Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

Arundati Roy on sham Democracy in India

Rich — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:38:00 -0700

In a country where one can be arrested for writing a book because it offends the sentiments of religious devotees or criticizing or for criticizing the judiciary this interview with Arundati Roy addresses sham democracy in India. One has to confront Arundati one by one on the issues she raises for social justice that are wide ranging and concern Maoist in Orissa, armed occupation in Kashmir, the ever latent potential for genocide within the power regimes couched within Hindu or Islamic fundamentalist movements or even more to the point, the model of Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalism for ethnic cleansing that is being adapted by the Home Minister (and former Enron lawyer) India's new neo-liberal elite, its global corporations to move 85% of the population from the villages and countryside into mega-city slums, appropriating the lands of indigenous peoples, to harvest for themselves India's last remaining natural mineral resources, such as bauxite....

On Universalism: In Debate with Alain Badiou by Etienne Balibar

Debashish — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:21:00 -0700

Etienne Balibar (1942- ) is a French philosopher and political theorist who was among the principal students of Louis Althusser. In this thought dialog with Alain Badiou (a worthy counterpart of the interview on Universalism carried on sciy earlier), Balibar conducts a sophisticated investigation on universalism - its dichotomies, its establishment as truth and the responsibility implicit in its pursuit.

Why is universalism always ridden with contradiction? Can it be spoken of in a singular fashion or can it be reduced to the proper side of a single dichotomy? In tracing a speculative history of universality, Balibar moves through the variety of dichotomous displacements through history to bring to focus the intrinsically dialectical essence of universalism.

This leads him to the political question of the establishment of universalism. Balibar extends the philosophical discourse of dialectics to the perpetuallly revolutionary essence of the politics of universalism - that is, it is in ceaseless reviolution that the single-dual ideal of what Balibar calls "equaliberty" becomes the quasi-transcendental horizon of realization. One may say that social consciousness expands in this process in unpredictable dimensions.

Finally, on the question of the responsibility intrinsic to the pursuit of universalism, Balibar points out how the question of violence is also intrinsic to it. This question is not merely an external or extensive one, a fact of revolution as mentioned before, but an internal and intensive responsibility - that of the violence of internal exclusivism. This is the specter of the terror of totalism or absolutism which we are so familiar with today. Balibar points to the always present specter of this danger and something the responsibility of the pursuit of universalism needs to be constantly vigilant about. - db

An Interview with Alain Badiou: “Universal Truths & the Question of Religion” by Adam S. Miller, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture

Debashish — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:11:00 -0700

Is universalism an ideology in the self-proclaimed name of the Human which is meant to spread its normative hegemony over all forms of particularism, with a discursive disciplinary and regulative mechanism so ubiquitous that it disappears into unnoticeability? And in doing so, does it indeed wipe out all particularisms, or being itself a particularism pretending to be undeniably universal, does it instead enable a numberless plethora of fundamentalistic particularims to be equal claimants to the right of universalism in innumerable contested definitions of the Human?

What then happens to universalism? Must we discsard this utopian ideal of the Enlightenment in the rubbish heap of History? Or is it an alternate locus that we must seek for it, a locus in which difference can inhere at the horizon of identity ? Alain Badiou (1937- ), prominent French philosopher and former chair of Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure, addrersses these questions in a book on St. Paul, where he develops his notion of universalism as a revolutionary aspect of becoming rooted in the idea of the Event. Such an Event cannot be predicted outside the appearance of dialectical contradictions, but in its appearance, such contradications lose their contradictory significance, either in an indifference or in a coexistence where new properties subsume their significance beyond contradiction. Perhaps it may not be too far to apply Sri Aurobindo's phrase to this event-ual nature of the becoming: "Trasncendence transfigures," though to Badiou such transcendence does not bear any inevitability or predictability to it.

In the present interview with Adam S. Miller of the Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Badiou expands on his views on universalism and also inflects his positions vis-a-vis that of Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek. - db

White Noise - a book review by William E. Connolly

Debashish — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 13:53:00 -0700

This book review by William Connolly, one of the most original political philosophers of our times, turns its attention on Stephen White's book Sustaining Affirmation, inflected with the sensibility of contingent and unpredictable becoming borrowed from Don DeLillo's novel White Noise. But much more than a book review, it is an engagement with White's text so as to affirm a number of positions held by Connolly himself, pertaining to his existential faith in immanent naturalism and the ontological condiitons for an evolutionary pluralism in the micropolitcs of contemporarary social life.

Connolly constellates his thought with what he calls the radical Enlightenment of Spinoza and a lineage he draws from this leading through Nietzsche, Bergson, Foucault and Deleuze. What one may see as common among these thinkers is the affirmation of a creative Becoming-without-Being or a Being as Becoming. That there is an infinte abundance to this which exceeds the human power of thought but to which thought can lend itself as an instrument of meaning and a part of its generous creative process, form core aspects of the faith which Connolly calls "immanent naturalism." Among the most pertinent causes driving this geneaolgy of postmodern thinking is the reaction against ontotheology, where a transcendental Being is inscribed with the name of God and assimilated into a fundamentalist metaphysics with an ideology, teleology, theology and normative boundaries to differentiate an inside and outside and institutional strutures to enforce these boundaries. Modernity is characterized by a displacement of the ideology of the Enlightenment onto pre-modern ontotheologies with a totalitarian scope in terms of absolute systemic knowledge and a cosmic-scaled will to power as technology. This ontology of the modern has also transformed mysticisms of the past into ontothelogies.

It will be clear from Connolly's text that he is hardly against the private affirmation of a faith in transcendental Being, but that this needs to be scrupulously rejected from becoming an ideology and needs to be subordinated to a practice of creative Becoming through openness to temporal proceses leading towards ever greater horizons of meaning and experience. -db

Zizek: A Lacanian plea for Fundamentalism (part 6 or 9)

Rich — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:32:00 -0700

This is part of (midway through) an excellent lecture by Zizek on Fundamentalism. In this particular part of the lecture he considers the differences in how Derrida and Habermas treat the question of "the other" and how in his view they actually compliment each other. In the other parts of the lecture Zizek gives his insight into why, if Max Weber were writing today, he would call his book, "Taoism and the Spirit of Capitalism", (aka why westernized Buddhism or Taoism is the perfect compliment to neo-liberal globalization). Zizek also addresses the differences in fundamentalism between the type practiced by Tibetean Buddhist and Amish versus moral majority Christianity and radical Islam as well as eurocentric tendencies to exoticize the other

About half way through this part of the lecture are some questions raised (that are difficult to hear) but if one listens to the entire lecture (either the series of nine u tube videos or the mp3) one will be richly rewarded, because Zizek is here, at the top of his game wildly speaking to issues of fundamentalism, eurocentrism, orientalism, and otherness.

The link to the utube page with the entire series of nine videos and the mp3 download of the lecture is given in the body of the post....

“It’s development, stupid !” or: How to Modernize Modernization by Bruno Latour

Debashish — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:26:00 -0700

Bruno Latour (1947-) is Professor and vice-president for research at the Institut d'études Politiques de Paris. Latour is a leading and very influential anthropologist of Modernity whose major contribution may be called holistic politcal epistemology. This, for Latour, is not a form of idealism, but what, following William James, he calls "radical empiricism." Latour is (in)famous for his pronouncement "We have never been modern." By this he means that the overarching hubris of modernity for human autonomy and mastery is a sub-narrative in a larger embeddedness in holistic properties which is only beginning to make its imperative critical demands on human attention. This emergence depends on the recognition of a change of telos and and a political epistemology of interdisciplinarity which takes humanity beyond itself into the fullness of global embodiment. In this essay, he reflects on environmentalism, society, technology and theology. - db

The Violence of the Global by Jean Baudrillard

Rich — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:15:00 -0700

The analogy between the terms "global" and "universal" is misleading. Universalization has to do with human rights, liberty, culture, and democracy. By contrast, globalization is about technology, the market, tourism, and information. Globalization appears to be irreversible whereas universalization is likely to be on its way out. At least, it appears to be retreating as a value system which developed in the context of Western modernity and was unmatched by any other culture. Any culture that becomes universal loses its singularity and dies. That's what happened to all those cultures we destroyed by forcefully assimilating them. But it is also true of our own culture, despite its claim of being universally valid. The only difference is that other cultures died because of their singularity, which is a beautiful death. We are dying because we are losing our own singularity and exterminating all our values. And this is a much more ugly death....

We are really not talking about a "clash of civilizations" here, but instead about an almost anthropological confrontation between an undifferentiated universal culture and everything else that, in whatever domain, retains a quality of irreducible alterity. From the perspective of global power (as fundamentalist in its beliefs as any religious orthodoxy), any mode of difference and singularity is heresy. Singular forces only have the choice of joining the global system (by will or by force) or perishing. The mission of the West (or rather the former West, since it lost its own values a long time ago) is to use all available means to subjugate every culture to the brutal principle of cultural equivalence. Once a culture has lost its values, it can only seek revenge by attacking those of others. Beyond their political or economic objectives, wars such as the one in Afghanistan [7] aim at normalizing savagery and aligning all the territories. The goal is to get rid of any reactive zone, and to colonize and domesticate any wild and resisting territory both geographically and mentally.

Into the Inferno: Hollow Language and Hollow Democracies by Arundhati Roy

Rich — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 07:32:00 -0700

Today, words like “progress” and “development” have become interchangeable with economic “reforms”, deregulation and privatisation. “Freedom” has come to mean “choice”. It has less to do with the human spirit than it does with different brands of deodorant. “Market” no longer means a place where you go to buy provisions. The “market” is a de-territorialised space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling “futures”. “Justice” has come to mean “human rights” (and of those, as they say, “a few will do”).

This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalise their detractors, deprive them of a language in which to voice their critique and dismiss them as being “anti-progress”, “anti-development”, “anti-reform” and of course “anti-national” – negativists of the worst sort. Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, “Don’t you believe in progress?” To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs and whose homes are being bulldozed they say, “Do you have an alternative development model?” To those who believe that a government is duty-bound to provide people with basic education, health care and social security, they say, “You’re against the market.” And who except a cretin could be against a market?

Towards a Postcolonial Modernity: AsiaSource Interview with Partha Chatterjee

Debashish — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:50:00 -0700

Partha Chatterjee, founding member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective, is director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and visiting professor of anthropology at Columbia University. Chatterjee's interests are diverse and include Bengali theater. He has acted in Mira Nair's adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's story The Namesake.

Chatterjee's work on anticolonial and postcolonial nationalism has left a definitive mark on contemporary scholarship. He has grappled with the problem of an Euro-American modernity politically institutionalized by the nation-state, in its implementations in terms of resistant cultural nationalisms among non-western and colonized peoples and their imagined communities.

The present inflection of his work moves towards postcolonial governmentality and the grassroots cultural politics of claiming identities within its categoric specifciations.

Chatterjee points out how the standard secular form of post-Enlightenment nationalism has been adapted in attempts to arrive at alternate forms within non-western cultures, yet how such adaptations have been marked by serious ambiguity, becoming co-opted by the forms they have sought to resist, rendered impotent or transformed into fascict ideologies. He calls for a continuous popular/communitarian creativity in understanding and dealing with such transformations, though his voice in this matter, judging by India's postcolonial history, tends towards pessimism.

For example, this is what he has to say about the moibilization of religion in its anti-colonial adaptations:

The innovations in nationalist thinking and nationalist mobilizations which have occurred in the postcolonial world have tended to get repressed by the emergence of fairly standardized forms of governance. Many of these innovations were actually repressed because they were not seen to be consistent with the known forms of the modern state. For instance, if you had movements or parties which were largely based on religion, this was seen to be somehow inconsistent with the idea of a modern constitutional state. Therefore, there was always this problem of what to do with such movements. Yet, those movements have been very influential and powerful in terms of mobilizing people against colonial rule.

So, once the objective of decolonization and transfer of power to a new nationalist elite had been met, the question was how to contain or manage these forces that had been released in the course of the national movement. That is where many of these tensions remained unresolved. If you look at the case of post-independence India, this whole debate about the "secular" state and what the secular state must do and what it means, in a sense, reflected this unresolved tension. In the historical process of the emergence of that state, a great deal of the mobilization had used religion, had depended on extremely powerful religious reform movements, of actually shaping what were seen to be religious beliefs and religious practices but changing them, reformulating them, in order to conform to what were seen to be the new challenges of the modern world.

So these religious reform movements were often completely part of the broader set of social changes that brought about nationalism, that brought about the new state, that brought about new political formations. They were integrally tied with many of those movements and yet the requirements of the secular state presumably forbade religion in public places or public life, or forbade political parties based on religion, because these were somehow inconsistent with a modern nation-state. Very often, there were all kinds of shortcuts or repressive ways of keeping those things under cover, as it were. Many of the tensions around secularism, for instance, and the kinds of challenges that emerged later on, in the case of India's Hindu right-wing in the 1980s for instance, were very much part of these unresolved questions from within the national movement. What the Hindu right then appealed to was not to say that nationalism was all wrong; they said, in fact, that they were the "true" nationalists. The reason why that could be said persuasively was because of a great deal of religious-based rhetoric and the presence, as I said, of these powerful religious reform movements, which were always part and parcel of nationalism.

So these remained unresolved problems. The overall frames remained derivative, almost imitations of forms of the state as developed in the West, but in actual practice what had to be done was to find completely innovative practices at the localized level. The real problem occurred when many of these local adaptations and innovations required a new translation into the larger frame.

Amos Elon (1926-2009) by Tony Judt (NYRB)

Rich — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:36:00 -0700

Thus Amos, unlike so many of the land-fixated commentators among his fellow countrymen, was one of the first to recognize that the settlements in the territories Israel has occupied since 1967 were a self-imposed catastrophe: "The settlements...have tied Israel's hands in any negotiation to achieve lasting peace.... [They] have only made it less secure."[2] That a country with the strongest military in its region, and with an unbroken string of armed victories behind it, should be so obsessed with the security risks of relinquishing a few square miles of land may seem odd indeed. But it speaks to the changes that have overtaken Elon's homeland in recent decades.

As he foresaw in 2003, Israeli insistence upon ruling over an Arab population that will eventually become a majority within the country's borders can only lead to a single authoritarian state encompassing two mutually hostile nations: one dominant, the other subservient. With what outcome? "If Israel persists in its current settlement policy,...the end result is more likely to resemble Zimbabwe than post-apartheid South Africa."[3] Many have since come to this depressing conclusion; I believe Amos was the first to make the point.

Amos wrote more in sorrow than anger. Many years ago, when few nonspecialists were even paying attention, he wrote despairingly of "the hu-man energies wasted for more than a generation on short-sighted settlement programs.... Think of what might have been achieved had the billions poured into the shifting sands of Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank, been spent on more useful causes."[4] Such misplaced efforts he attributed to what he called "the astonishing mediocrity of Israeli politicians." That was written in 2002. The incompetence and political cowardice of a generation of Israeli Labor statesmen, from the sainted Golda Meir to the egregious Shimon Peres, were already manifest. But there was worse to come: Amos Elon would live to see the resurrection of Benjamin Netanyahu and the obscene elevation to foreign minister of Avigdor Lieberman, sad confirmation of his assessment....

The road out of Kabul goes through Kashmir by Graham User (LRB)

Rich — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:12:00 -0700

Pakistan and India have been at war since 1948. There have been occasional flare-ups, pitched battles between the two armies, but mostly the war has taken the form of a guerrilla battle between the Indian army and Pakistani surrogates in Kashmir. In 2004 the two countries began a cautious peace process, but rather than ending, the war has since migrated to Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas on the Afghan border. ‘Safe havens’ for a reinvigorated Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida, the tribal areas are seen by the West as the ‘greatest threat’ to its security, as well as being the main cause of Western frustration with Pakistan. The reason is simple: the Pakistan army’s counterinsurgency strategy is not principally directed at the Taliban or even al-Qaida: the main enemy is India.

Orientalism Revisited: Edward Said’s unfinished critique (Boston Review)

Ron — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:11:00 -0700

With the 1978 publication of Orientalism, Edward Said launched a critique of Western scholarship on the Middle East that still reverberates through academia and government. By characterizing Middle Eastern cultures as incapable of adapting to modern life, the early Orientalists, in Said’s view, hid their colonial, and indeed racist, biases. In the process, he suggested, Orientalists fooled themselves—and Westerners generally—into believing that their studies were undertaken with total neutrality. Said particularly attacked Bernard Lewis as the contemporary exemplar of this entrenched view. In a series of exchanges, Said argued that such scholarly bias contributed to the failure of the West to recognize Palestinians as a distinct people or to value Middle Eastern nations except for their oil. While Said did not live to see how Lewis’s views would influence the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq, the terms of his critique still divide scholars.

Despite decades of controversy, however, neither Said’s most recent supporters, such as Juan Cole and Rashid Khalidi, nor his most ardent critics, Raphael Patai and Daniel Pipes, have succeeded in subjecting Said’s concerns to a serious analysis that might address the central question: can scholarship on the Middle East ever be freed from its political context? ...

Congress Wins (The Guardian)

Rich — Sat, 16 May 2009 10:36:00 -0700

The Congress party delivered its best performance for decades, and while it will still need the support of regional parties outside its United Progressive Alliance (UPA), it was expected to form a considerably more powerful government that it did in 2004, and one more able to push through an ambitious reforming programme.

Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism: Advanced Technologies and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition: Metnexus (Global Spiral)

Rich — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:25:00 -0700

Reference: 100 years of Sri Aurobindo on evolution

In those places where Heideggerian thought has been influential, it became impossible to defend human values against the claims of science. This was particularly true in France, where structuralism—and then poststructuralism—reigned supreme over the intellectual landscape for several decades before taking refuge in the literature departments of American universities. Anchored in the thought of the three great Germanic "masters of suspicion"—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—against a common background of Heideggerianism, the human sciences à la française made antihumanism their watchword5, loudly celebrating exactly what humanists dread: the death of man. This unfortunate creature, or rather a certain image that man created of himself, was reproached for being "metaphysical." With Heidegger, "metaphysics" acquired a new and quite special sense, opposite to its usual meaning. For positivists ever since Comte, the progress of science had been seen as forcing the retreat of metaphysics; for Heidegger, by contrast, technoscience represented the culmination of metaphysics. And the height of metaphysics was nothing other than cybernetics.

Let us try to unravel this tangled skein. For Heidegger, metaphysics is the search for an ultimate foundation for all reality, for a "primary being" in relation to which all other beings find their place and purpose. Where traditional metaphysics ("onto-theology") had placed God, modern metaphysics substituted man. This is why modern metaphysics is fundamentally humanist, and humanism fundamentally metaphysical. Man is a subject endowed with consciousness and will: his features were described at the dawn of modernity in the philosophy of Descartes and Leibniz. As a conscious being, he is present and transparent to himself; as a willing being, he causes things to happen as he intends. Subjectivity, both as theoretical presence to oneself and as practical mastery over the world, occupies center stage in this scheme—whence the Cartesian promise to make man "master and possessor of nature." In the metaphysical conception of the world, Heidegger holds, everything that exists is a slave to the purposes of man; everything becomes an object of his will, fashionable as a function of his ends and desires. The value of things depends solely on their capacity to help man realize his essence, which is to achieve mastery over being. It thus becomes clear why technoscience, and cybernetics in particular, may be said to represent the completion of metaphysics. To contemplative thought—thought that poses the question of meaning and of Being, understood as the sudden appearance of things, which escapes all attempts at grasping it—Heidegger opposes "calculating" thought. This latter type is characteristic of all forms of planning that seek to attain ends by taking circumstances into account. Technoscience, insofar as it constructs mathematical models to better establish its mastery over the causal organization of the world, knows only calculating thought. Cybernetics is precisely that which calculates—computes—in order to govern, in the nautical sense (Wiener coined the term from the Greek xvbepvntns, meaning "steersman"): it is indeed the height of metaphysics.

George W. Bush: "Iraq" (The Farewell Tour)

Rich — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:26:00 -0800

An Indian Patriot Act post-Mumbai? by Kanishk Tharoor (Open Democracy)

Rich — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:57:00 -0800

The juxtaposition is what creates the magic

— Suketu Mehta

Our recommended links represent some of the best resources we have found on the web for integrating global perspectives with critical reflections....

Open Democracy and Global Voices (who it seems C.N.N has just discovered) move along complimentary liminal pathways in the cybersphere of global journalism to engage important perspectives left out in the corporatist Media-net

Kanishk Tharoor is an assistant editor of Open Democracy and he raises an interesting question regards the agenda post-Mumbai for a similar Patriot Act in India as in the States post 9/11.

The Phenomenon: The Audacity of Hope (a review by M. Tomasky)

Rich — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:00:00 -0800

I first posted this article here in Nov 2006 before Barack Obama declared his intention to run for president. Since then his historic candidacy has changed the political landscape of the United States, or at least that is the promise should he be elected.

This article is a review of Obama's book: The Audacity of Hope by Michael Tomasky, an especially astute political journalist. The article is an interesting read now fast forwarded two years into the future.

The word "phenomenon"—from the Greek word phainesthai, "to appear," and related to another Greek word that is the root of the English word "fantasy"—possesses a unique potency in our culture. While scientists may use it to mean anything observable, it is popularly applied to rock stars, movie stars, top athletes, and the like. Even today, in our hype-drenched society, it is not used promiscuously. It is reserved for that special minority of people who seem to have singular talent and potential; for those with the ability, that is, to fulfill our collective fantasies.

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - II

Debashish — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:04:00 -0700

This is a fragment constituting a continuation of Debashish Banerji's reflections on Techno-Capitalism as the epistemic regime of modernity and posible post-human futures at the eschatological cusp of history. Here the alignment of Marx and Hegel with the Enlightenment vision/teleology is contemplated and questions asked regarding a comparative alignment with the Neo-Vedantic teleology (if it can be called that) of Sri Aurobindo.

Obama Makes History

Rich — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 10:42:00 -0700

Barack Obama has made history. Here are some well considered meditations on the historic events and news coverage of the past week courtesy of Jon Stewart.

The New American BoogeyMan: Reverend Jeremiah Wright

Rich — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:52:00 -0700

The Hillary Clinton Campaign and the Republican Party (funny how those two organizations seem to fit together) have succeeded in characterizing the Pastor Jeremiah Wright as the new American BoogeyMan. By managing to decontextualize a few sound bits from a sermon he gave after September 11, 2001, in a nutshell they have managed to label him, and by association Barak Obama, as the voice of [both] Black Hatred of White America and Islamic Terrorism. By comparisons some of Dr. Kings speeches which castigate the Union for its racial inequality, its genocide of American Indians, and enslavement of Africans may be a bit tamer.

In short, the political strategy pursued by Clinton and the Republicans is to have this man condemned by playing on the fears of White America and disrupt the message of hope and change of Obama (which one hopes not to be a cynical hope). Two disclosures, I certainly am not a fan of the Christian hell fire and damnation sermons, that go on in either the White of Black Churches. I do not have any illusions that an Obama presidency would be significantly different than previous democratic failures, but since he takes less blame for supporting the politics of empire over the past eight years, by default [he] gets my vote.

The alarming fact is that in the age of Utube and FOX News that someone can edit and pervert ones words to the extent that nothing remains of the larger historical context in which they are embedded, and cause almost a whole nation to fear and hate a new boogyman. This should be a concern of any nation which calls itself a democracy; the failure of history. Here is Rev. Wright from an interview on 4/25/08 with Bill Moyers: ...

'Going beyond God,' Karen Armstrong's transformed views of religion

Ron — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:29:00 -0700

Imho, this is an important article about the pluses and minuses of religion, an interview with a former nun who has had many deep experiences of what she writes. Highly recommended. ~ ronjon

Karen Armstrong is a one-woman publishing industry, the author of nearly 20 books on religion. When her breakthrough book "A History of God" appeared in 1993, this British writer quickly became known as one of the world's leading historians of spiritual matters. Her work displays a wide-ranging knowledge of religious traditions -- from the monotheistic religions to Buddhism. What's most remarkable is how she carved out this career for herself after rejecting a life in the church.

At 17, Armstrong became a Catholic nun. She left the convent after seven years of torment. "I had failed to make a gift of myself to God," she wrote in her recent memoir, "The Spiral Staircase." While she despaired over never managing to feel the presence of God, Armstrong also bristled at the restrictive life imposed by the convent, which she described in her first book, "Through the Narrow Gate." When she left in 1969, she had never heard of the Beatles or the Vietnam War, and she'd lost her faith in God. ...

100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution: The dialectics of biology and culture; science, ecology & economics (part 6 of 6)

Rich — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:36:00 -0700

Perhaps it is best if the twain between science and religion do not meet. Trying to engage science and spirituality in a dialog has a long and troubled history. The incommensurable narratives of matter and spirit they both tell have proven time and time again troublesome for reaching any common understanding. In fact, if science and spirituality do share something in common it is that they all too often accuse the other of totalizing a universal narrative that usurps all ways of looking at the world that are inconsistent with their own.

Religion and science each have their own fundamentalist practitioners who would reduce the world solely to accounts told in their holy books or biology text books. One can not easily imagine an encounter between science and religion in which some violent reaction would not be triggered. Worse perhaps then the violent confrontation between science and religion is when either one appropriates the narratives of the other for the purpose of furthering their own ideological concerns. In the case of religion one example would be in their use of science to justify creationism, while in the case of science such appropriation usually results in one of the just-so stories of origins or cultural analogs of natural selection that Neo-Darwinism tells....

This holds true also for any dialog one would wish to begin between integral yoga and science. It would perhaps be best to begin such a dialog by first exploring Sri Aurobindo's dialectic between yoga and culture and then to look for resonances with narratives told by credible scientist regards the dialectics of science and culture. Better yet, in Sri Aurobindo's own work one finds him at times also critically exploring the dialectic between science and culture. It would therefore seem best to arrive at a dialogic platform to engage science and integral yoga using their diffusion in the semi-permeable membrane of culture, rather then by a direct confrontation as a means to begin the conversation.

Tibet is one thing, but India and China tensions spell bigger disaster

Ron — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:39:00 -0700

...Few of his contemporaries think of George Walker Bush as a visionary American president, unless they are using the term to imply a touch of madness. Yet early in his second term Bush launched a bold initiative to try to establish closer American ties with India, the world’s biggest democracy, in what may eventually be judged by historians as a move of great strategic importance and imagination...

Bush... has managed to cast aside 40 years of hostility and suspicion between America and India – and even agreed to start collaborating over nuclear energy – in the hope of strengthening India and its economy. And all for a special reason: the rise of China. ...

or Guernica Iraq!

Rich — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:40:00 -0700

Picasso captured an intense scene reflecting the deeply unjust suffering, agony and despair experienced by the people of Guernica. And in doing so he produced one of the most iconic, powerful and affecting pieces of anti-war artwork ever put to canvas. It is little surprise then that a reproduction of the painting, which hangs outside the entrance to the UN Security Council, was covered while Colin Powell was attempting to sell the Iraq War to the world.

The people of Iraq are suffering what amounts to the similar unjust brutality inflicted on the people of Guernica Iraq, except it's practically on a daily basis. A more accurate comparison would be to imagine having the London Tube and Bus bombings everyday. And have them happen so often that they become a predictable daily occurrence and part of life."

Guernica was the product of a fascist Spanish-German alliance between Franco and Hitler, and the corportist sponsors of the Luftwaffe. The following collage of images come to us trough the efforts of the Anglo-American alliance of Blair and Bush and through the courtesy of Boeing, Haliburton, Blackwater et al....

Guernica and/or Iraq

Rich — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:54:00 -0700

On the five year anniversary week of the Iraq war what can one say? Hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees, a nation in civil war, and no real end in sight. A war that even former head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan concedes was fought over oil. One can only turn to images and here is Picasso whose depiction of the slaughter at Guernica Spain as a result of German bombing, is considered one of his most important paintings. I will post a link to U tube video by the same title which unfortunately subjects Guernica to the eternal return of the same.

Here is a bit of History ...

Jesus and the Lost Goddess Sophia

Ron — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:35:00 -0800

I've taken the liberty of transcribing the following passages from the remarkable book Jesus and the Lost Goddess, by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. I highly recommend purchasing and studying this book. Reading it is like a moist vivifying breeze in the scorched lifeless desert of deadly strife between cults of religious fanatics who each believe they alone worship the true God. It documents the horrifying behavior of the misogynous and patriarchal Roman Church and the self-serving lies and propaganda its repressed male leaders have been spreading for two thousand years in their attempt to exterminate Sophia, the divine Goddess of Wisdom and Gnosis. I've felt for years that the RC Church was more Roman than Christian, this book substantiates that intuition with an illuminating compendium of well-referenced scholarship. ~ ronjon

...For the original Christians, the Jesus story was a myth used to introduce beginners to the spiritual path. For those wishing to go deeper than the 'Outer Mysteries', which were only 'for the masses', there were secret teachings or 'Inner Mysteries'. These were 'the secret teaching of true Gnosis' which, according to the 'Church Father' Clement of Alexandria, were transmitted 'to a small number by a succession of masters'. Those initiated into these Inner Mysteries discovered that Christianity was not just about the dying and resurrecting Son of God. They were told another myth that few Christians today have even heard of – the story of Jesus' lover, the lost and redeemed Daughter of the Goddess.

Amongst the original Christians the divine was seen as having both a masculine and feminine face. The related to the Divine Feminine as Sophia, the wise Goddess. Paul tells us, 'Among the initiates we speak of Sophia', for it is 'the secret of Sophia' that is 'taught in our Mysteries'. When initiates of the Inner Mysteries of Christianity partook of Holy Communion, it was Sophia's passion and suffering they remembered. Amongst the original Christians, priests and priestesses would offer initiates wine as a symbol of 'her blood'. The prayer would be offered: 'May Sophia fill your inner being and increase in you her Gnosis.' ...

U.S. Resists Calls for Emission Cuts, Threatening [Bali] Climate Talks

Ron — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:06:00 -0800

The U.S. is resisting calls from the European Union and developing nations to commit to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming, threatening progress on a new accord to fight climate change.

Ministers from more than 130 nations are meeting in Indonesia this week to decide on guidelines for two years of talks to write a successor to the Kyoto climate-change treaty, which expires in 2012. The European Union, a group of 77 developing nations and China say they want industrialized countries including the U.S. to agree to reduce emissions by as much as 40 percent by 2020.

The Bush administration says talks should begin without a set emission target. Without U.S. support, the negotiations may not be completed in time to replace the Kyoto treaty, said Munir Akram, a Pakistan ambassador and spokesman for the group of 77 nations. The lack of an emission-cut target threatens investment in power and carbon-trading markets, UN officials say. ...

The Presidential Climate Action Project

Ron — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 08:34:00 -0800

...Leading climate experts estimate that the international community has 10 years to make dramatic changes in greenhouse gas emissions if we wish to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. A similar need for action in the next decade is being created by the growing international competition for oil, the approaching peak in world petroleum production and America’s increasing dependence on oil from unstable or hostile regions. Left unaddressed, these problems may create unprecedented economic and environmental hardships and increasing global tensions.

By the time the 44th President takes office, the window of opportunity to prevent these crises will be one-third gone. The people of the United States, as well as other nations, will be looking for an early indication of whether the President intends to lead the world’s largest energy-consuming and greenhouse-gas emitting nation on a responsible course of action.

To help the President launch effective Federal leadership on these issues, the University of Colorado and several partner organizations are engaging the nation’s science, policy, business and civic leaders to produce a Presidential Climate Action Plan (PCAP). ...

The biopolitical/dromological reversal, by Ian R. Douglas

Ron — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:11:00 -0700

I came across this interesting article when Googling the term "dromology" -- which Rich used in an earlier comment.

For Foucault, biopower was the essential missing link in genealogy of capitalist modernity. As he insisted in 'Discipline and Punish': " ... the two processes - the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital - cannot be separated." On the other side of the equation, Paul Virilio has stressed that his focus on speed in no way detracts from the importance of capital. As he insisted in 'Pure War': "Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed is the hidden side of wealth." And lest we forget, Marx also understood the political advantages of the collision of dromological/biopolitical technology: ...

Nowhere better do we find resonances of this "vulgar stimulation" than the ensemble of discourses that seem now in the ascendant (the discourses of globalism and globalization), fast overtaking the globe, and in the same movement creating anew a fast globe. These discourses, and their subsidiaries (informatisation, risk, competition, efficiency) - reflected and enacted in a whole panoply of specific practices - are all linked in the double movement sketched out above (the "will-to-speed" and "modern governmentality"). Taken together - I argue - we stumble across the unwritten history of globalization, and in that, the unwritten history of contemporary advanced capitalism.

The links are fairly simple. Dromology: the will-to-speed finds its final realisation in the destruction of the space (astronautical flight, space obliterated in proportion to the velocity of the vehicle). This destruction, as a social principle (Mumford's "desire to get somewhere"), has reduced the expanse of the world to naught, thrusting us into the global epoch. Governmentality: we need look only to the proliferating discourses of risk, competition, informatization, self-monitoring, self-organization, efficiency, effectiveness and excellence to get a taste of the ways in which the discourse of speed works to order the world into which individuals - indeed whole societies - are thrown. Each element feeds of the other: dromocratic power has encouraged the release of the will-to-speed through which we face what Virilio has termed the "negative horizon" (the implosion of space under the violence of speed). In parallel, disciplinary society has actively sought to produce this violence of speed (first in the military, then in the factory, then in the school, then in the prison) as a technical instrument in the ordering of populations ("populations at speed"). ...

In Iraq: The New Conterinsurgency by Tom Hayden (The Nation)

Rich — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 08:47:00 -0700

American officers call them the Kit Carson Scouts: Sunni military units prowling the desert to hunt down Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and other extremist jihadi groups. The original Kit Carson fought ruthlessly to repress the Navajo on their reservations by employing rival tribes like the Ute in one of the American military's first counterinsurgency campaigns. Even today, America's favorite weapons--the Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Black Hawks and Tomahawks-- testify to the military's most formative memories.

Now counterinsurgency is back in favor, the cure for Iraq as implemented by Gen. David Petraeus and an assortment of Ivy League advisers. By enlisting Sunni Iraqi insurgents to turn their guns against jihadis, Petraeus is claiming tactical progress in the "surge." The Bush Administration is using that claim in its campaign to continue the surge for another six months, and the war itself for a few years longer. There may also be a high-stakes internal coup against Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, which could be coupled with US appeals to allow more time for political progress. August was spent on feverish promotion of the Petraeus plan, with several dozen members of Congress wined, dined and personally briefed in Baghdad's Green Zone. Pundits Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, who promoted the 2003 invasion, wrote a widely circulated New York Times op-ed piece titled "A War We Just Might Win" after a recent trip to Baghdad. Fox News then featured O'Hanlon in an up-beat hourlong special about Petraeus and counterinsurgency. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave O'Hanlon an appreciative audience as well. (The PR campaign is having some effect: In late August 29 percent of Americans believed the surge was "making the situation better in Iraq," up ten points from July. And $15 million is now being spent on Republican television spots to shore up support for the war.) ...

Usufruct: The deceit behind the attempts to discredit evidence of climate change

Ron — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 19:46:00 -0700

The deceit behind the attempts to discredit evidence of climate change reveals matters of importance. This deceit has a clear purpose: to confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change. The danger is that delay will cause tipping points to be passed, such that large climate impacts become inevitable, including the loss of all Arctic sea ice, destabilization of the West Antarctic ice sheet with disastrous sea level rise later this century, and extermination of a large fraction of animal and plant species….

...The real deal is this: the ‘royalty’ controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, with the ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children. ...

A modern guide to India and Hindutva

Ron — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:35:00 -0700

Imo, this review of the book Understanding India: Relevance of Hinduism, provides some relevant background on the SCIY discussion re "What is Hindutva?," begun by Mr. Yeshwant Sane.

...In the ninth part, Abhaya Kashyap, Consultant, IBM and Infotech, feels that any meaningful debate on any aspect of Hindu identity or Hinduism runs the risk of either being perceived as a “rightist Hindutva propaganda or a liberal secular attempt to dilute the core values of Hinduism and its understanding.” He objects to the use of Hinduism for political purposes, “whether they claim to represent Hindutva or claim to be secular. It is our attempt to depoliticise the issue and develop a non-partisan paradigm whereby Hinduism can be understood as a potent force impacting India’s cultural, political and economic image.” ...

Patil elected first woman president of India

Rich — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 09:43:00 -0700

NEW DELHI: Pratibha Devisingh Patil was declared elected the 12th President on Saturday evening. On July 25, she will become the first woman to head the Indian Republic. ...

Myths of the War on Terrorism

Ron — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 10:40:00 -0700

... Though, al Qaeda may—emphasize "may"—still have the capacity to mount the occasional major operation, that doesn't mean terrorism should be treated as an omnipresent, existential threat. -- In reality, this fight bears only a faint resemblance to a real war. Only rarely can al Qaeda and its imitators manage a strike against their prime enemies, Britain and the United States, and even more rarely can they succeed. Like the alleged terrorists who planned to attack Fort Dix and JFK International Airport, the perpetrators in Britain were not trained professionals but bumbling amateurs.

On Sept. 12, 2001, it was easy to believe that we would suffer dozens of major attacks on U.S. soil over the next six years, and almost impossible to imagine we would suffer none. Instead of being the opening blitz of a "long, global war," 9/11 was a freak event that may never be replicated.

In a real war, such as the ones we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, many people die, week in and week out. But John Mueller, a national security professor at Ohio State University, notes that in a typical year, no more than a few hundred people are killed worldwide in attacks by al Qaeda and similar groups outside of war zones. ...

What is Hindutva?

Ron — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 02:45:00 -0700

'Hindutva' has been described and defined by many. The first definition has come from Veer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923, in his pamphlet entitled" who is a Hindu?" to describe movements advocating Hindu Nationalism. Thereafter, a spate of definitions and interpretations have arisen, but none of them carries the full Import of the struggles of the Hindu life on this Earth.

Firstly, all the previous efforts in defining it were rooted in some type of a Social or Religious motivations (all religions in their present status are materialistic in practice - and not truly Spiritual), or Political motivations. Now, presently the effort is for gaining a lost self-identification motivation.

Secondly, in view of the laws of 'the spiritual evolution', eternally functional and in operation in the universe, the human cognitive limits have always failed to realize fully the true agenda of their life. Vedic knowledge is the only guide available to the struggling human mind; and Hindus have inherited and attempted to follow this wisdom to a large extent. Therefore, the concepts or definitions of organized religions, Natural Sciences and even 'Spirituality' 'Dharma' are all in the crucible. ...

Fooled by visions of the future

Ron — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 14:32:00 -0700

Thanks to RYD for referring us to this article.
_____________
SINCE THE 1960s, politicians and pundits have predicted the imminent arrival of a digital utopia in which robots would do the washing up and we would live in peace and harmony in an electronically-connected global village, thanks to the Net. -- So why are the utopian visions of 40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today? Because business and political leaders have consistently pushed a carefully orchestrated fantasy of the future to distract us from the present, says Richard Barbrook, who explores the subject in Imaginary Futures — From Thinking Machines to the Global Village.

Mr. Barbrook, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Westminster, U.K., has been researching this topic for more than four years. What he wants is to show how ideology is used to warp time. "In other words," he says, "how we're told that the importance of a new technology lies not in what it can do in the here and now, but what the more advanced models might be able to do one day." He is particularly interested in exposing the "nonsense of technological determinism," which he describes as "the theory that someone builds a machine, the machine sprouts legs and runs around the world changing it." -- Mr. Barbrook believes we can trace today's deterministic views of technology to the Cold War; when the Soviet Union and the United States dedicated huge resources to demonstrating which empire better represented progress and modernity. During that period, the U.S. repackaged the space rockets, atomic reactors, and computer mainframes it was developing in the pursuit of atomic Armageddon into prototypes of better things to come.

"Nasa's spaceships would evolve into luxurious interplanetary passenger liners," says Mr. Barbrook. "General Electric's nuclear fission reactors would become fusion plants providing limitless energy for all. IBM's computers were prototypes of artificial intelligence." Soon, the implication went, loyal obedient robots would be at humanity's beck and call. ...

Digital Maoism by Jaron Lanier (edge)

Rich — Sun, 20 May 2007 20:17:00 -0700

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".

Bush Orders First Federal Regulation of Greenhouse Gases

Ron — Mon, 14 May 2007 19:12:00 -0700

After resisting the regulation of greenhouse gases since he took office in 2001, President George W. Bush today signed an Executive Order directing four federal agencies to develop regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from new mobile sources. Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide emitted by the combustion of fossil fuels, contribute to global climate change. -- The President directed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Agriculture to work together "to protect the environment with respect to greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles, nonroad vehicles, and nonroad engines, in a manner consistent with sound science, analysis of benefits and costs, public safety, and economic growth," the Executive Order states.

On Capitol Hill, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, "The President's announcement today is one more in a long series of pronouncements claiming to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Yet after six years of failed energy policies that have favored Big Oil, the American people are still left with record gas prices and record dependence on foreign oil." "It appears that the President wants to run out the clock to the end of his term without addressing our energy needs, because the executive order will do nothing to promote energy independence. Instead," Pelosi said, "it is clearly designed to bog down the Environmental Protection Agency in a bureaucratic interagency process that will ensure that no steps are taken to regulate greenhouse gases from motor vehicles. Here in the House, we are working to develop legislation that will reduce energy dependence and global warming emissions; we will introduce a package of initiatives that will make this July 4th Energy Independence Day." ...

Climate change a a “serious national security threat”

Ron — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:00:00 -0700

Sweltering flight deck crews couldn’t launch Navy jets for extended periods of time. U.S. ground troops would find themselves splitting time between humanitarian relief operations and fighting insurgents bent on winning over desperate third-world peoples. Low-lying logistics hub Diego Garcia would be swallowed up by the Indian Ocean.

Global warming isn’t often thought of as a matter of interest for the U.S. military. But it should be, an advisory board of 11 retired flag officers concluded in a report issued Monday under the auspices of the Center for Naval Analyses, a non-profit national security analysis group. Climate change is happening, the blue-ribbon panel concluded, and is a “serious national security threat.” ...

Postmodernism and the Birth of the Author in Philip K. Dick's Valis

Ron — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 10:28:00 -0700

...If we define the topic as the relation between the reader's, the character's, and the author's willingness to believe, then the matter is very different in Valis. In Valis the text does not offer the reader the incredible as already labeled incredible — zany or horrifying, extreme or bizarre. The incredible is offered as ordinary, as reportage. Is not this the frisson worked by this novel? Anyone reading a novel such as Ubik has to accept that the novel offers something visionary and phantasmagoric. Whether one then emphasizes the novel's treatment of the deliquescence of commodity in late capitalism, or, with George Slusser, one then emphasizes its rendition of ``historicity'' in relation to an open, Emersonian event horizon, one has to pay attention to that explicit inventiveness which constitutes the shimmering portal... through which any reader gains entrance to that novel and others like it. Valis is different. ...

Many of Dick's values are strongly liberal and humanist. He values the little guy who dissents, resists, and persists, if necessary, alone; he values the single humble act, the individual saved..., the broken pot fixed, the embrace of two strangers in the dark and rain-spattered forecourt of a gas station... And liberal values, and hopes, are subjected to intense torsion, or distortion, in Dick's novels. [Fredrick] Jameson has traced this in Dr. Bloodmoney, whose bizarre cast's weird actions he sees as Dick's response to a threatened "leftist" belief that good and evil in history can be attached to individuals. Dick values that which is unassimilated — unassimilated into the mechanical and collective, into an oppressive society, into a single godhead, into entropy; but the urgency of assertion and defense of that value leads him to break all traditional definitions of the human individual. Liberal humanism, passed through this sieve, emerges as intuition of the potential value in androids, gods, animals, robots: anywhere and wherever life asserts a distinctness, rather than threatening it. The issue must be fraught with danger: vindication of the human, if it is to be achieved, will only be effective if the human has been profoundly jeopardized. ...

Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference, by Eric Davis

Ron — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:30:00 -0700

...Unlike most religious seers, Dick did not approach his visions with anything like certitude. Dick distrusted reification of any sort (his novels constantly wage war against the process that turns people and ideas into things), and so he refused to solidify his experiences into a belief system. ...Dick approached his theophany (or "in-breaking of God") as artistic material, reworking it in his writings with an artist's commitment to irony, craft, and a political bite. Even in his private journals, he constantly liquefies his revelations, writing with a modern thinker's sense of the tentativeness of speculative thought.

... Dick's Black Iron Prison imaginatively captured the "disciplinary apparatus" of power analyzed by historian Michel Foucault. Demonstrating that prisons, mental institutions, schools, and military establishments all share similar organizations of space and time, Foucault argued that a "technology of power" was distributed throughout social space, enmeshing human subjects at every turn. Foucault argued that liberal social reforms are only cosmetic brush-ups of an underlying mechanism of control. As Dick put it, "The Empire never ended."

"...today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. [10]"

As Jean Baudrillard has argued into the ground, simulation rather than representation has become the defining characteristic of cultural signs and artifacts in our time. ... The technological simulacrum creates its own reality, which Baudrillard calls the "hyperreal," a kind of ersatz parody of Plato's ideal world of forms. For example, when you download a printer driver from the Internet or record a CD onto digital tape, you do not "copy" the information so much as replicate a hyperreal object.

... As an exhausted rationalist, Baudrillard simply abandoned himself to a morbid celebration of the pixel apocalypse, giving up any notion of resistance or transformation while ignoring the messy realities that gum up the works of all such grand intellectual scenarios. But Dick never gave up his commitment to the "authentically human," the "viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new." He also recognized that simulacra lie deep in our souls, and that we are not so far from the spiritual paradigms of the ancient world, with their camouflage spirits, talking images, and automata gods. And so Dick redeployed the gnostic struggle for authenticity and freedom within the hard-sell universe of simulation. The world is a prison not because of its materiality—which was the opinion of the ancient Gnostics—but because of the hidden orders of power and control it houses: the various corporate, political, and ideological archons herding us into increasingly compelling synthetic worlds. ...

'The Great Turning' by David Korten

Ron — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 09:25:00 -0700

In The Great Turning, Korten argues that corporate consolidation of power is merely a contemporary manifestation of what he calls “Empire”: the organization of society by hierarchies of domination grounded in violent chauvinisms of race, gender, religion, nationality, language, and class. The result has been the same for 5,000 years, fortune for the few and misery for the many. Increasingly destructive of children, family, community, and nature, the way of Empire is leading to environmental and social collapse.

The Great Turning makes the case that we humans are a choicemaking species that at this defining moment faces both the opportunity and the imperative to choose our future as a conscious collective act. We can no longer deny the need nor delay our response. A mounting perfect economic storm is fast approaching. A convergence of climate change, peak oil, and the financial instability inherent in an unbalanced global trading system will bring an unraveling of the corporate-led global economy and a dramatic restructuring of every aspect of modern life.

Thanks to Mario Santonm for recommending this book. ...

ISEC: The International society for Ecology & Culture

Ron — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:47:00 -0700

I got to know the remarkable Helena Norberg-Hodge, the Founder of ISEC, back in the 70's, when she was setting up the Ladakh Project, for which she shared the 1986 Right Livelihood Award, otherwise known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize.' –- Her selfless, Buddhist commitment to protecting the indigenous peoples of the Tibetan high plateau from Western commercial development deeply impressed me. I'll always remember her inspiring photos of the unique and glowing faces of the Ladakh people who hadn't yet been exposed to Western culture. Knowing Helena, I can unreservedly attest to the quality and integrity of ISEC. ... ~ ron

Forty Initiatives that are changing our world (Resurgence Mag.)

Ron — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:12:00 -0700

This informative list of annotated links compiled by Resurgence Magazine includes interesting initiatives in the areas of Activism, Agricultural Development, Ecology, Economics, Education & Community, the Internet, Political & Corporate, Publishing, and Scientific Principles. The few I’ve had a chance to check out so far look like they’re indeed doing important work; e.g., ISEC (the International society for Ecology & Culture), which I’ll post more info about in my next article. — Recommended.

The Institute of Science in Society (ISIS): Science Society Sustainability

Ron — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:37:00 -0700

The Institute of Science in Society says it's "The only radical science magazine on earth." I don't know if that's literally true, but at first look, this does seem worth a serious look. Thanks to koantum for telling us about it.

“SIS is the antidote to scientific mumbo-jumbo. It treats people as grown ups - capable of understanding and facing up to difficult issues - whilst demanding that scientists describe the challenges of science in terms people can understand. Every idea that SIS explores is an advocacy of good science. A must-read for all who wish to change society for the better.” Alan Simpson, Member of Parliament, UK ...

Interview w. Dr. Darin Barney, author of "Prometheus Wired"

Ron — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 14:33:00 -0700

Rich Carlson asked me to post this article for him. ~ ron

...Dr. Barney recently lectured at Mount Allison as a part of the Democratic Audit series, which is coming out in book form one of these days. Of the lectures in the series that I attended, Barney was the only speaker to explicitly and rigourously question the influence of corporate interests on democratic processes (something that, one would think, would be necessarily central to any "democratic audit" taking place in the last 200 years). Specifically, Barney elaborated on the corporate stranglehold of development of communications infrastructure policy and regulation in Canada. -- Dr. Barney answered my questions via email. What follows is an unedited transcript; an edited version with an extended introduction is forthcoming. - Dru Oja Jay

Dr. Barney: Still, I think it is important to think not only in terms of how we design or use these technologies, but also in terms of how social practices are designed by, and how we are, in a sense, used by, these technologies. Technological mythology leads us to believe that technologies arise, as if by magic, to address pre-existing needs and to provide solutions to pre-existing problems. In reality, technologies tend to create more needs than they address, and to manufacture the very problems they stand ready to solve. I think of cellular telephony in this regard. Was the ability to engage in phone conversation while riding the bus really a pressing social need prior to the arrival of the cellular phone, or did our perception of that as a need arise after this technology became widely available? Was the fact that everybody wasn't always accessible, everywhere, via personal communication technology a problem before the mobile phone, or did constant accessibility become an expectation in light of the domestication of mobile phones and e-mail? Theorists of technology used to call this "reverse adaptation," and it is, I think, a social dynamic that is widespread in the age of proliferating digital technology. ...

Cyber officials: Chinese hackers attack 'anything and everything'

Ron — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 14:52:00 -0800

NORFOLK, Va. -- At the Naval Network Warfare Command here, U.S. cyber defenders track and investigate hundreds of suspicious events each day. But the predominant threat comes from Chinese hackers, who are constantly waging all-out warfare against Defense Department networks, Netwarcom officials said. - Attacks coming from China, probably with government support, far outstrip other attackers in terms of volume, proficiency and sophistication, said a senior Netwarcom official, who spoke to reporters on background Feb 12. The conflict has reached the level of a campaign-style, force-on-force engagement, he said.

“They will exploit anything and everything,” the senior official said, referring to the Chinese hackers’ strategy. And although it is impossible to confirm the involvement of China’s government, the attacks are so deliberate, “it’s hard to believe it’s not government-driven,” the official said. - The motives of Chinese hackers run the gamut, including technology theft, intelligence gathering, exfiltration, research on DOD operations and the creation of dormant presences in DOD networks for future action, the official said. ...

Chennai Declaration: UN urged to help achieve hunger-free world

Ron — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:05:00 -0800

The United Nations (UN) has been recommended to set up a Statutory Body comprising G8 and G20 nations to provide political oversight to the global and national efforts to achieve the goal of a hunger-free world by 2015. — The recommendation was made in the Chennai Declaration that was adopted yesterday on the concluding day of the three-day international workshop on "Food Security: A Great Threat to Human Security" held at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSRRF) in Chennai in India.

"The goal should be eradication of hunger by 2015, and not halving the proportion or the number of the hungry in relation to any chosen base year," the declaration recommended. — It said all the member states of the UN should make the right to a balance diet, clean drinking water, environmental sanitation, primary health care and primary education a basic human right...

The programme will be completed today (Thursday) through visiting Biovillage and Auroville, a MSSRF project in Pondicherry. ...

The human role in climate change (Boston Review)

Ron — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 23:50:00 -0800

This is one of the best summaries of the science of climate change and global warming forecasting I've seen. It's by Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at MIT, who was recognized in 2006 by Time magazine as "one of the world’s 100 most influential people." Highly recommended.

...The evolution of the scientific debate about anthropogenic climate change illustrates both the value of skepticism and the pitfalls of partisanship... general awareness of the issue dates to a National Academy of Sciences report in 1979 that warned that doubling CO2 content might lead to a three-to-eight-degree increase in global average temperature. Then, in 1988, James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, set off a firestorm of controversy by testifying before Congress that he was virtually certain that a global-warming signal had emerged from the background climate variability... Most scientists were deeply skeptical of Hansen’s claims; I certainly was...

At roughly this time, radical environmental groups and a handful of scientists influenced by them leapt into the fray with rather obvious ulterior motives. This jump-started the politicization of the issue, and conservative groups, financed by auto makers and big oil, responded with counterattacks... A very small number of climate scientists adopted dogmatic positions and in so doing lost credibility among the vast majority who remained committed to an unbiased search for answers... On the right, the search began for negative feedbacks that would counter increasing greenhouse gases: imaginative ideas emerged, but they have largely failed the acid test of comparison to observations. But as the dogmatists grew increasingly alienated from the scientific mainstream, they were embraced by political groups and journalists, who thrust them into the limelight. This produced a gross distortion in the public perception of the scientific debate. Ever eager for the drama of competing dogmas, the media largely ignored mainstream scientists whose hesitations did not make good copy. As the global-warming signal continues to emerge, this soap opera is kept alive by a dwindling number of deniers constantly tapped for interviews by journalists who pretend to look for balance...

Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ron — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 13:18:00 -0800

Thanks to our friend Katherine Grace McGlothlin for these inspiring quotes honoring Dr. King, on his birthday, Jan. 16:

“Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weakness of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.” ...

Welcome to world peace (Christian Science Monitor)

Ron — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 02:20:00 -0800

World peace was not supposed to look like this. It was supposed to be more - well, more peaceful. But a remarkable global phenomenon is being obscured by headlines about bombs and conflict in the Middle East. The ancient scourge of war has disappeared, at least in the sense of one government's army doing battle with another. — Last week marked 1,000 consecutive days with no wars between nations anywhere in the world, since the night in November 2003 when India and Pakistan instituted a cease-fire. This is the longest episode of interstate peace in more than half a century.

Other sorts of conflicts still rage around the world, but these are not wars of government against government. In this summer's bloodletting in Israel and Lebanon, for example, the Lebanese government took no military action to defend its territory, even as some of its bases came under fire. In Iraq, no government in the world has sent troops to support the insurgency. The interstate phase of the war for Iraq ended more than three years ago, when the United States and its allies removed Saddam Hussein's government. Despite the brutality in Darfur and elsewhere, even civil wars have become rarer. After rising steadily for half a century, the number of civil conflicts dropped by a third or more in the late 1990s. The world is far more peaceful than a dozen years ago, when slaughters in Rwanda and the Balkans led to gloomy predictions of rampant civil war. ...

"Response to my critics," by Meera Nanda

Ron — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 22:11:00 -0800

"Prophets Facing Backward," my book under discussion here, claims that the cluster of social constructivist, feminist and postcolonial theories that deny any cognitive distinctions between warranted knowledge and collectively accepted beliefs ... have provided philosophical justifications for [a] kind of populist interpretive flexibility ...

Set against the backdrop of the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the book argues that the relentless debunking the very idea of universally valid, bias-free facts has received in the hands of its many academic critics, has added to a culture of doublethink where truth has becomes infinitely malleable, open to all kinds of nativist, pseudo-scientific and faith-based interpretations.

Intellectuals, whose job it is to challenge such mystifications, I argue, have betrayed their calling by condemning the very possibility of impartial and universally valid truth that can cut through cultural and national boundaries. This betrayal has made it easier for the religious right to present itself as the defender of the tradition, dressed up as “alternative science”, which it claims has been unfairly rejected and willfully suppressed by the secular elite. The logic of deconstruction of modern science simultaneously provides the logic for the construction of “sacred sciences” by the resurgent religious-political movements that have sprung up among the Hindus, Christian and Muslims alike.

It is indeed high time for science studies to get engaged in the thorny issues raised by the attempt of religious extremists to take on the prestige of science for their objectively false and outdated cosmologies. It is gratifying to note that the debate I began in the "Prophets" has now been joined. My colleagues from science studies and postcolonial studies have done me the honor of critically engaging with the concerns I have raised regarding the political dangers of epistemic multiculturalism in this age of religious fundamentalisms. In this essay, I will respond at length to the issues my critics have raised in their readings of the "Prophets." ...

"Prophets Facing Backward," by Meera Nanda

Ron — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 21:26:00 -0800

The leading voices in science studies have argued that modern science reflects dominant social interests of Western society. Following this logic, postmodern scholars have urged postcolonial societies to develop their own "alternative sciences" as a step towards "mental decolonization". These ideas have found a warm welcome among Hindu nationalists who came to power in India in the early 1990s. In this passionate and highly original study, Indian-born author Meera Nanda reveals how these well-meaning but ultimately misguided ideas are enabling Hindu ideologues to propagate religious myths in the guise of science and secularism.

At the heart of Hindu supremacist ideology, Nanda argues, lies a postmodernist assumption: that each society has its own norms of reasonableness, logic, rules of evidence, and conception of truth, and that there is no non-arbitrary, culture-independent way to choose among these alternatives. What is being celebrated as "difference" by postmodernists, however, has more often than not been the source of mental bondage and authoritarianism in non-Western cultures. The "Vedic sciences" currently endorsed in Indian schools, colleges, and the mass media promotes the same elements of orthodox Hinduism that have for centuries deprived the vast majority of Indian people of their full humanity.

By denouncing science and secularization, the left was unwittingly contributing to what Nanda calls "reactionary modernism." ...

"One Cosmos," Robert Godwin's Blog

Ron — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 15:26:00 -0800

This is the personal blog of Robert Godwin, the author of "One Cosmos under God," which he discussed in the WIE interview in my previous SCIY posting. Godwin describes his book as: "the fruit of a lifetime of thought attempting to synthesize material from a number of diverse domains, including cosmology, theoretical biology, quantum physics, developmental psychoanalysis, attachment theory, anthropology, history, mysticism and theology, into a coherent, self-consistent, non-reductionistic whole." — In "One Cosmos," Dr. Godwin reveals a humorous alter-ego whom he calls: 'Gagdad Bob.' His posting for today begins as follows:

Now, I'm not an anthropopogist. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn, and I do know a thing or two about a thing or three. And one of the things I know is that pre-human hominids only became human because of the specifically trinitarian nature of the human developmental situation: mother-father-helpless baby. This, by the way, is one of the many reasons I do not believe intellignt life will ever be found on other planets, because genes and natural selection are only the necessary but not sufficient cause of our humanness.
In other words, even supposing that life arose elsewhere and began evolving large brains, a large brain would never be sufficient to allow for humanness. Rather, the key to the entire enterprise -- the missing link, so to speak -- is the extremely unlikely invention of the helpless and neurologically incomplete infant who must be born approximately 12 months "premature" so that his brain can be assembled at the same time it is being mothered. If we had come out of the womb neurologically complete, then there would be no "space" for humanness to emerge or take root. We would be Neanderthals. Literally. ...

The MIT Media Lab's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project: a New Prototype for Philanthropy?

Ron — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 13:28:00 -0800

...The concept behind the project, which Negroponte unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, less than two years ago, is as simple as its name: give all children in the developing world laptop computers of their own. If we achieved that, he believes, we could bridge what's usually termed the "digital divide." The laptops would offer children everywhere the opportunity to benefit from the Internet and would enable them to work with and learn from each other in new ways. OLPC, the nonprofit organization that Negroponte set up to manage the project, has taken responsibility for designing the computer and engaging an outside manufacturer to produce it. But the nonprofit is not going to buy the computers. That, at least for now, is the responsibility of governments, ...

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Program Surges Ahead; India backed out

Ron — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 12:55:00 -0800

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has just taken another step forward by shipping the first 10 computers from the manufacturer in Taiwan, to the US State Department for testing. This is the first batch of the $100 laptops for children in poor countries such as Nigeria, China, Brazil, Egypt and Thailand who have already placed an order for 1 million laptops... India was part of the program initially until Indian Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee reversed the decision to back the OLPC project. ...

Thank You ... A Renewed Effort Towards Peace, by Dennis Kucinich

Ron — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 16:23:00 -0800

... All across this country, the voices of the American people have called out for peace. All across this country, the American people's votes have registered a strong vote of confidence in a process that will take us out of Iraq. We have to now harness this energy. Let's continue to work together to take steps towards organizing this powerful peace movement in this country so that, not only do we get out of Iraq, but we stop the wars of the future. ...

Election Report: Greenest Day in American Political History

Ron — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 16:28:00 -0800

I felt this email from Frances Beinecke, the President of the Natural Resources Defense Council, was worth sharing.

You and I have got a lot to celebrate -- finally!
We have fought so unbelievably hard for six long and difficult years to defend our environment against a House and Senate leadership that has endeavored -- often on a weekly basis -- to sacrifice our natural heritage for the sake of Big Oil and other powerful special interests. ...consider this: of the "Dirty Dozen" (the 13 members of Congress targeted by the League of Conservation Voters for the poorest environmental voting records), nine were defeated.
On the flip side, eight out of nine of the League's "Environmental Champions" won their races. Dozens of candidates -- from both parties -- who ran on forward-looking energy policies were chosen by voters. At least 20 pro-environment challengers unseated anti-environment incumbents in the House. And Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger won strong voter support by signing a Global Warming Solutions Act.
Last Tuesday may well go down as one of the greenest days in American political history. ...

Iraqi health minister estimates 140,000-150,000 Iraqis killed by insurgents

Ron — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 14:31:00 -0800

VIENNA, Austria: As many as 150,000 Iraqis have been killed by insurgents over the past three and a half years, a senior Iraqi official estimated Thursday. -- For every person killed, about three have been injured in violence since the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq's Health Minister Ali al-Shemari said at a news conference in Vienna. -- Al-Shemari initially said he estimated that at least 150,000 had died, but in a follow-up interview with The Associated Press late Thursday, he said it could be in the range of 140,000 to 150,000. ...

Comments on "Reflections on Sri Aurobindo's THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY" (cont.)

Ron — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 15:10:00 -0700

I've taken the liberty of re-posting here all of the comments ("Replies") to Debashish's earlier posting: "Reflections on THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY By Debashish Banerji." -- My reasons:

1) The set of responses in this thread was getting so large that we were starting to experience some oddities in BlogHarbor's reply functions.
2) I was concerned that we could delete the entire thread due to some technical or human error, thus losing this fascinating & important discussion.
3) By posting all of the comments as this article, we can go back in and re-format them if we wish; e.g., correcting typos & adding italics for quoted passages.

PLEASE CONTINUE OUR REPLIES ON THIS TOPIC HERE, IN THIS ARTICLE, NOT IN THE PREVIOUSLY POSTED ONE.

Thanks,
~ ron

Major Change Expected In Strategy for Iraq War

Ron — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 11:43:00 -0700

The growing doubts among GOP lawmakers about the administration's Iraq strategy, coupled with the prospect of Democratic wins in next month's midterm elections, will soon force the Bush administration to abandon its open-ended commitment to the war, according to lawmakers in both parties, foreign policy experts and others involved in policymaking. ...

• The Religious, the Spiritual and the Secular by Robert Minor

Debashish — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 01:21:00 -0700

In this slim paperback, Robert Minor sets out with a double intention: (a) to tell the legal story of the power struggle between the Sri Aurobindo Society and Auroville; and (b) an exploration of the legal and cultural epistemological ambiguities surrounding the terms "religion", "spirituality" and "secularism" and their shaping of the discourse of modern political contestation in India, as exemplified in the story of Auroville.

Bush Signs Law Creating Tribunals for Terror Suspects

Ron — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 11:01:00 -0700

President George W. Bush signed legislation to allow the trial of suspected terrorists by military tribunals, and his administration immediately used the law to challenge suits by hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees. ...

China’s New Leftist (The NYT Magazine)

Ron — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 16:30:00 -0700

... At our last meeting, Wang also spoke more about a subject Cui had brought up with me: how the rise of China and India throws up new challenges and possibilities with profound implications for the world at large. “Western societies have been on top for the last two centuries and shaped the world with the decisions they made,” he said. “China and India will now play equally crucial roles in the new century. But what will they be? I think it is very important for Chinese and Indian intellectuals not just to imitate the West. They have to explore alternatives to the Western model of modernity. Otherwise, the ‘consumer nationalists’ are already saying, ‘America was on top; now we are on top.”’ -- Wang laughed, and added, “This is not interesting.”

Stewart Brand Meets the Cybernetic Counterculture (posted by Rich)

Ron — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 14:53:00 -0700

...Gathering at their church in Garnerville, and then again at performance sites around the country, the members of USCO ["US" company, an anonymous group of artists whose installations and events combined multiple audio and visual inputs] lived and worked together steadily for a period of years. Like a cross between a touring rock entourage and a commune, USCO was more than a performance team. It was a social system unto itself. Through it, Brand encountered the works of Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller—all of whom would become key influences on the Whole Earth community—and began to imagine a new synthesis of cybernetic theory and countercultural politics. ...

Reflections on THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY By Debashish Banerji

Debashish — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:33:00 -0700

In these last chapters of The Ideal of Human Unity, Sri Aurobindo draws together the threads that he has introduced earlier in the work, leading to his conclusion. Though Jan Smuts was yet to coin the word "Holism" to encapsulate the idea that a directed tendency towards the formation of ever-larger aggregates is observable in Nature, each such distinct stage marked by the presence of an identity and properties exceeding those of the sum of their parts, Sri Aurobindo's model of History follows this course. Indeed, this teleology follows naturally from Sri Aurobindo's master-idea of the progressive manifestation of intrinsic spiritual Oneness in Time, expressing itself politically as the drive towards world-union.

North Korea Claims Successful Nuclear Bomb Test

Ron — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 09:07:00 -0700

A barrage of condemnation and calls for retaliation befell the communist state Monday after it announced it had set off a small atomic weapon underground. -- The United States, Japan, China and Britain urged action by the United Nations Security Council in response to the reported test. The Council warned North Korea just two days earlier not to follow through with any test, and Kim Jong-il's government's defiance could mean a serious international backlash. -- White House spokesman Tony Snow called for "immediate actions to respond to this unprovoked act" and said that the United States was closely monitoring the situation and "reaffirms its commitment to protect and defend our allies in the region." ...

Full-Scale War: Looking at Russia’s Conflict with Georgia From All Sides

Ron — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:05:00 -0700

Let me begin this posting with a caveat: I know nothing about Russian/Georgian politics. I have no idea what political persuasion is represented by this article, or the "Russia Profile.org" website it's posted on. I simply enjoyed the writing style of its author. ~ rjon

What is going on in Georgia? Answering this question means that we have to know what is going on in Russia. But first, a substantial proviso, about comrade Mikheil Saakashvili. Well, never mind the “comrade” bit. The young chieftain has succeeded in doing something for his country: He has swept the political trash out of rebellious Batumi, driven the upstart Aslan Abashidze out of the country, and refused to allow in the frostbitten Igor Giorgadze. But the further you go, the more Saakashvili’s inadequate regime has a whiff of Gamsakhurdianism – a cheap mix of theatrical gesture, gamesmanship, pettiness, myopia, and self-obsession born of a persecution complex. ...

S. Korean Diplomat All But Certain to Assume UN Top Job

Ron — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 17:31:00 -0700

South Korea's foreign minister is quite likely to be answering to a new title soon - United Nations secretary-general. Seoul's chief diplomat has cleared what is widely viewed as the last major hurdle to winning the post. -- South Koreans are enthusiastic about the prospect that Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon will soon replace United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who is retiring. ...

Senate Passes Bill on Building Mexican Border Fence

Ron — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 15:11:00 -0700

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 — The Senate on Friday approved the building of 700 miles of fence along the nation’s southwestern border, fulfilling a demand by conservative Republicans to take steps to slow the flow of illegal immigrants before exploring broader changes to immigration law. ...

Report offered by Pres. Bush shows terrorism threat growing

Ron — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 06:51:00 -0700

WASHINGTON - President Bush on Tuesday declassified portions of a high-level intelligence report that describes the Iraq conflict as a major catalyst for Islamist radicalism around the world, but also cites other causes for the expanding terrorist threat. ...

"The World According to China," NYT Magazine

Ron — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:21:00 -0700

...China now aspires to play an active role on the global stage, which is why it sends skilled diplomats like Wang Guangya to the U.N. That’s the good news. The bad news is that China’s view of “the international order” is very different from that of the United States, or of the West, and has led it to frustrate much of the agenda that makes the U.N. worth caring about. The People’s Republic has used its position as a permanent, veto-bearing member of the Security Council to protect abusive regimes with which it is on friendly terms, including those of Sudan, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Myanmar and North Korea. And in the showdown with Iran that is now consuming the Security Council, and indeed the West itself, China is prepared to play the role of spoiler, blocking attempts to levy sanctions against the intransigent regime in Tehran. ...

"What is suffering?" - Quoted from Shantaram

Ron — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 12:00:00 -0700

I'm slowly working my way through Shantaram, the remarkable book by Gregory David Roberts I referred to in a previous post. Here's another sample of Robert's evocative writing. The setting is a discussion group of men, all of whom are leaders of the Bombay "mafia." These weekly discussions are organized and led by Khaderbhai, the charismatic "Godfather" of Bombay's officially tolerated organized crime scene.

Khaderbhai has invited a new guest to this week's session. He is known as Linbaba, a cover identity being used by the book's namesake, "Shantaram," when he arrived in Bombay after escaping from prison in his native Australia.

As is the custom in the group, Khaderbhai calls on the new guest to suggest the topic of discussion ...

Securing Shelter: Hope for Mumbai's Slums

Ron — Tue, 30 May 2006 15:35:00 -0700

This article describes one of the many NGO organizations now working to support the increasing number of slum dwellers around the world. SPARC originally focused on Mumbai, and is now branching out to network with other similarly-oriented NGO's working in other cities. This networking, mutual support and learning is supported by their increasingly sophisticated use of telecommunications technologies.

I think we need another term to describe these positive uses of telecom/computer technologies; e.g., their ability to facilitate the networking and empowerment of previously disempowered groups, ranging from computer programmers (Open Source movement) to slum dwellers. It's the other side of the coin from the "virtual class" types Rich so rightly critiques.

Half of the 14 million people in Mumbai, India's commercial capital, live in slums. A number of non-governmental organisations ( NGOs ) are working to help these communities but one NGO that stands out for its work with slum and pavement dwellers is the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC). ...

planet of slums: Bangalore (the garden city)

Rich — Sat, 27 May 2006 13:13:00 -0700

My own take on the Indian economic boom in information technology is that it represents a form of neo-colonialist exploitation of the huge “standing reserve” (Heidegger) of the available talented engineers in Indian society. While there maybe some trickle down to a portion of the non-participatory population from the information economy, the overall the quality of life conditions for the teeming masses of India is almost unaffected. I believe a parallel can be made between ...

Wikipedia re Hindutva

Ron — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 02:14:00 -0800

The term "Hindutva" (sometimes spelled "Hinduvta") has been used in some recent SCIY posts. I just looked it up in Wikipedia and discovered how little I knew about its history, provenance, and relation to past and current Indian politics. Here's the full text, including many informative links: ...

'Give Peace A Chance,' by John Tierney, New York Times

Ron — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 11:04:00 -0800

You would never guess it from the news, but we're living in a peculiarly tranquil world. The new edition of ''Peace and Conflict,'' a biennial global survey being published next week by the University of Maryland, shows that the number and intensity of wars and armed conflicts have fallen once again, continuing a steady 15-year decline that has halved the amount of organized violence around the world. By JOHN TIERNEY New York Times, May 28, 2005

Dramatic decrease in organized violence

Ron — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 10:33:00 -0800

All forms of violence are headed down, and the crucial years are between 1985 and 1990, which is just the time when after a continual increase (see the first three charts), the number of democracies jump up. The way to understand this is that in the late 1980s, democracies achieved a critical mass in the international system, a tipping point for violence. ...

ARE HUMANS OBSOLETE?, by Langdon Winner

Ron — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 00:57:00 -0800

Praised by The Wall Street Journal as "The leading academic on the politics of technology", Mr. Winner was born and raised in San Luis Obispo, California. He received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York where he serves as co-director of the newly founded Center for Cultural Design. His work focuses on the social and political implications of modern technological change.

In recent years the conventional understandings of progress have been challenged yet again, not in this instance by intellectuals concerned about inclusion and social justice, but by entrepreneurs who have discovered a fine new heir to the accumulation of useful knowledge. The writings of several prominent scientists, engineers, and businessmen brashly proclaim that, at the end of the day, the telos of science has nothing to do with serving human needs or alleviating humanity's age-old afflictions. For contemporary developments point to the emergence of a new beneficiary, one vastly modified and improved as compared to its anthropoid ancestors. Yes, human beings may pride themselves in thinking that their presence is required both to generate and enjoy the benefits of scientific advance, but this vain prejudice is false. According to the new prophets of perfectibility, the true inheritor of the legacy of science will be an entirely new creature, one variously named metaman, post-human, superhuman, robot, or cyborg. ...

They Thought They Were Free : The Germans, 1933-45 (review by Dorian)

Ron — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 12:44:00 -0800

*They Thought They Were Free : The Germans, 1933-45*
by Milton Mayer
Published: May 19th, 1966

I highly recommend reading the excerpt below from Mayer's book. One would think that it was written today, with full awareness of the obvious parallels to our current political situation and the intention to draw atttention to them. However, as I've noted above, the book was authored in 1966. The resemblances to the present day are uncanny - and disquieting. - Dorian

Musharraf calls for 'Muslim renaissance'

Ron — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 23:41:00 -0800

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has urged the heads of 50 Muslim countries to work out a strategy for a Muslim renaissance. The Daily Times of Pakistan reports that Mr. Musharraf, who made the speech at the Third Extraordinary Summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Mecca, also called on Islamic countries to ban groups that preach violence or commit terrorist acts in the name of Islam. He also called on the leaders present to make mandatory contributions to a fund for science and technology. ...

(BR) 'Fahrenheit 9/11' by Michael Moore

Debashish — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 23:50:00 -0800

Michael Moore's controversial documentary on George Bush Jr. was viewed in June 2004 at a Los Angeles theater by Sri Aurobindo Center members Dorian Schneidman, Keka Chakraborty and Debashish Banerji. Here are Debashish's notes on the movie. ...

The World Digital Library: "A Library for The New World"

Ron — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 06:33:00 -0800

..the time may be right for our country's delegation to consider introducing to the world body a proposal for the cooperative building of a World Digital Library. This would offer the promise of bringing people closer together by celebrating the depth and uniqueness of different cultures in a single global undertaking. ...

Interview: Dr Karan Singh re India Center in D.C., Talk re "The Auroville Experiment"

Ron — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 17:51:00 -0800

Dr Karan Singh, Deputy Leader of the Congress Party in the Rajya Sabha and the new president of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, is optimistic that during his tenure, the much-talked about India Center in Washington will finally become a reality. ... Dr Singh, who also currently serves as chairman of the Auroville Foundation -- a UNESCO-sponsored international community in South Asia where residents from over 30 countries and many states of India are trying a 'hands-on' experiment in spiritual and ecological harmony -- also delivered a lecture at the Asia Society in New York on 'An Alternative Approach to Resolving Sectarian and Communal Conflict: The Auroville Experiment.' He spoke to Managing Editor Aziz Haniffa recently..

What's cost to solve the world's major humanitanian problems?

Ron — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 03:05:00 -0800

Here's an intesting summary of an inteview with Ted Turner on the David Letterman show on Sept. 16, 2005:

How to stop Terrorism and where is the madness ?

Does democracy decrease terrorism?

Ron — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 12:32:00 -0700

Here's an interesting article on US strategy in Iraq:

A Lasting Peace?

It's by Eric, at the 'Total Information Awareness' blog.

"The dragon's tail," by Roger Anger, 'AV Today' - Sept.05

Ron — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 23:18:00 -0700

Our faith should be in a future where the values of the spirit and a new evolutionary emergence of a global mind uniting man and womankind will ultimately prevail over the forces of ignorance, terror and tyranny. The unity of nations would almost demand a new deﬁnition of nationhood ...