Jesus in Siberia

Quatrain

The rain falls on the just
And on the unjust fella;
But mainly upon the just,
Because the unjust has the just's umbrella.

*Durkheim

I’ve been a part of a reading group that has taken on a major work by Milbank - I forget what it's called, and to be honest it's not even worth mentioning. But during these readings, Milbank is quick to engage in self-congratulatory masturbation while bashing the social sciences. He is a staunch defender of Catholic theology and thinks anything else is derivative of theology, or its plain bad theology, or it is horrendous because it falls under the category of "paganism." Here he seems to associate "paganism" with the narrative of everything was "chaos" in the beginning and therefore cannot possibly be desirable for an end goal of 'peace.' During these petty juvenile dismissals of other disciplines, he rants and bashes the sociology of religion as useless. One of those great thinkers that has been on Milbank's hit-list is Emile Durkheim, French sociologist of religion.

In first response to Milbank, Durkheim grants and acknowledges a few things that Milbank seems to be quite adamant about: “There is no religion that is not both a cosmology and a speculation about the divine. If philosophy and the sciences were born in rleigion, it is because religion itself began by serving as a science and philosophy.” And, “if religion gave birth to all that is essential in society, that is so because the idea of society is the soul of religion.”  

Emile Durkheim is one of those figures always referenced in the social scientific study of religion. His ‘Elementary Forms of Religious Life’ is a seminal work that set the tone and trajectory for future generations. Durkheim’s hypothesis is that religion is a social thing: “Religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities.” Along the way, Durkheim sets up some important questions to be addressed. The first question is an ontological one. Granted that even the basic understandings of reality are socially constructed, such as time and space, what is it about all religions that provides an ontological argument for human beings? Durkheim then sets up two categories for the investigation into religious phenomena: beliefs and rites. And more importantly, within the first category, a distinction between the sacred and the profane. He then makes an important distinction between religion and magic: the Church - something that has been much debated and semantically stretched. Bringing together these elements, Durkheim provides his famous definition of religion: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”

Now Durkheim raises some other issues about beliefs, rites, the Church, magic, the place of shamanism, as well as concerns about a human nature that allows such creativities to manifest in religion through different cultures and social settings. As it is the case for any science, no one thinker has the last word. Science is fallible, amenable, and subject to conditions of reproducibility, verifiability, critique, and progressive advancements; negative correlations are also positive data. So to critique Durkheim is not the equivalent of critiquing the entire discipline nor does it mean that the entire discipline is still at the level of Durkheim. Perhaps it is Milbank and theologians of his category that must learn humility - go back and read their bible?

Kindness

"Kindness in words creates confidence. 
Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. 

Kindness in giving creates love."   

                                           -Lao-tzu

Gratitude

"An important purpose for mortality is to help us learn to recognize and to choose the positive even though the negative more fully surrounds us. We make this choice consciously or unconsciously in every moment of the day, and these millions of tiny choices create the foundation of our identity. We are what we think. We are what we say, what we do, what we fill our lives with. Ultimately, every being creates himself by these countless, crucial choices."

- Betty Eadie

 

*Colonialism

A man can't go and rape a woman, impregnate her, deny her abortion, tell her how to raise the child, dip out, then come back when the child is a successful adult and say, "See woman, I did you a favor by raping you. Look at all the good things that have come out of it. Now give me them benefits and put me on a pedestal."

*Interdisciplinary Need

We are living in a day where the many disciplines have been advancing in their own path for quite some time. Each of these disciplines have been establishing within their own paradigms and function in one form of positivism or another, all the while looking or waiting for paradigm shifts to happen. But isn't it time that we should go back and start bridging them all together again so that we can look at the practical in an informed manner? Why is the method of governance and attitudes so polarized that even ideas that would coincide with another party's agenda would be rejected solely on the basis of who it came from and the emotional attachments to one's party and negative emotional attachments to the other.

We know enough about the environment to know what harms and promotes it. We know enough about various cultures, about history, about different forms of government, and the various efficacies and non-efficacies of economic policies. Why are we not integrating and pooling the knowledge together? How come theology and philosophy are not working together in a practical manner that will promote a well-being for the populace? Why isn't theology engaged with other theologies for the anticipation of a meshing of civilizations and religious creeds? One who adopts the perspective that the world will be a Christian nation must deal with the ideas of resistance. Why is poverty, human trafficking, and the underprivileged not discussed? Shouldn't the disciplines be looking further at practical implications and the possibilities of interdisciplinary work and dialogue. Building trust and diminishing anger and hostilities should be a priority instead of raping the lands of others under the auspices of stability and promoting liberty.

*Real Objects and Imagination of the Left - a unrefined reaction

"However, as concerns real objects, your question is legitimate. Here we do need to make sure that the gates don’t open and let Popeye, unicorns, and square circles enter our farms and valleys. And we do this by saying that a system is a real object when it has intrinsic qualities that cannot be undermined or overmined.

If all the qualities of the morning star and the evening star turn out to be nothing more than qualities of Venus, then we have successfully undermined these two, and neither is a real object. They are relational phantasms generated by our own interactions with Venus.

If all the qualities of witches turn out to be nothing more than qualities of various disconnected phenomena that people have directly experienced (dead babies in the village, drops of blood near the well, a scarlet fever epidemic) then the supposed object “witch” has been successfully overmined, and the witch is not a real object. Note that Hume and his heirs treat all objects as if they were nothing but witches, breaking them up into symptoms, or into “bundles of qualities.” Despite his jovial demeanor, Hume is a cruel judge, condemning all real objects to be burned at the stake.

But the best we can do is build certain fallible methods to determine what can and cannot be undermined or overmined. That’s because, by definition, there is no direct access to real objects. Real objects are incommensurable with our knowledge, untranslatable into any relational access of any sort, cognitive or otherwise. Objects can only be known indirectly. And this is not just the fate of humans— it’s the fate of everything. Fire burns cotton stupidly, paying no heed to its color, smell, or beautiful purity and softness. Fire interacts with the cotton only insofar as it is flammable. And the same holds for all relations."

Graham Harman later on goes into the limitations of imagination of the left. I think these are intimately tied together.

http://skepoet.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/marginalia-on-radical-thinking-an-interview-with-graham-harman/

So I've been thinking about this...and I might have botched what he said. But I think there might be, somewhat of a gap between his characterizations of "real objects," and in extension to his discussion on the limitations of imagination from the left. 

I wonder, if the real objects he speaks about are limited to material dimensions. He says that "a system is a real object when it has intrinsic qualities that cannot be undermined or overmined." And he gives an example of the morning and evening star as qualities of Venus for something being undermined; and the example of witches being the product of various disconnected phenomena as something being "overmined." But I think this begs the question of what an "intrinsic quality" is and thereby questioning his definition or criteria by which a system becomes a "real object." We can argue that there is some intrinsic quality to being human. People argue for the "soul" as if it was something irreducible or something of an essence of a person. And yet, as individuals we can't separate out our own systems that are actively at work within us that gives us this holistic quality or phenomena of a "soul" or "essence." But given the biological and neurological data, we know that there are memory systems, inference systems, emotional systems, perceptual systems, sensory-motor systems, mechanisms of personality from genetic inheritance and so on that work together within us to provide a sense of who we are and the interaction of these systems with our environment, i.e. nature and nurture are "intrinsically" intertwined, to give us identity. Would this entail that one's essence is undermined by our biological and environmental factors? If there is anything that is intrinsic or considered to be a center of being human it is the genetic stuff we are given to begin with that manifests itself from being triggered by the environment. In that case, would the interaction itself count as something intrinsic thereby making us "real"?

I think this becomes even more problematic when we go into cultural systems: religion, ethics, etiquette, politics, economics, government and so on. The law is real, with real implications. The economy is real also with real implications. But is law or economy itself as a system a real object? Doesn't theories of gift-exchange and reciprocity theory undermine what is intrinsic about economy? Or could theories of exchange be what is intrinsic about economy? The reality of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is overmined by various disconnected phenomena within the dynamics of power, wealth circulation, tax breaks, and etc. etc. Does this mean that this part of the economic system is not a real object? If it is not, then what is it that Occupy is protesting against? We talk about Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, and Marxism, as real things despite their ideological orientation. And perhaps this is where the left, and the right, actually lack imagination. The treatment of these ideas as real, non-malleable, objects. I suppose we could treat their basic ideas that compose the respective ideologies as the intrinsic quality of them. I would argue that we need to be ready to throw away the lines and boundaries that delineate these things as intrinsic ideas to their respective systems. Imagination becomes stymied by limitation. The ideas of Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, and Marxism, are not necessarily incompatible. And just because we have a particular form of Capitalism conjoined with a particular form of a Republic (Democracy + Oligarchy) does not mean that that is the definitive form of Capitalism or political system. In other words, just because we live in a system does not make it the defnition. And just because Communism happened underneath the function of Stalin, Lenin, and Mao does not make those the definitive outcomes of Communism or Marxist ideologies. They in fact were not true to Marx as they massacred millions of working class folk. The lessons of history should not be forgotten. Nor should we be so afraid that we stay within the rigidity of the current systems because we think the other one didn't "work."

The contemporary task, in my view, is not only to critique the current systems as well as the neutral ones, as Foucault suggested, (something we see manifesting in Egypt - neutral institutions and habits/culture of power reincarnating in various forms, although its full cycle is yet to be seen) but also to abandon our emotional attachments to these terms of ideology and redefine and blur the lines of them all. Get rid of Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, and Marxism, and all the other categorical labels. Play outside the box without limitation. This is where, to an extent, a bit of naivete can be helpful. If one does not know how and what is "supposed to be done" then one is not limited by them either. The imagination of today, I think, should take up this task. To reinvent the way the economy and government/politics function by accounting for the lessons of history.

In a way the real informs what is not real, and conversely, what is not real informs the real. It seems that not only does ontology need to be reconfigured, reconsidered, and reappropriated in terms of what is intrinsically human but also the ontology of relationships need to be reconfigured into the broad range of things it touches on in terms of what is intrinsic to economics, governance, and humanity's relationship to the environment.