Thursday, December 31, 2009

At the end of the 19th century, Christian theologian Ernst Troeltsch proclaimed that the sun was setting on Christianity, and poet Matthew Arnold declared that in the future poetry would replace religion. As Wilson (The Vicar of Sorrows) points out in this splendid book, the 19th century provided the context not only for theories of God's demise but also for the numerous challenges that political thinkers, scientists and artists posed to Christian belief. Yet, as he notes, while the battles between faith and doubt were raging, church attendance did not decline but remained constant. The famous debates between Thomas Huxley, Darwin's "bulldog," and Bishop Wilberforce contributed to an atmosphere of optimism about the perfectibility of humankind and the world. Wilson traces the development of this rise of unbelief from the 18th century to the early 20th century. He contends that Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with its contempt of Christianity's "highest ideals," and David Hume's skeptical Dialogues Concerning National Religion, which challenges the very possibility of the existence of the supernatural, provide the groundwork for the demise of belief in the 19th century. Wilson explores some of the most explicit instances of the century's intellectual challenges to faith: George Eliot's translations of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity and David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined; Darwin's evolutionary formulations calling into question the idea of a special creation; Marx and Engels's charge that bourgeois institutions used religion to enslave people and make them weak; William James's reading of various religious states in The Varieties of Religious Experience as psychological states of mind. Eliot's translations alone introduced into England both Strauss's contentions that the life of Jesus was clothed in myth pictures like the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection and Feuerbach's claim that God was nothing more than a projection of humanity's wishes. Wilson examines also how the Catholic Church responded to the Modernist thought of Alfred Loisy, who imported much of the skepticism of the 19th century into his religious writings and challenged conventional Catholic teachings on the Church and the Bible. With passionate prose and a lively style, Wilson narrates a first-rate intellectual and religious history.

Publisher's Note
A.N. Wilson presents a magisterial, colorful narrative that illuminates the central tragedy of the 19th century--the death of God (or man's faith in Him).
Industry reviews
"Religion for him is not only a subject for intellectual speculation (most recently in books about Paul and Jesus) but also, obviously, for painful self-examination. Like the figures in this book, he appears to be God-tormented." New York Times - Gertrude Himmelfarb (06/15/1999) "This is a formidable and important book, which should, all being well, be read in a hundred years' time. The death of God is an event with which we all live and about which millions of words have been written. But, as far as I know, only A. N. Wilson has looked closely at the scene of His demise--inside the tortured imaginations of the largely nineteenth-century clerics, poets, artists and philosophers whose anguish so accurately prefigures, indeed pre-empts, our own." Appleyard "...[A]n enjoyable book of first-class intellectual gossip." Rowe "GOD'S FUNERAL is a very rich and fascinating intellectual history, and A.N. Wilson has, once again, done a first-rate, bang-up job. it is a most commendable book, well worth your time." Catalano

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

A beauty and joy that radiates even as she discusses atrocities

Previous:	Conference Proceedings: Fundamentalism and the Future
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Arundati Roy on sham Democracy in India

by Rich on Tue 29 Sep 2009 06:38 PM PDT | Permanent Link

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....

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Re: Arundati Roy on sham Democracy in India

by adam pogioli on Wed 30 Sep 2009 03:23 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Roy has claimed elsewhere that appreciation of beauty is impossible after all the recent war and terrorism. Yet what stands out in her is a beauty and joy that radiates even as she discusses these atrocities that must hit so close to her heart. Reply

Re: Re: Arundati Roy on sham Democracy in India

by Tony Clifton on Wed 30 Sep 2009 08:39 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Thanks for your comments Adam. It seems like Arundati is riffing off Ardono's statement that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric..

Re: Re: Re: Re: Conference Proceedings: Fundamentalism and the Future
Debashish Science, Culture and Integral Yoga http://dev.kowmudi.com/sciy/www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2009/9/29/4336911.html

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested

SABDA - Sri Aurobindo and World Literature Goutam Ghosal

This book is "another effort to show how Sri Aurobindo may be studied with reference to the great Western writers, most of whom are romantics in a special sense." These short comparative essays "seek to clarify the Western tradition behind Sri Aurobindo who is returning again to the West, after a hundred years, not just through his philosophy, but also through his poetics...". The comparative studies cover a wide range of Western poets such as Blake, Wilde, Emerson, Poe, Baudelaire, Petrarch among others.

***

To Strive... to Seek... to Find

Bijoya Sen Gupta

But never to yield... that’s what makes human beings transcend their mortality. In sadhana as in business, a sincere aspiration and a commitment to a larger vision is what makes ordinary man evolve into Ubermench... ask Somerset Maugham

Many many years ago, as a young school girl, I read a wonderful story by Somerset Maugham. It was called The Lotus Eater. It was about a man called Thomas Wilson who decided to place his dream, of a carefree life in the beautiful island of Capri, so well within his reach that in the end it destroyed his character. And turned him into a vegetable.

The story, a modern parable of sorts, has stayed with me ever since. Lotus eating is probably the most debilitating disability that plagues us - as much in business as in our personal lives and in sadhana. [...]

Tata’s vision in business is in many ways an echo of the kind of education that Sri Aurobindo and The Mother have spoken about, on one occasion the Mother says, “An aimless life is always a miserable life. Every one of you should have an aim. But do not forget that on the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life. Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others.”

For the sadhak, that aim is a sincere aspiration, a call to the divine consciousness. For the enlightened entrepreneur it is a commitment to his vision. But ultimately it’s the search that makes man what he is. Forever aiming and aspiring for something bigger than himself. It’s what Alfred Tennyson talked about in his poem Ulysses... “to strive, to seek, to find but not to yield.”

The author, a Kolkata-based freelance writer is on the editorial board of Fourth Dimension Inc

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Both Mazzini and Gandhi overprivileged the role of religion in politics

Gandhi's Diagnostic Approach Rethought – by Margaret Chatterjee

2 May 2008 ... Few scholars match Margaret Chatterjee's outstanding contribution to Gandhi studies. We are all in her debt, for example, for her Gandhi’s Religious Thought (1983) ... Antony Copley

Firstly the text addresses some of the non-Indian influences on Gandhi, with special reference to the Russian and in the shape of Mazzini, the Italian. The big idea he learnt from the Russians, and this embraced both Madame Blavatsky and Tolstoy, and one that he could not have learnt from his own culture, was brotherhood.

One completely new name she introduces is that of Timofei Bondariev, a peasant who converted to Judaism during the pogroms of the 1880s and set up Jewish agrarian communities. Was this the origin of Gandhi’s idea of bread labour ? She also speculates that Gandhi may have taken the idea of the oceanic circle from Peter Kropotkin. Had Henry Salt taken him to hear the Russian anarchist lecture in London ? Of course Gandhi as a religious man differed from the Russian populists with their secular often atheist agenda, but there was much in common in the ways they addressed the needs of the Russian and Indian peasantry and there still remains a great book to be written on the comparative histories of those peasantries.

Mazzini as a man of God is far closer to Gandhi. The fascination of early Indian nationalism, above all in Bengal, with the Italian is of course well known – I traced it myself in an essay Congress and the Risorgimento: A Comparative Study of Nationalism, published in The Indian National Congress: Centenary Hindsights edited by D A Low (OUP1988) – but Chatterjee rightly reminds us that Mazzini looked beyond the nation to ‘the good of all’. My concern is whether both Mazzini and Gandhi overprivileged the role of religion in politics. Chatterjee also wryly acknowledges that modern Indian admirers of Gramsci use just the same Gramscian critique of Mazzini’s failure to endorse a genuine social revolution in Italy to fault Gandhi’s to do the same in India.

Chatterjee now turns to the more metaphysical aspects of Gandhi’s thought and in highly original chapters explores his attitudes towards vows, deception and war. This is where his readiness to compromise comes under review. Gandhi clearly was wedded to the taking of vows – think of those to his mother, to brahmacharyaor celibacy, to what was to prove to be the birth of satyagraha in the Empire theatre in Johannesburg in 1906.

I detect some ambiguity here. Curiously Gandhi was very impressed by Charles Bradlaugh’s refusal to take a vow except on his own terms when elected an MP and even attended the funeral of this outspoken atheist. Yet he was less than sympathetic to Charles Andrews who rued the day he had taken a vow to believe in the 39 articles on becoming an Anglican priest. When it comes to Gandhi’s attitudes to war, she speculates that he may have come up with the idea of ‘a moral equivalent to war’ in nonviolence from William James.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Prosperity and abundance unerringly find true believers

Christianity and the crash from The Immanent Frame In the December 2009 issue of The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin added to the ongoing debate over the causes of the current economic downturn by casting light on the role played by the prosperity gospel---a strain of Christian teaching tens of millions of believers strong, which proclaims that an unfaltering faith in God will lead to monetary and other material blessings in this lifetime. In light of the questions raised and conclusions put forth in Rosin's article, we asked a group of esteemed scholars and journalists about the relationship between contemporary Christianity and Americans’ economic attitudes, behaviors, and notions of responsibility. We are pleased to offer their responses below.

America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.

by Hanna Rosin

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.”

The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”

The Climate of History: Four Theses by Dipesh Chakrabarty

By debbanerji Posthuman Destinies

As the crisis gathered momentum in the last few years, I realized that all my readings in theories of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies, and postcolonial criticism over the last twenty-five years, while enormously useful in studying globalization, had not really prepared me for making sense of this planetary conjuncture within which humanity finds itself today. The change of mood in globalization analysis may be seen by comparing Giovanni Arrighi’s masterful history of world capitalism, The Long Twentieth Century (1994), with his more recent Adam Smith in Beijing (2007), which, among other things, seeks to understand the implications of the economic rise of China. The first book, a long meditation on the chaos internal to capitalist economies, ends with the thought of capitalism burning up humanity “in the horrors (or glories) of the escalating violence that has accompanied the liquidation of the Cold War world order.” It is clear that the heat that burns the world in Arrighi’s narrative comes from the engine of capitalism and not from global warming.

By the time Arrighi comes to write Adam Smith in Beijing, however, he is much more concerned with the question of ecological limits to capitalism. That theme provides the concluding note of the book, suggesting the distance that a critic such as Arrighi has traveled in the thirteen years that separate the publication of the two books.7 If, indeed, globalization and global warming are born of overlapping processes, the question is, How do we bring them together in our understanding of the world?

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Vico, Croce, Collingwood, & Carr

The Climate of History: Four Theses by Dipesh Chakrabarty

By debbanerji Posthuman Destinies

We could begin with the old Viconian-Hobbesian idea that we, humans, could have proper knowledge of only civil and political institutions because we made them, while nature remains God’s work and ultimately inscrutable to man. “The true is identical with the created: verum ipsum factum” is how Croce summarized Vico’s famous dictum.11 Vico scholars have sometimes protested that Vico did not make such a drastic separation between the natural and the human sciences as Croce and others read into his writings, but even they admit that such a reading is widespread.12

This Viconian understanding was to become a part of the historian’s common sense in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It made its way into Marx’s famous utterance that “men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please” and into the title of the Marxist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe’s well-known book, Man Makes Himself. 13 Croce seems to have been a major source of this distinction in the second half of the twentieth century through his influence on “the lonely Oxford historicist” Collingwood who, in turn, deeply influenced E. H. Carr’s 1961 book, What Is History? which is still perhaps one of the best-selling books on the historian’s craft.14

Croce’s thoughts, one could say, unbeknown to his legatees and with unforeseeable modifications, have triumphed in our understanding of history in the postcolonial age. Behind Croce and his adaptations of Hegel and hidden in Croce’s creative misreading of his predecessors stands the more distant and foundational figure of Vico.15 The connections here, again, are many and complex. Suffice it to say for now that Croce’s 1911 book, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico, dedicated, significantly, to Wilhelm Windelband, was translated into English in 1913 by none other than Collingwood, who was an admirer, if not a follower, of the Italian master.

Social democracy is just as empty as neoliberalism

cruelty in Gibbon from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

Sure, it’s a good idea to be suspicious of naive ideas about the progress of the human race. However, there are always a few areas in which we can be pretty certain that progress has in fact occurred… Thanks to Pasteur I was not dead of rabies last summer, to give just one example.

Another example is surely the declining use of cruelty in human affairs. The most gut-wrenching scenes described today before judges in The Hague are fairly unimaginative atrocities compared with the standard operating procedure of most of the monarchs Gibbon discusses. Among other things, it was always unlucky to be the son, daughter, or close associate of a deposed ruler. It would be hard even to choose the cruellest incident related by Gibbon.

I realize this might seem like a dangerous claim to make after the century that just ended, but while industrial-scale death may be the most evil thing that’s ever happened, I think some of Gibbon’s scenes are far crueller in their gratuitous infliction of slow-paced humiliation and pain.

Part I: Fanon, Cone and Carter—On Imposed Narratives, Counter-Narratives and the Christian Narrative from Per Caritatem by Cynthia R. Nielsen

In the closing section of Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon emphasizes the need for the black person to be future-oriented and to actively reject the white-scripted narrative into which he was born while creatively carving out a new present and future. For Fanon, this meant a willingness to employ violence and to risk his own life so that human beings would no longer “be enslaved on this earth”.[1] Yet, his vision also included a call to human solidarity, a call to blacks and whites and to all human beings to “move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born”.[2] [...]

If in fact colonialism and modern institutions of slavery are fueled by a desire to possess, destroy and re-make others in one’s own (white) image, and Christians who have supported these projects have been in grave error, is it possible to vindicate Christianity so that it might still be considered a valid option for the possibility of saving difference? J. Kameron Carter believes it is possible and has recently made a case for rescuing Christianity from its perverse instantiations.

In part two, I shall discuss Carter’s reading of Maximus the Confessor.

Multilateralism from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko

I’ve been writing a review of Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth today, and a thought occurs to me: the fact that the Copenhagen climate talks produced little more than a token gesture seems to count as evidence that, as Hardt and Negri argue, multilateralism is just as dead as unilateralism. It’s difficult to imagine any kind of binding agreement being reached under any circumstances, but certainly a meeting among heads of state, various CEOs, and representatives of NGOs and religious groups seems more likely to produce meaningful results.

(Similarly, I wonder if one could take the depressing progress of health care reform as evidence that social democracy is just as empty as neoliberalism….)

Wayne Frair, Professor of Biology, The King's College, Briarcliff Manor New York 10510

I understand the essence of Dr. Lynn White's paper to consist of the following four main ideas:

1. Modern science is an extrapolation of Christian natural theology which realizes man's transcendency of and mastery over nature.

2. With the wedding of science and technology four generations ago man attained new powers over nature.

3. These powers are out of control and so we find ourselves in a serious ecological crisis.

4. The solution which is essentially religious involves:

a. recognition of the guilt of Christianity;

b. rejection of the Christian axiom that nature exists solely to serve man; and

c. realization of a more Franciscan position which taught a spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature.

Paul Samuelson and the State from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux

Here’s a letter that I sent earlier today to The Economist:

Mr Samuelson jumped to this conclusion about the need for regulation far too cavalierly.

Neither as a matter of logic nor of history do market imperfections necessitate government regulation. Even on purely economic grounds, regulation might do more harm than good – a fact downplayed by Mr Samuelson. Mr Samuelson’s healthy skepticism of dreamy ivory-tower notions of market efficiency was strangely accompanied by his own dreamy ivory-tower notions of government efficiency.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

Origins of a Fable from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

Certainly in the 1930s there was a stronger reserve among Cambridge, England, economists to what had become 19th-century ‘classical’ economics about the market (Mill, Manchester School, The Economist, and their stories about ‘laissez-faire) and early misattributions to Adam Smith, than was common among Chicago economists, whose enthusiasm for harmonious markets was quite explicit in house.

Interestingly, Samuelson remarked, in a sceptical tone, about the oral tradition at Chicago in the 1930s (he graduated there in 1935 – and moved to Cambridge, Mass. for his post-graduate degrees), that such ideas as the ‘invisible hand’ doctrine had limited explanatory power, especially after “two centuries of experience and thought”. (See: Samuelson’s Economics, 1st edition 1948, page 36 and 12th edition, 1985, page 41.)

Unfortunately, Cambridge, Mass. conquered Cambridge, England, on these matters with the fading of Keynesianism under the triumph of Monetarism from the 70s. Meanwhile, and afterwards, the invisible hand myth conquered the profession with the ruthless energy of the barbarian invasions of Rome in the 5th century.