“As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities”.
Voltaire
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell
“Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident”
Arthur Schopenhauer
6:1 Chapter Summary:
This study of civilisation fleshes out some of the distinct problems inherent in applying a relatively sympathetic and intuitive account of a subject without the necessary epistemological transformations of the mindset. That is, to critique a mindset but at the same time ignore the fundamental differences of that mindset, which as I have shown is an extremely important consideration, is to run the risk of missing essential details that are inherent in the structural form of the cosmological mindset that informs the epistemology. This essay examines the nature of judgement and goes on to critique Coomaraswany’s essay “What is Civilisation” so as to expose the trap that many scholars Wilber and as will be shown, Plato to, fall into when attempting to address the nature of reality without address the cosmological construct of the informing mindset.
6:2 JUDGEMENT
From within the mindset of materialism, Judgement, Justification, Hierarchical value systems, all of these attributes are based on linear logic. Kant wrote at length about such issues in his ‘Critique on Judgement’ (Adams 1971) and in the course of pointing out the fact that judgement is subjective, as is taste, and the individual is really the only one to know what they have done, to whom or what their allegiance lies, and so on, as all actions are bound within a multidimensional web of personal and non personal, or local and global considerations, he continually hits the boundary of the materialist mindset, which allows no further extension as the mindset is limited and unable to expand into the very territories that philosophy attempts to negotiate. This issue identifies the very tensions that lie at the heart of all noble attempts to address ways and means of raising the human spirit and experience into the higher realms of virtuous living that all artists, philosophers, scientist and musicians have ultimately all aspired to.
The epistemological impasse that is the system and its constraints, attempt to defer to a form of relativism, or pluralism, as a politically correct attempt to allow human nature to express itself and be in this world with any potential for freedom, liberty, and the ideals upheld by this civilisation. Relativism, pluralism, multiculturalism, are politically correct ideas, these are the very goals of democratic governance and the ultimate goal of “universal human reason”. Reason is the intellectual process through which all action is justified whether it be “evil” through the doctrine of necessity, or philanthropic and virtuous to counterbalance the seemingly necessary acts of criminality.
This becomes a huge problem for the materialist, and in the light of political posturing towards globalisation and Western (English, American, Australian) dominion on this planet, it becomes critical that the structure is exposed for the impotent mindset that it is. There is no longer time to play out the continued assumption that everyone will eventually see reason, and realise that materialism is simply the way it is, (no stream of consciousness, no inspiration, no out of body experiences no ghosts, no entities, no angels, no nothing) and that somehow through all of the negating forces of control, subjugation, oppression and defence against the enemy of the State, whoever it may be, the higher virtues and ideals may emerge (out of the criminal mindset of justified bloodshed?). This objective hasn’t occurred in over 2,500 years of fighting a bloody battle for ‘democracy’ which entails obliterating the opponent or at least subjecting them to the laws of an authority, punishment, incarceration, torture all being tools of the trade so to speak.
This tautological process results in the remaining culture or supreme culture in global terms, maintaining a population that is passive, complacent, ignorant of the real machinations of the ‘games of warfare’ and inevitably highly malleable. We have a culture where many are medicated sometimes as young as three and four years old, for anomalous psychological behaviour. We are a culture that identifies a “normative” value and outside these parameters one can be categorised by an ever increasing list of anomalous “dysfunctions” to the extent that the ‘artist’ or ‘visionary’ can now be ‘diagnosed’ as ADD, ADHD, ODD, hypersensitive, autistic (artistic) (Williams 1998), aspergers, depressive, manic, obsessive, idiosyncratic, compulsive, anxious, agoraphobic, sociophobic, neurotic and so on, when previously one was simply considered ‘saturnian’ or having an artistic temperament ( Wittkower 1963).
Outside of a materialist mindset, these ‘conditions’ are responses to complex multidimensional phenomena. As a transceiver of information, the human being is subjected not only to information perceived by ‘ordinary’ means in the immediate locality of the perceiving self, that is, what is immediately experienced through the senses of the body, but depending on the level of sensitivity, the ability to be receptive, and the cognitive sensitivity to subtle energies, the potential to be aware and affected by uncleared thought forms in the environment and in the self, as well as those vibrations projected by all of the sentient beings around you, across space and time, opens the field of ‘normality’ to a completely extended area. One of the most distressing experiences that I have personally had, was the sensing within a few days preceding the recent tsunami. Whilst I did not perceive details, I was compelled to write to a friend that I had never before sensed such a great uneasiness and concern for the planet that the beings around me were on complete alert. Being sensitive and open for most of my life, I learnt to ‘dumb’ down my ability to perceive, so as to maintain a ‘normal’ existence, and often ignore, sometimes to my detriment, the ‘guidance’ that is there. I have for the past decade worked with people to process complex informational matrixes that are causing their own lives to be dysfunctional. The multidimensional realm is vastly different to the reduced reality that humans are forced to exist in by virtue of the dominant mindset. Anomalous psychological dysfunctions are often ill perceived and the propensity to suppress brain function chemically in order to deal with unacceptable behaviour does not seek to heal the issues plaguing the subject.
To assume that there can be objective judgment against another human being let alone a system whereby judgement of mere aesthetics is concerned is highly foolish and relies upon a false structure based on values and levels of authority. It is a Kafkaesque debacle of diabolic proportions.
In Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm, by George Orwell, each of these novels, whilst speaking in the language of fiction, reveal complex and deep truths about the reality that we are negotiating. As reality plays out the precognitive scenarios that these narratives revealed so many decades ago, one needs to ask the question about the potential for such ‘inspiration’ and in turn the potential to transform the perceived future. To reduce fiction to a meaningless narrative is to reduce the revelatory potential inherent in human creativity, perception and in imagination, and in doing so humans passively become victims of fate. To judge the revelation as if the author is completely responsible is also misunderstanding the complexity of the human mind as transceiver of information. The mindset, the social, cultural, environmental and personal experiences will inform the artist and whatever epistemological constructs he is attached to will be the filter through which the inflow of inspired creativity is perceived.
In Nick Zangwill’s critique of Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgement’ his assessment of ‘relativism’ exposes the limitations of the materialist constraints.
“Before we move on, it may be worth saying something about “relativism”, according to which no judgments of taste are really better than others. It is common for people to say, “There is no right and wrong about matters of taste.” Or people will express the same thought by saying that beauty is “relative” to individual judgment, or even that it is “socially relative.” Such relativism about value of all sorts is part of the Zeitgeist of a certain recent Western cultural tradition. It is part of the intellectual air, in certain quarters. And in particular, many intellectuals have expressed a dislike of the idea that judgments of taste really have any normative claim, as if that would be uncouth or oppressive. However, if we are describing our thought as it is, not how some think it ought to be, then it is important that philosophers should be persistent and insist -- in the face of the Zeitgeist -- that normativity is a necessary condition of the judgment of taste. Two points ought to embarrass the relativist.
Firstly, people who say this kind of thing are merely theorizing. In the case of judgments of beauty, relativist theory is wildly out of step with practice. As with moral relativism, one can virtually always catch the professed relativist about judgments of beauty making and acting on non-relative judgments of beauty -- for example, in their judgments about music, nature and everyday household objects. Relativists do not practice what they preach. Secondly, what is it that drives people to this implausible relativism, which is so out of line with their practice?
What do they see as attractive in it? One thing is perhaps a perceived connection with tolerance or anti-authoritarianism. But this is upside-down. For if ‘it's all relative’ and no judgment is better than any other, then relativists put their judgments wholly beyond criticism, and they cannot err. Only those who think that there is a right and wrong in judgment can modestly admit that they might be wrong. What looks like an ideology of tolerance is, in fact, the very opposite. Thus relativism is hypocritical and it is intolerant. The time has come when the Zeitgeist should give up the ghost. Move over geist, your zeit is up!” (Zangwill 2003)
The materialist relies on there being a consistent normative fixed way of being in this world. However, what is indicative in work like this, and indeed in the greater part of English philosophy are emotional diatribes that relish in their cleverness at pointing out how seemingly ridiculous anyone else is, who cannot see so clearly as themselves. Zangwill is right about the zeitgeist, but doesn’t understand what the zeitgeist is. He assumes that it is information ordinarily perceived, that is through the TV or from books and journals. The idea that one could be subject to a global informational matrix that is so complex it makes the internet look like a mere technological simulacrum!
His thought is superficial flatland thought, assuming that the zeit geist is a product of some superficial fashion, unaware that the creative process has always been the sphere where synchronicity and the collective consciousness have informed the real world(Waddington, 1969; Waldo-Schwartz 1975) as to think like this, because his mindset would not allow him to entertain the thought that there could even be a collective consciousness, that mind penetrates to all things from all things; that the zeitgeist is feeling and tuning into the global mind; that intuition does come from streaming consciousness, open and receptive, and so on. He assumes that relativity is antiauthoritarian and intolerant, and in this statement he assumes exposes the hierarchical value placed on authority itself, as if the very potential limitations or not, for an individual to perceive symbolically is no two-way exchange. How often do I read a poem and perceive a different dimension of its truth than in a previous reading? If I were to assume that the meaning of the poem was limited to the interpretation of an authority, I would not be capable of witnessing the very ‘aliveness’ of the work itself. Nor would I be able to appreciate the synchronous meaning field that the poem may offer a reader in a personal spacetime conjunction of informational matrixes. This is assumed to be the illusory territory of reading things into things, an assumption which follows from a mindset that fails to see the interconnections between all things.
It is important to consider the nature of judgement however as whole. If we extend this philosophical territory, out of the safe arena of valuing objects in a limited field of materialist aesthetics, and into the arena of judgement of human action, then materialism can only lead to fascism. It relies on the deferment of personal judgement to that of the authority or the government and assumes an overarching allegiance to the government, and to the laws that the government issues. The personal, private and subjective domain is then treated objectively and truths which are multidimensional, transformative through the parameters of local and global meaning, are subverted to the two-dimensional perception of a dichotomous code of judgement. Ones’ actions, for example protesting against violations of basic human rights, which are the product of an increasingly fascist state, will be judged as a crime against the state. Subversive actions through aesthetic means have always been present in western art practice, and to restrict its value to an authority based purely upon an aesthetic of beauty limits the transcendental nature of meaning as a mirror of the human condition. One of the value of Art is the very value that we place in its ability to reflect back to us the very things that are perverted in the culture itself and to foresee the impending future.
6:3: WHAT IS CIVILISATION?
In Ananda Coomaraswamy’s essay ‘What is Civilisation’, (1989) he points out through the rationale of Plato found in his ‘Republic’ that ‘man will be a ‘just’ man when each of his members performs its own appropriate task and is subject to the ruling Reason that exercises forethought on behalf of the whole man’ that the responsibility for a ‘just’ whole is every individual’s responsibility for the part that they play within that whole. Plato is writing from a perspective that realises the various components of civilization as a hierarchy of sovereign rule and ordered structure that includes labour, ownership, possession, military defence, and so on. In order to maintain the equilibrium of this whole, the hierarchy is necessary, and the individual’s actions fundamental in the process of this ecosystem functioning at the highest possible ideal state. This fundamental structure is echoed throughout the words of every statesman who has endeavoured to anchor the ideal qualities of virtue, justice, freedom, tolerance, and truth. The dialectics that Plato was working from, as I have already shown was a complex dialectic of higherdimensional awareness that is Klein bottle logic. It is this form of logic that Hegel and Marx re-emphasised in their own dealings with the drive of civilization and all that is entailed.
The question, however remains, what is the totality of the civilization? Within the systems put forward by Plato, and Socrates before him, the totality was the expanse of the civilized world, contained as it where, by the identification and function within its limits.
For contemporary authors, the totality is all humans regardless of the difference between mindsets. This is a very important issue, as the difference between mindsets is, as I have argued, the difference between a superficial reductionist, flatland analysis as opposed to the multidimensional. In his attack on ecofeminists and ecomasculinists, Ken Wilber suggests, all societies are considered to have an economy, and that the ‘noble’ savage is an illusion. (Wilber 2000) However this non-differential analysis of societies fails to appreciate the extreme difference between mindsets. The ‘economy’, if it can be called an economy at all, of indigenous societies is not at all like the economy of the ‘civilised’ cultures. Before Marx, there was no true theory of capital. The classical notion of economics did not come close to understanding the complexities of capital, and assumed that there had always been a notion of possession and money since the ‘beginning’. Through Marx, this idea was completely destroyed as he identified the radical distinctions between a tribal level of relations of proportion of exchange, that is, supply and demand at a tribal level. (Johansen) The added issue of prohibitions against mining the earth is equally ignored by contemporary analysts. The failure to analyse these constraints, renders their analysis reductive and superficial; what remains is a ‘vulgar’ economics (Johansen 2006).
Defence, possession, and the justification of all action necessary to preserve that which is contained within the ‘whole’ of civilisation, are attributes of a system that is realized through superficial analysis. The totality of the dialectical considerations refers only to the civilisation in question, and all else remains marginalised, beyond the boundary of discrete territory.
All that is on the outside, the enemy through which one justifies the need for military control, the territories and possessions that have the potential to be taken, and/or destroyed, is identified as the threat of an external agent that would pull apart, dia-bolos, that which is the object of all of the laws and the system that the totality functions through and preserves. The preservation of the State, and its potential to grow in territory and wealth becomes the object of nationalistic pride. This self adulation and service to self is required to justify the diabolic actions perpetuated against the ‘other’. It is a superficial, primal, reductive, and simplistic system that has adulated a reductive science to support it.
Coomaraswarmy does not realize this foundational problem concerning the structure of the ‘logic’ of reasoning civilization. He identifies the ‘Indian philosophy of work’ as ‘identical’ to the structure that Plato outlines in the ‘Republic’, a structure based on ‘ideals’ that divinely ordered. It could be said that all religions and philosophies strive to address this very issue. All idealisations whether it be to the ‘socialist’ ideal, to ‘nationalist’ ideals to ‘Christian’ ideals or to any other idealisation are reductive and superficial without a higher order logic that identifies the differential analysis of the real without subverting to dichotomous bifurcations.
It is also ‘true’ that the ultimate ideals of the virtuous state rely on the virtuous action of the individual. As negotiation towards the totality that is globalization, it is imperative that social and political posturings are raised into a differential logic, to meet the complexities of the whole as a dynamic form, and not perpetuate the discretions of a system that separates the state from the enemy of the state. It is a pathetic attribute of western logic to maintain a binary, dichotomous and superficial system of analysis and assume that there could be only two alternatives: right, wrong; good, bad; state, enemy of the state; male, female; night, day. A black and white world reduces life to a game board of chess, and that is the most tragic truth that the politically globalised powers that be assume.
6:4 DIFFERENTIAL KLEIN BOTTLE LOGIC AND THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL ARENA
Plato’s universe was a Kleinbottle. As a holographic form, the Kleinbottle itself is the universal fractal. At every level of reality, paradox logic exists. By applying a differential, Kleinbottle logic, to the structural geometrisation of the object of this analysis, that is a geometry of a civilization, the complexities of globalisation may be realised as a dynamic whole, and not as the superficial flatland construct that prevails with it inherent supremacists and fascist tendencies. The Kleinbottle is a paradoxical topology. It is a bounded finite shape that is boundless and infinite. Its boundary contains itself. The infinitude of the unified inner and outer, contained and not contained whole is a dynamic negentropic perpetually recreating structure. It is transboundary. It is transtropic. It is the undivided universe that David Bohm invoked. And from what I have read concerning the indigenous attitude to territory, (Christie, 1992; Bell 1998) there are no such reductive distinctions concerning the atomistic categorisations of things and territorial boundaries.
In the following quote Micheal Christie reveals a personal crisis as he attempts to employ a western ontology onto the aboriginal reality. The situation he describes concerns the political dilemma facing the local Aboriginal council that had to deal with an area referred to as Yolngu land, a traditional area to some families that now included distantly related groups:
“A name was needed for the council that would keep the state government happy and at the same time provide a paradigm for legitimating the continued presence of, and eliciting the cooperation of all the different groups who had been brought there from their traditional land in the surrounding area, during the mission days. The name they fixed upon was Dhanbul- morning star people. The local landowners were custodians of the morning star ceremony (they don’t however ‘own’ it). On their land is the point from which the spirits call up the morning star, and many other clans of their moiety sing to the morning star, and their connections with it. And every Yolngu of other clans of their moiety sing to the morning star, and their connections with it. And every Yolngu of the opposing moiety would be either a daughter or a mother to morning star holders. (Across moieties, these would be mother-child (“Yothu-yindi”) relationships. These ‘children (yothu) and ‘mother’ (yindi) can be either male or female. They are the custodians of the other moieties land and totems.) Dhanbul was a name which would call up allegiances from all the newcomers under the focus of the morning star. The name Dhanbul registers the Yirrkala council not by defining it as bounded geographically thus excluding some other landowners, but rather by foregoing a name which can link all people to this area by a radial category, through a local focus.
I failed as I struggled mentally to arrange all Yolngu matha names into hierarchy. I assumed for example, that the distinction between ‘plant’ and ‘animal’ is a ‘natural’ one, an ontological distinction, a reality quite independent of human attempts to make sense of the world. But there is no Yolngu matha word for either ‘plant’ or ‘animal’. In fact there are very few names at all which divide the world up into the sorts of macro categories which English speakers imagine are really real- a difficult fact to account for if we believe that the world is obviously and inherently structured, that hierarchy is a reality independent of human reasoning so obvious to any eye that all languages spoken by intelligent people could reasonably be expected to encode it…..Basicness of categorisation has everything to do with culturally constrained matters of human psychology: ease of perception, memory, learning, naming and use, and nothing to do with any proposed objective status external to human beings. Ultimately, if we do end up with a hierarchical reality, it is very likely because we have built one, not because we have discovered one. And we are left to ask whose interests the building of hierarchy- in science and society- one legitimises the other- may serve. (Christie 1992)
A civil, social and political construct that bounds the state through its territory, in a manner that is discrete and separative, is a confused and ill formed limitation that reduces Plato’s notion of civilization, albeit perfectly reasonable. It is reasonable as the issues of totalitarianism, defence and possession, have already been inherited as the norm. It is reasonable to condemn the practices that are seen to be evil, manipulative, and destructive and a threat to the state. It is not reasonable to uphold the higher moral ground on one hand: the righteous hand, and apply the doctrine of necessity on the other hand, the sinister hand, when the doctrine of necessity orders citizens of the states and officials alike to perform actions that are of the lowest moral ground. It is justifiable if the territorial issues and very structure through the civilization is formed, is formed out of defence and preservation (conservation) of the foundations that the very concept of civilization is reduced to.
However, it is this that leads ultimately, when the state strives for global dominion: an objective inherent in the ideal for freedom through sovereign control, and in doing so threatens other states that equally function through the justification of a doctrine of necessity to preserve their own state, to totalitarian and fascist objectives. It is an end that is inevitable. In so being, the very object of ones ideals, the virtues of human aspiration, are reduced or destroyed, the doctrine of necessity invoked and justified, and the guilt that is held within the heart of all just and honourable men on both sides of the boundary of the states, is absolved through great deeds executed by the righteous hand, through acts of philanthropy, civil service and commercial deeds that support the totality of the state.
The very schizophrenic nature of the contemporary mindset, has its roots in the earliest formulations of civilization.
The right hand is at odds with the left hand.
In such a reductive and superficial system of (un)civilisation, justification of those deeds performed with the left hand (through the doctrine of necessity), assumes that there are two levels of truth and two levels of ideal, which resonates with Whitehead who said, “all truth is half truth”. On the personal or local level an evil deed is only evil if it not in service to the state, it becomes a good deed on the global level of the whole. Bad can be good, depending at what level you wish to view it. In such a system of corruption and criminality, the whole is either the self or the family or the state. One justifies ones actions according the good of the self, of the family or of state. It depends upon where ones loyalty lies. Does one serve the self, the family or the state? If one’s loyalty is with the self, then all justifiable acts of evil are committed through the need to preserve the self and the self’s possessions. If ones’ loyalty is the family, then one may sacrifice the honour (admitted by the state) of the self, in order to preserve the family, a situation which is well known to many of the convicts who stole out the need to feed their families thereby surrendering the honour offered by state as their allegiance is to their family, in a situation where the state would necessarily allow the poor to starve. Many of these ‘convicts’ formed the foundations of the new state of White Australia. One may die to save their children or their loved ones’, and in having one’s loyalty entrenched in the family, one is subject at times to act against the laws of the state, for mere survival. If one’s loyalty lies with the State, then one’s actions will be oriented towards the preservation of the States ideals, and will therefore act against the family or the self in order to preserve the integrity or simply serve the State, however corrupt. The Chinese ‘Cultural’ Revolution influenced children who turned against their own parents in service to the new state in this way. (Revolution 2006)
Coomaraswarmy tells us that ‘what must never be forgotten is that all ‘our’ powers are not our ‘own, but delegated powers and ministries through which the royal Power is ‘exercised’; the powers of the soul ‘are only the names of His acts. It is not for them to serve their own or one another’s self-interest- of which the only result will be the tyranny of the majority, and a city divided against itself, man against man and class against class- but to serve Him whose sole interest is that of the common body politic.’ The entire notion of civilization rests upon serving a God, having a sovereign power ordained by God, and being in an ideal state of Godliness. (Coomaraswarmy 1989)
If, however, the mindset reduces the human to an automaton without anything but physical processes to account for consciousness, reduced to a victim of the physical processes themselves, to instincts and automatic reflexes, any true form of civilization, as suggested by Plato and Coomaraswamy which relies upon an ideal state of Godliness, is impossible as it is not attainable through the mindset of materialism, as history shows us.
Justice, reason and necessity, therefore, are the powers of justification determined by the authority to which ones moral allegiance is framed. If the court does not believe in the immanence and transcendence of God, does not believe in Gods’ creation as the totality of all that is in existence as Plato’s God does, and indeed does not believe in the intelligence of matter and of the whole world as an integrated whole, but only believes in human intelligence that is constrained by physical brain function, then God is not in this world. And this world is reduced to a game between the forces of good and evil however they are perceived.
In pursuing his question “What is Civilization” Coomaraswarmy fails to see the complexities of these issues. He identifies with Plato’s assumption that the individual’s task is better done through that which is his chosen vocation rather than to move into another vocation and attempt to work beyond his means. He considers that ultimately the ideal society is a ‘kind of co-operative workshop’. In associating this with Indian philosophy as ‘identical’ he justifies a cast system, a linear hierarchy, and states that ‘one should never abandon his inherited vocation’.
This is the nature of the beast. Be it Christian, Hindu, Moslem socialist or fascist. This is a criminal mindset, and this is reasoned as human nature. Humans are reasoned as being no more than beasts. The doctrine of ‘Evil and selfish Genes’ and ‘Evil Memes’ (Dawkins 1976; Dennit 1991 and Bloom1995) assumes this to be the natural condition of human beings and presupposes the doctrine of Darwinian evolutionary theory as a theoretical fact, a notion that today is satisfactorily over-ruled by the ‘New Life Sciences’ of Rupert Sheldrake (1987) and his notion of morphogenesis, and of David Bohm’s sound interpretation of Quantum physics (1952), and his negentropic cosmology of undivided wholeness(1993).
It is preposterous to reduce the extraordinariness of the human being, to such a state of materialism and even more extraordinary that variations on this theme have been maintained for millennium. It is the imposition of an unnatural structure that serves the few who maintain authority over the masses which has imprisoned the human being, and disables him from rising into his ideal state.
It is this imposed structure that lies at the basis of Nietzsche’s quest in ‘beyond good and evil, and forms the foundation through which the Postmodern’s attempted rather confusingly, to address the ‘other’, the marginalized, the externalized, objectification, the grand narrative, the enemy and so on. (Cahoone 1996) The Klein bottle logic, is a logic of unity and wholeness. It is a differential logic. It is dialectical. It is paradox. There is no enemy, but the enemy within.
In a lower dimensional structure, the dichotomies of good and evil are inverted when they shift from local to global. There will always be a bifurcation between opposites if the structure in which these opposites are invoked, is limited to a bounded shape that separates and excludes whatever is outside of it. If we just take for example the tension between Christians Jews and Moslems, the similarities and differences are very complex. All three religions are global religions. All three religions believe in a wrathful God (which may well be the same god). Jews believe that their prophet is yet to come. Christians believe that Jesus is not only the prophet that the Jews are waiting on, but believe that he is in fact God, and that he is coming again, while Moslems believe in the life of all of the great prophets of the world, their own personal prophet, Mohamed, who came after Jesus, has provided for them, the final statement of truth. All are willing to allow their own citizens to die in the cause against evil. All project evil upon the enemy of their state/religion, in the name of their God, for the preservation of their people and for their possessions. As the Jews and Christians are politically united, the issues facing us today are not at all dissimilar to the ancient struggles of the brothers of the righteous and the brothers of darkness described in the war chronicles of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Old Testament, both fighting under the banners of their God, both identifying themselves as the true righteous and both identifying their enemy as the evil ones. Both are prepared to commit atrocities, indeed, to ignore the commandments of their God and Religion, in order to carry out God’s wishes. All reduce the ideal to the real, and doing so dissociate themselves from personal revelation, deferring their acts to the authority who is assumed to be the only one gifted with revelatory abilities, be he a priest, or a military leader.
The bifurcation on all levels is between good and evil, on a local level, all are prepared to perform evil deeds that are justified for the good of the state (global good). All civilizations rely economically, politically and socially on the identification between the self as the righteous and the other as the enemy. The logic is flatland and the civilizations perpetuating such a logic are flatland civilizations, reduced to function from the lowest common denominator of a criminal mindset.
6:5 UNCIVILISATION
In citing Dr Schweitzer’s suggestion that ‘it is very hard to carry to completion a colonization which means at the same time a true civilization’….. The other is always seen as requiring assistance to be elevated into ‘Truth’ as it is assumed that the “primitive”, the Neolithic (in terms of earlier civilising missions), the non-literate have far less intelligence as it is assumed that technology is naturally evolving development indicative of intelligence. The same reduction is imposed as was imposed through the notion of economy. There is no consideration of a cultural mindset where everything is endowed with Godliness to the point that mining is simply out of the question, and therefore economies and literacy, and technologies are limited accordingly. The civilised ancients including Plato and the Greeks would be considered to have radically reduced intelligence compared to the intelligence of modern men, due to the accumulation of knowledge, facts and the intellectual dexterity exemplified by the complex technologies that are threatening the extinction of all. Very evolved indeed! Schweitzer continues: ‘The machine age brought upon mankind conditions of existence which made the possession of civilization difficult.’ Coomaraswamy considers
“if indeed our industrialization and trade practice are the mark of our uncivilisation, how dare we propose to help others ‘to attain a condition of well-being’? The ‘burden’ is of our own making and bows our own shoulders first. Are we to say that because of ‘economic determination’ we are ‘impotent’ to shake it off and stand up straight? (Coomaraswarmy 1989 )
He continues to address the issues in the same vein as is evident in the work of Emerson and numerous others who advocate the Christian (albeit Masonic) path of virtuous aspiration in seemingly gracious and humanitarian ways, all assuming to assist the ‘primitive’ and ‘barbaric’ alike into the Christian ‘civilised’ fold, by resorting to reform.
6:6 REFORMS
‘Reform what is deformed’, is for Coomaraswarmy an appeal to ‘take account of an original ‘form’. He again invokes Plato in the words ‘form of our city of God is one ‘that exists only in words, and nowhere on earth, but is, it seems, laid up in heaven for whomsoever will to contemplate, and he does so, to inhabit; it can be seen only by the true philosophers who bend their energies towards those studies that nourish rather soul than body and never allow themselves to be carried away by the congratulations of the mob or without measure to increase their wealth, the source of measureless evils, but rather fix their eyes upon their own interior politics never aiming to be politicians in the city of the their birth,’
And here is the true problem. In a civilization that upholds Christianity with one hand and materialism with the other, where is the ‘inflowing stream of consciousness’ the ‘inspiration’ and the very will to ‘contemplate’ unless we reinstate the full and true potential of the human being as Plato’s cosmology and the cosmology of the ancients of the non-literate cultures, of the barbarian, and therefore of the primitive peoples in need of civilization!!!
Plato’s world is a world that realizes the ideal truth of former cultures as the ideal form, yet is seduced or imposed upon by the superficial rendering of such an ideal form, where the magnificence of civil ingenuity, intellectual dexterity, and the potential for the materialist mindset to realize and transcend its limitations, just as Hobbes did, just as Emerson does, just as sustainable ecologists do, and just as all who adulate the being of art (technology) as opposed to the art of being (ontology) as the means through which transcendence will be achieved. Idealism itself becomes reduced to a cartoon superficiality, and we are left with discontinuous logic, tautological arguments, and a semantic, indeed philosophical gridlock.
Coomaraswarmy ends his noble essay with a contemplation of Plato’s proposition “to entrust the government of cities to ‘the uncorrupted remnant of true philosophers who now bear the stigma of uselessness’, or even to those who are now in power ‘if by some divine inspiration as genuine love of true philosophy should take possession of them’: and altogether right when he maintains that ‘no city ever can be happy unless its outlines have been drawn by draughtsman making use of the divine patter, (republic) that of the City of God that is in Heaven and ‘within you.’?”
For all of the intellectual evolution, and accumulation of knowledge that has occurred in the 2500 years since Plato, we are still struggling with the very issues that maintain ignorance, destroy ideals and render civilization impotent. Superficial Gods, superficial religions, superficial ideals, and superficial knowledge then and now: and the roots of civilizations discontents? Civilisation itself. Simplistic reductions of complex reality, embedded in the very bedrock of an economy of possession, and a doctrine of necessity is a justification for a free license to abuse the very privilege of being human; it is the reason why transdisciplinary research is required to break down the barriers that knowledge has place around wisdom, is required to traverse all forbidden territories, is required to reinstate true philosophy and is required to do everything in ones own capacity to reform the distortions of a deformation of what it is to be human.