous, the ideological cheapens words, twisting their meanings, accenting the phonetic at the expense of accuracy. "Spin" or "lie"? These words carry differing connotations, yet the terms differ only in spelling.
The purpose of this deliberate obfuscation, this threshold of deceit, is the creation of doubt in the audience and the acquisition of ill-gotten credibility. No surprise the political players of the day are concerned with "talking points" and "sending letters to elected officials". By framing the debate, the language they use can become even more opaque, a cycle empowering a lie in ascendancy. Language as warfare, words as bullets, manifesto of verbal landmines that serve to limit political thinking is the earmark of our age.
To the poet it is a game; to the philosopher it is tenure; to the dictator it is everything.
The success of reactionary politics is based on the Big Lie, resurgent and dressed up, but as severe and dangerous as ever before. To start a war based on a lie is nothing new, but our institutions ostensibly exist to prohibit these tendencies.
By controlling the language of the debate, the debate proceeds along and within the boundaries the framer has designed. The efficacy of this strategy is evident in the collapse of civil democratic debate. Screaming at the top of one's lungs so that no rational argument can be set forth by one's opponent, is the essence of contemporary reactionary politics by all appearances. Shouting one's opponents down is not an intellectual triumph; no argument has been debated, no conclusions can be drawn. Human nature, in it's animal/emotional sense has simply beaten down the faculty of reasoning and consideration...