We focus on legislating for minorities. This serves to divide; since these are treated as separate groups. How does this fit with democracy, which surely is rule by the majority?
A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.” John Rawls
One of the problems is that there is a loosening hold on shared values wherein society protects and honours all, especially the weakest and those furthest from some “norm”. Without such fundamental shared morality then we are left as a nation of “isms” – racism, sexism and the like. A place where those who are left out have no choice but to band together and fight – as a separate group.
Europe’s moral code, and hence America’s, was founded in Christianity. This no longer serves to bind us, but is there a secular equivalent to “love your neighbour as yourself”? John Rawls put forward this idea.
“A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.” John Rawls
What a wonderful ideal. A society and politics I would follow and fight for…
The great existentialist philosopher – Martin Buber – speaks about dialogue and distinguishes it from love. I have included some quotes at the end of this note from his 1929 essay “Zwiesprache” (Dialogue) below, together with a short note about Buber and Jesus.
I think that love and dialogue are closely intertwined ..
Genuine dialogue is about meeting, arising from mutual awareness. This can happen even as two strangers glance at each other in passing. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant by “Love thy neighbour as thyself”; that is, become as fully aware of and in sympathy with your neighbour as you are with yourself.
Is this not a call to dialogue, which is after all a direct way to become fully aware of our neighbour. A deep awareness which is a form of mindfulness. A mind full of the other and thus a way to expand your horizon.
This sharing of horizons is really a form of love itself. A Love which (I believe) underlies all of creation.
As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says
“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God”.
Buber quotes
Three types of dialogue. In his 1929 essay Buber describes dialogue as genuine meeting with full awareness. He developed this later (I and Thou,1937) into a whole philosophy of relation; where all meaning is contained in therelationshipbetween (zwischen) people and the “other”. Here is the first quote:
“There is genuine dialogue – no matter whether spoken or silent – where each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them. There is technical dialogue, which is prompted solely by the need for objective understanding. And there is monologue disguised as dialogue, in which two or more men, meeting in space, speak each with himself in strangely tortuous and circuitous ways and yet imagine they have escaped the torment of being thrown back on their own resources.”
Dialogue and love. In the second quote he distinguishes between dialogue and love:
“I know no one in any time who has succeeded in loving every man he met. Even Jesus obviously loved of “sinners” only the loose, lovable sinners, sinners against the Law; not those who were settled and loyal to their inheritance and sinned against him and his message. Yet to the latter as to the former he stood in a direct relation. Dialogic is not be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, and company in with the other, the love remaining with itself – this is called Lucifer”
Buber, Zionism and Jesus. Buber was an intellectual Hasidic Jew. He was a lifelong Zionist, but who strongly disagreed with how the new state was constituted. He thus refused to become the first president of Israel. He “favored a binational state that encompassed and honored both Jewish and Arab ethnicities, and centred on mutual love and respect. He believed that Jesus was the greatest of all Jews and that his message was the flower of judaism. He describes Jesus thus:
“from my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother”
I ramble a little below, but it has all been said by TS Eliot – and exquisitely – in his Four Quartets. So I have (yet again) begun a cycle of recording of these poems. The first of the four – Burnt Norton – is in the link below.
I have been reflecting on meaning. I man convinced of a timeless wonder and purpose within which this material universe is a part. I am fortunate because I have experienced fleeting transcendent bliss, the sense that “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”. I believe that the way of knowing this is not through logic, or algorithm – but direct experience of infinite loving other within people, nature and God. Why then do we think? Why speak? What purpose does our human edifice of philosophy and mathematics serve?
I have recently glimpsed one possibility. Whilst I have always experienced deep connection to “all that is” within Christ (and not necessarily within any particular church), I have had a rational stumbling block which I have recently resolved. Christ said “I am the way, the truth and the life. Except by me shall no man come to the Father”. How can that be? What about those before, and who are brought up in different traditions? What about Hindus and Buddhists, who I am sure access the same truth? My resolution is simple. I have come to see that it is the moments of epiphany and connection wherein reality lies. Those moments – quoting Martin Buber – of “I-Thou” rather than “I-It” living. What Christ meant I believe is that he embodied the I of I-Thou or the point of connection. So that he could truthfully be at the same time human and fragmented AND the oneness that is all-that-is which some of us call God. When he said “I”, meant both “I” as frail human and “I” as God. This is one of those mysteries and paradoxes that our rationality can’t touch – just like the physical paradox of light being at the same time a wave and a stream of individual photons.
I reached this personal insight – which allows me properly to want to follow Christ – through conversations with my dying brother Christopher last year. (Thank you Chris x)
Anyway – Eliot says it all so well – and he of course also came to Christianity – expressed in The Four Quartets. His journey from the materialist and atheist despaire expressed The Wasteland, was also one of finding “the point” of the turning world as intersection through Chist of infinity with finite.
Liberal societies are healthy streams. Free flowing, oft times turbulent – but with a clarity and purity of involvement and liquid cohesion.
These are though under threat from two directions – Capitalism above, and Nationalism below.
Capitalism freezes flow and movemeent; cutting communities off from the clear air and creating false inward reflections and strange refracted images from the external world (where others are walking on the icy outer surface).
And below, Nationalism – the stirring of the rotting sediment of dead fears. Racism, an appeal to the worst archetypes of the other. Muddying and reducing visibility, so that all are trapped in isolation and separation.
How do we keep the liberal stream flowing, with our eye on the common good of shared humanity?
Whatever your faith – look to wisdom from our ancestors.
“ Love your neighbour as your self” Christ
“those who worship Me with love and devotion are very close to Me, and I am also very close to them” Bhagavad-Gita
Research discussed in Psychology Today from 2017 indicates that narcissism appears to be linked to reduced emotional empathy and feelings of loneliness. (Link to article below). It seems, if I understand it properly, that this all flows from a state called “borderline personality organisation”, where our sense of self is unstable or threatened. I take it that this leads then to narcissism as a kind of retreat or defensive mechanism.
This is an odd thought for this day which celebrates and reflects the ultimate act of emotional empathy and love and connection. I wonder why I was drawn to that article. No matter. Happy Easter! X
“All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” Little Gidding TS Eliot
A meditation on the meaning of time and the timeless. Imagine that time is a mirage, and that we already exist eternally and are infinitely connected. Our ego traps us into believing that we are separate, that all is material and that – heaven help us – we are the centre of everything. I can occasionally step outside my “self” – and there lies peace and belonging and joy.
It seems to me that the fundamental issue that haunts each of us is – insecurity. How, then, to deal with that? And it’s worth addressing. In my experience the more secure a person is, then the more listening, creative, compassionate, generous, talented and capable of joy they are. (And happiness is life lived in the expectation of joy). Conversely when we feel insecure we experience withdrawal. We become self-centred with attendant unhappiness and disconnection. Our horizons contract to world as prison. How then does security arise? Where do we find an ability to like in confidence? (Con Fides; with trust). There is abundant evidence that this is determined very early in life by carers – of course normally parents – creating a predictable loving and connected environment in which the child can develop. (Oliver James points out one parent should normally be present full-time for babies and toddlers). The connection to good and evil? In fact are these useful constructs at all.; or simply perceived positive and negative outcomes of random events? Indeed we do need to deal with these concepts before tackling any personification or accretion of these into God and Devil. For me, what resonates is; Firstly science is uncovering deep meaning at the most fundamental level. Experiments on matter at the most microscopic levels shows that existence is an infinite series of possibilities, potential – until observed. It is the act of observation that, in effect, crystallises out this particular existence from the cloud of possibilities. That raises the issue of observation. Surely there must be an “observer” to create this particular reality. Sure enough, our species are the most efficient engines of observation, whether through science or the arts. We each of us spend our life in observation (or as some would call it – witness, some knowledge). Interestingly our gathering of knowledge is escalating in a geometric progression. (Are we approaching Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point”?) It appears to me that at least one of our purposes as humans is to be just this – engines of observation crystallising out existence. That puts the onus on us collectively. WE – life. Does that not change a world view? Good and evil is created as we create existence. Accept that good and evil do exist, as outcomes of our collective path through life. Accept that is is our joint task to work for good effect around us, and do we not at least connect to purpose – rather than trying to live with our eyes tight closed against the fear that we float on a sea of random meaninglessness.
De Chardin’s work is scintillating – a brilliant piece of philosophical science. But, oh how difficult to access! It appears as a work of nineteenth century charismatic spirituality, language calculated to repel a positivist scientist. Yet it deals with concepts and theories that bring together quantum mechanics, relativity, geology, evolutionary biology and anthropology. One struggles to absorb the width of his landscape. And he distils some compelling concepts. Material evolution started at the big bang with occasional phase-shifts from plasma to atoms, from giant molecules to cellular life, from complex organisms to the birth of ideas. Evolution within the geosphere (the crystallising and polymerising worlds) leading to the biosphere and now the noosphere. A duality of material and spiritual, which he calls the “without” and “within”. He traces the development of the “within”, an evolution of consciousness. He names man as a stage in that process associated with the phase-shift from the evolution of biology to the evolution of ideas. He shows that everything, both material and spiritual in each phase has common properties – plurality, unity and energy. His ideas have of course been widely adopted, but almost by stealth and by others. He was a Jesuit priest, and the church tried to gag him. He bowed to pressure, because of his vows of obedience, and much of his work came to light after his death. . De Chardin’s work gloriously and selflessly witnesses the growth of God within and between us. What an irony that the entombed treasury of his ideas was pillaged most famously by Richard Dawkins (memes? Noosphere…), who is of course the Ian Paisly of atheism. It is meat and needs to be chewed, but it is rich meat and will repay the effort.
