I wonder if you might broaden the base of your serious and well-articulated critique of our current situation to include the perspective of the peoples of the Native Nations of this continent as articulated in the “Basic Call to Consciousness” of 1977. Originating in the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, drafted by the scholar John Mohawk (Seneca), and carefully reviewed and revised by the Haudenosaunee Council of Chiefs, this was a wake-up call to humanity: “The way of life known as ‘Western Civilization’ is on a death path, and its culture has no viable answers....The air is foul, the waters poisoned, the trees dying, the animals are disappearing. We think even the systems of weather are changing [remember this is from 1977!].... The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation and begin to see liberation as something that needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World. What is needed is the liberation of all the things that support life—the air, the waters, the trees—all the things that support the sacred Web of Life.”
Shared spiritual sociality—whether perceived in Confucian terms as forming one Body with Heaven, Earth, and the ten thousand things, or perceived in Indigenous terms as the unity and equality that exists among all our relations in the web of life, or perhaps even in Christian terms as harmony with the mystical Body of Christ (if that Body is understood as the community formed by all living beings created when all things were made through Him as described in the beginning of the gospel of John), or in terms of really any perception of the living truth of our equal belonging—has implications for all peoples and for an America and a world that has yet to be, and that is—as you say—still struggling to be, born.
An awakening is gradually developing amongst many tribes of native people of this Turtle Island landspace. Those who conveniently and habitually call this ruptured republic "America" are becoming part of the problem.
Native thinkers such as the late Dakota thinker John Trudell came to the conclusion that the European people who came to this place were deracinated, rootless due to (usually) assuming the dominance missionary position to all of life and even of those spirited entities whom we generally would not consider as having life.
Long have I given thought to the need for people to come to the understanding/realization that as pointed out by the late Catholic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, we are spiritual beings temporarily inhabiting a 3rd Dimensional material lifetime. It is hard for people who have been long indoctrinated into dogmatic organized religious beliefs to make that transition of thinking for oneself. It is even more difficult for those who have been "educated" beyond their capacity for critical thought and have become scientistic rationalistic materialists...totally lost within their ideological abstractions.
Abstractions such as the clock, the calendar, the contemporary alphabet and most particularly MONEY have ensorcelled the majority of the world's people ...particularly here in this ruptured republic where pro$titicians sell their souls and spirits to the devolutionary charms of greed and ego...they are out to grab the Big Brass Ring and don't much care about the destruction which is brought about by immersion in consumer and infotainment anti-culture. Culture is rooted in family, clan, neighborhood, soil, animals and immersion within the natural world.
Chaos and confusion are being promulgated by secretive elites following agendas which are ultimately destructive of all worthwhile traditions, many of which desperately need reformation and reformulation, although in the fairly recent past they served to connect and bond relationships amongst many. The times become more and more difficult to comprehend and with which to contend. Many fall off the fast-moving Cosmic time changes and are only capable at subconscious levels of the realization that this devolutionary cultural matrix happens to be clinically insane.
When I was a child and even into young manhood, there were a fair number of truly worthy and public-spirited individuals who were able to rise to the top of various institutions. Today, that once upon a time reality has been turned on its head. Nowadays, it is not the meritorious who ascend, but rather the psychopaths and sociopaths. Those people are so imbued into the materialistic matrix that they have lost all connection to all other forms of being, including other humans, whom they arrogantly deride and denigrate...on their route to riches, fame and acclamation by a culture which they do not understand as being totally toxic.
Some 42 years ago, in an unpublished manuscript, the final chapter in that visionary proposition was titled "The Million Tribes of Turtle Island". We need to relocate. Tribal villages made up of folks who share the vision and acquire as a group ownership sufficient land to fulfill the old African proverb of "It takes a village to raise a child". Children are our most precious human "resources". Should they be obliged/condemned to grow up in hostile environments where all too few can view the heavens, sniff the roses, or even feel the joys of freedom.
Thanks for your words. I share your admiration for John Trudell and your sense that we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
I think it is possible to reframe what it is to be an American in terms of learning from the land and from all of the peoples who have lived on it—and who still live on it—what it means to be human. Such a reframing, I believe, would be helpful to Marianne’s campaign and helpful to the American people who need to know that the best of their democracy is rooted in this soil and can be nurtured with greater knowledge of how the peoples of the Native Nations nurtured it in the past.
“In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,” the anthropologist David Graeber and his colleague, the archaeologist David Wengrow, hold out hope for the ability of human societies to reject a politics of domination precisely because some Indigenous societies have done so successfully in the past. Their view of these societies is not romanticized, and they recognize the incredible range and diversity of Indigenous experience. They reject the evolutionary schemes whereby there is a supposed progression from “simple” to “complex” societies, from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to hierarchical states, or even from small-scale societies to large-scale empires. Instead, they argue that these evolutionary schemes were themselves developed by prideful Europeans as a defense mechanism against what Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate is a powerful Indigenous critique of Western societies and Western culture and Western religion. This critique, they argue, was a major contributing tributary flowing into the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment, I would note, can be seen as the first great effort in modern times to pursue liberation with the tools of the dominant culture, including, unfortunately, its spurious concepts of who is “fully” human.
Brother Gabriel Sagard’s early seventeenth century account of the Wendat (Huron), a work that became a bestseller in Europe cited by both Locke and Voltaire, is one of many that Graeber and Wengrow review. According to Sagard: “They [the Wendat] reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.” The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune wrote of the Montagnais-Naskapi in 1642: “They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to anyone whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.”
As Graeber and Wengrow note, when it comes “to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty—or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology—indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones.”
Unfortunately, Graeber and Wengrow downplay East Asian influences on the Enlightenment, which were also substantial, as well as those positive contributions to the Enlightenment that were rooted in Christianity and Judaism. I have heard—perhaps it is apocryphal—that in debates in the University of Paris, in the Middle Ages, one had to present one’s opponent’s position to their satisfaction before proceeding to present one’s own response. Such roots of more democratic self-government should also be recuperated and nurtured. And the Enlightenment heritage as a whole should be reconsidered in the light of the world’s great spiritual traditions and the past few centuries of the experience of life on earth.
Steven, thanks for a most erudite response and extension. It's highly evident that you are of broad perspectives and analyses, particularly aware of historical and ethnological depths.
It is not a broad highway in academia any more. Recently, I have enjoyed many insights via reading of some of the gathered insights of perhaps the most outstanding philosopher in the Western traditions in a volume by his amanuensis, Lucien Price...title escapes me at the moment...of Alfred North Whitehead, during his tenure at Harvard after years at Cambridge. The scholarship and mutual amity amongst many academics during those years of the 30's and 40's was at a level which does seem to be quite rare amongst contemporary academicians.
Currently, the emphasis on publish or perish is co-mingled with a depressing level of specialization, along with that Cartesian materialistic rationalism, exacerbated by an academicist competitiveness based on narrow-minded egoism, which appeared to dominate major universities as far back as my experiences with that grant-seeking system of mechanistic adumbrations of genuine scholarship.
Can such a system which serves as an entryway into governmental and corporate bureaucracies possibly be reformed? I think not. The University concept, dating back to The University of Bologna, under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church, founded, I seem to recall, in the 13th Century, may have run its course. The religious precepts have abandoned the mythos of organized religion and have embraced a replacement in Scientism. Even in the liberal arts, the perfectly oxymoronic realm of "political" science, screams out at me as one deeply grounded in history and also in various forms of political action. Politics is an art, not a science. That art is grounded in probability factors, not in any realm of provability.
Thus, my rural centric speculations have gone a bit "New Age" as it were, while at the same time envisioning a reprise of ancient understandings. Hypothetically, let us consider a concatenation of land-based micro-campuses within, say a 30 mile radius, which would comprise a Cosmoversity. Our scientific endeavors have rediscovered a phenomenon which both the ancient Hellenes and many of the tribal peoples of Turtle Island and in pre-Christian Europe as well...a Cosmic vision.
A Canadian thinker, Richard Bucke, back in 1906, authored a book titled "Cosmic Consciousness" in which he postulated a gradual development of such a phenomenon which he conceptualized that a handful of individuals, most particularly, Leonardo, the Florentine, personalized Renaissance awakening and developed visions which had not been part of European thought for nearly 2,000 years. Over time, Bucke's analysis was that this consciousness development became shared by more and more individuals up to the early 20th Century and into a projected future as becoming relatively commonplace.
When one considers cosmic time-cycles in terms of world-ages, we do seem to be at the hinge of a turning-point.
Just a tad of the thoughts I've explored on the Cosmoversity concept...these campuses would literally be built from the ground up and would include housing for scholarly teachers and seekers. The divisions would follow such interests and fascinations as motivated engroupments. For example, base level would likely be in the liberal arts, with prime focus on history, geography and literature which most would accept as having attained classical status. In dramatic contrast to the current rage in academia as totally selling out to mammon and its expression as Homo Economicus, in dropping liberal arts courses and fully embracing the STEM system; the FOUNDATION for a cosmoversity would return to a not too distant past, where a Grundlage in foundational studies would be paramount.
The 30 mile radius superstructure would include campuses centering on the sciences, where instead of focusing on laboratory learning as the be all and end all, courses such as biology and geology would be highly interactive with the local and regional environmental actuality. Field trips into outside regions would logically broaden perspectives in those fields. Metalurgy and its chemical antecedents could be explored through hands-on forges and such which would be located in the immediate environs.
Morpheus calls, so these thoughts will soon succumb to the dream-state. The concept of the Cosmoversity is something which could certainly be fleshed out if it would be of interest to any and all who are envisioning a transition from a clinically insane culture into one which is both literally grounded at the same time as oriented towards a future erected by a harmonious and esthetically uplifting set of possibilities.
The educational system you envision Carstie is very likely to become a reality, as futurist and systems scientist Dr. Anneloes Smitsman is promoting Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) and this fits your model idea. She also embraces both present and indigenous wisdoms as pathways to make a thrivable society. I urge you check out her work.
I am grateful to everyone who liked this. For those who want more, I recently gave a talk on our shared spirituality--what our Confucian friends refer to as forming one body with Heaven, Earth, and the Myriad Things: https://www.chilit.org/docs.ashx?id=1115652
Marianne, what you published tonight is an astute overview of the chronic illnesses that have damaged not only our nation but the world as well. You have voiced these concerns over the years. Indeed, we must focus our energies on several fronts using our collective intelligence: replacing our failed economy with a stable-state style one that's inclusive; governance, based once again on inclusion and ethics--with public financing of campaigns instead of dark money. Then, for the sake of our existence as a species, we must not tarry but realize the urgency of our situation--as the sounds of misguided warm drums beat even louder this evening. There's no argument, I think, that we are at multiple tipping points that must be addressed. Earth can no longer support the extractive growth required for the expansion of our economy because we only have finite resources. So all new economic and governance approaches need to take into account regenerative practices--policies that help all of life thrive and not just for a chosen few. Finally, Marianne, I think the greatest gift you bring to the people is your unique ability to unite people with loving truths and deep insights that are restorative and healing.
It takes courage to work on transformative change as you have been doing Marianne most of your adult life. Now we must support you and make a collective commitment to stay the course in order to avoid total societal and ecosystem collapse. We can and must evolve, and Nature has great examples to help guide us along the way to building a more loving, balanced, and harmonious society. Warm regards always, Joan Halgren.
Thank you Joan. You consistently steer a stable course in the direction of the spirit path, which native people call "the Red Road", an understanding that All are One and that One is All. Life calls us to do our bit and you are well attuned to this realization. Blessings.
Carstie, thank you for your sweet comments. Glad too that you mentioned indigenous people. We can wisely learn from them how to save ourselves since their cultures have more experience being closer to Mother Earth. Peace to you, Joan.
Wow!!! Thank you, Marianne! Your heart-voice-spirit on the national stage is certainly needed. I was immensely grateful to you for your willing to stand up in the line of those willing to serve the country's leadership in 2020. You and Michael Moore are prophets among us. Bless you and take care!
A vision of progress with your moral and spiritual guidance can really change this world for the better for all of us! I so believe in you Marianne and your message needs to resonate with the masses and I think this time around it will.
The most direct way to reduce fossil fuel emissions is to reduce consumption. At the moment, even as solar and wind power increase, fossil fuel emissions are also increasing! This is because energy demand is going up. Why? Think of all the container ships we see pictures of, and the stuff that is in them.
Of course, reducing consumption would slow the economy. Understandably, folks are terrified of this. Another Great Depression would be awful. Yet our current ecological /climate change trajectory is even worse. A friend of mine in India tells me that where she lives they no longer have relaxed outdoor social events with food, because it has become too hot. Here in Australia we had catastrophic fires across the whole continent… The trend is global, and worsening rapidly.
It’s tricky to work out how we can slow the economy without collapsing it catastrophically. I have yet to find a degrowth thinker who has thought this through well. Nor have I myself thought it through, to be frank. But I think a first step is to recognize that economic growth, because it depends on industrial production, is destroying our environment in ways that will make life hellish for coming generations.
Another aspect is defanging the wealthy, which you are already on top of. However, I suggest that fostering public acceptance of the need to live economically modest lifestyles is also critical.
Just this week I was physically obliged to become a type of consumer for the first time in some 78+ years. Previously, I had never purchased a new piece of furniture. However, due to intense back-pain resultant from a crushed disc in my thoracic region and with development of chronic pain due to the gestation of rheumatoid-arthritis in all five vertebrae in the lumbar region, it became necessary to purchase a new mattress and box-spring. The old one, third-hand, had become so squishy that the pain became unbearable.
Prior to this occasion, all my furniture and appliances had been previously used by other people. For over 12 years, I found both a challenge and an unending form of discovery and even entertainment as an over the road antiques dealer...or a professional recycler if one thinks about it. The challenge was to begin with minimal capital and very little merchandise to gradually build up the inventory to the point where self-support became reasonably steady despite the unending expenses involved in traveling 25 states to do some business.
Congruent with all of this, the life pattern was such that even doing those antique shows, by season's end there were only a few hundred dollars to tide over until the new season began with the New Year. Most of the income ultimately went into acquisition of new merchandise to keep that show on the road. It was quite the balancing act. One compensation was that I was not obliged to file Federal Income taxes...much less pay into the WarDefense system which has dominated this ruptured republic, even before my birth during the latter stages of the Second World War and the subsequent U$$A imperium, currently sporting military bases in over a hundred foreign lands.
Best we can hope for is a live well-lived. That philosophy has been a lodestar for decades. However, such a life journey such as mine is not a possibility for many. Together, we must unite, first with sharing thoughts and ideas and ultimately being part of some radically new directions essential to the mutual creation of a life worth living in loving all that is.
Re “Together, we must unite, first with sharing thoughts and ideas and ultimately being part of some radically new directions,” some of us are forming a League of Evolutionary Catalysts to do just that. https://app.box.com/s/j0wwhkr27r9mzxbn6jw7hhtj65ivqtro tells the story.
Hooray for you, and for all of us who stand with you, and for you. This is such exciting news, especially for elders like me, who have waited more than 60 years to vote for a candidate other than "...the one LEAST morally repugnant." Do not underestimate the power of the people as we rise to claim the birthright of all Americans...To paraphrase the words of the late great Martin Luther King, "Let justice roll down like thunder, and righteousness like a mighty stream!"
Powerful, direct, honest and crucial. We are standing strong, being the change we want to see in the world. The government is not on the course to benefit the people but on it's self serving journey so we must turn to one another, to help and support those in need and speak our minds. A country where homelessness and poverty are now considered a crime, where unbridled rage, pain and hate lead to mass shootings. No, we will not give up. We will lead with LOVE and be ready to help with a better vision. Thank you Marianne.
Brilliant. There are so many layers of unconscious greed. I have been trying for 20 years to awaken people to the side-effect of ocean warming and its ultimate death due to our continued use of military sonar. Where to start? And, how can I help you break through?
This is why I supported you in 2020 and why I always will. We need change. Big change. Very little is working in America right now, too many people are suffering in countless ways. This is not how our country is meant to be. Keep speaking loudly, Marianne.
I have noticed that Musk is no longer putting your materials regularly on my Twitter feed. Since the oligarchs are trying to make you invisible, I will daily search and share your work, writings, comments etc. And I have noticed that same thing regarding the MMT proponents whom I have followed since 2016. So, best wishes in your endeavors. There's a ton of work to do and many bridges to build in the process.
Thanks for your message, Marianne!
I wonder if you might broaden the base of your serious and well-articulated critique of our current situation to include the perspective of the peoples of the Native Nations of this continent as articulated in the “Basic Call to Consciousness” of 1977. Originating in the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, drafted by the scholar John Mohawk (Seneca), and carefully reviewed and revised by the Haudenosaunee Council of Chiefs, this was a wake-up call to humanity: “The way of life known as ‘Western Civilization’ is on a death path, and its culture has no viable answers....The air is foul, the waters poisoned, the trees dying, the animals are disappearing. We think even the systems of weather are changing [remember this is from 1977!].... The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation and begin to see liberation as something that needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World. What is needed is the liberation of all the things that support life—the air, the waters, the trees—all the things that support the sacred Web of Life.”
Shared spiritual sociality—whether perceived in Confucian terms as forming one Body with Heaven, Earth, and the ten thousand things, or perceived in Indigenous terms as the unity and equality that exists among all our relations in the web of life, or perhaps even in Christian terms as harmony with the mystical Body of Christ (if that Body is understood as the community formed by all living beings created when all things were made through Him as described in the beginning of the gospel of John), or in terms of really any perception of the living truth of our equal belonging—has implications for all peoples and for an America and a world that has yet to be, and that is—as you say—still struggling to be, born.
An awakening is gradually developing amongst many tribes of native people of this Turtle Island landspace. Those who conveniently and habitually call this ruptured republic "America" are becoming part of the problem.
Native thinkers such as the late Dakota thinker John Trudell came to the conclusion that the European people who came to this place were deracinated, rootless due to (usually) assuming the dominance missionary position to all of life and even of those spirited entities whom we generally would not consider as having life.
Long have I given thought to the need for people to come to the understanding/realization that as pointed out by the late Catholic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, we are spiritual beings temporarily inhabiting a 3rd Dimensional material lifetime. It is hard for people who have been long indoctrinated into dogmatic organized religious beliefs to make that transition of thinking for oneself. It is even more difficult for those who have been "educated" beyond their capacity for critical thought and have become scientistic rationalistic materialists...totally lost within their ideological abstractions.
Abstractions such as the clock, the calendar, the contemporary alphabet and most particularly MONEY have ensorcelled the majority of the world's people ...particularly here in this ruptured republic where pro$titicians sell their souls and spirits to the devolutionary charms of greed and ego...they are out to grab the Big Brass Ring and don't much care about the destruction which is brought about by immersion in consumer and infotainment anti-culture. Culture is rooted in family, clan, neighborhood, soil, animals and immersion within the natural world.
Chaos and confusion are being promulgated by secretive elites following agendas which are ultimately destructive of all worthwhile traditions, many of which desperately need reformation and reformulation, although in the fairly recent past they served to connect and bond relationships amongst many. The times become more and more difficult to comprehend and with which to contend. Many fall off the fast-moving Cosmic time changes and are only capable at subconscious levels of the realization that this devolutionary cultural matrix happens to be clinically insane.
When I was a child and even into young manhood, there were a fair number of truly worthy and public-spirited individuals who were able to rise to the top of various institutions. Today, that once upon a time reality has been turned on its head. Nowadays, it is not the meritorious who ascend, but rather the psychopaths and sociopaths. Those people are so imbued into the materialistic matrix that they have lost all connection to all other forms of being, including other humans, whom they arrogantly deride and denigrate...on their route to riches, fame and acclamation by a culture which they do not understand as being totally toxic.
Some 42 years ago, in an unpublished manuscript, the final chapter in that visionary proposition was titled "The Million Tribes of Turtle Island". We need to relocate. Tribal villages made up of folks who share the vision and acquire as a group ownership sufficient land to fulfill the old African proverb of "It takes a village to raise a child". Children are our most precious human "resources". Should they be obliged/condemned to grow up in hostile environments where all too few can view the heavens, sniff the roses, or even feel the joys of freedom.
Thanks for your words. I share your admiration for John Trudell and your sense that we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
I think it is possible to reframe what it is to be an American in terms of learning from the land and from all of the peoples who have lived on it—and who still live on it—what it means to be human. Such a reframing, I believe, would be helpful to Marianne’s campaign and helpful to the American people who need to know that the best of their democracy is rooted in this soil and can be nurtured with greater knowledge of how the peoples of the Native Nations nurtured it in the past.
“In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,” the anthropologist David Graeber and his colleague, the archaeologist David Wengrow, hold out hope for the ability of human societies to reject a politics of domination precisely because some Indigenous societies have done so successfully in the past. Their view of these societies is not romanticized, and they recognize the incredible range and diversity of Indigenous experience. They reject the evolutionary schemes whereby there is a supposed progression from “simple” to “complex” societies, from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to hierarchical states, or even from small-scale societies to large-scale empires. Instead, they argue that these evolutionary schemes were themselves developed by prideful Europeans as a defense mechanism against what Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate is a powerful Indigenous critique of Western societies and Western culture and Western religion. This critique, they argue, was a major contributing tributary flowing into the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment, I would note, can be seen as the first great effort in modern times to pursue liberation with the tools of the dominant culture, including, unfortunately, its spurious concepts of who is “fully” human.
Brother Gabriel Sagard’s early seventeenth century account of the Wendat (Huron), a work that became a bestseller in Europe cited by both Locke and Voltaire, is one of many that Graeber and Wengrow review. According to Sagard: “They [the Wendat] reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.” The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune wrote of the Montagnais-Naskapi in 1642: “They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to anyone whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.”
As Graeber and Wengrow note, when it comes “to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty—or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology—indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones.”
Unfortunately, Graeber and Wengrow downplay East Asian influences on the Enlightenment, which were also substantial, as well as those positive contributions to the Enlightenment that were rooted in Christianity and Judaism. I have heard—perhaps it is apocryphal—that in debates in the University of Paris, in the Middle Ages, one had to present one’s opponent’s position to their satisfaction before proceeding to present one’s own response. Such roots of more democratic self-government should also be recuperated and nurtured. And the Enlightenment heritage as a whole should be reconsidered in the light of the world’s great spiritual traditions and the past few centuries of the experience of life on earth.
Steven, thanks for a most erudite response and extension. It's highly evident that you are of broad perspectives and analyses, particularly aware of historical and ethnological depths.
It is not a broad highway in academia any more. Recently, I have enjoyed many insights via reading of some of the gathered insights of perhaps the most outstanding philosopher in the Western traditions in a volume by his amanuensis, Lucien Price...title escapes me at the moment...of Alfred North Whitehead, during his tenure at Harvard after years at Cambridge. The scholarship and mutual amity amongst many academics during those years of the 30's and 40's was at a level which does seem to be quite rare amongst contemporary academicians.
Currently, the emphasis on publish or perish is co-mingled with a depressing level of specialization, along with that Cartesian materialistic rationalism, exacerbated by an academicist competitiveness based on narrow-minded egoism, which appeared to dominate major universities as far back as my experiences with that grant-seeking system of mechanistic adumbrations of genuine scholarship.
Can such a system which serves as an entryway into governmental and corporate bureaucracies possibly be reformed? I think not. The University concept, dating back to The University of Bologna, under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church, founded, I seem to recall, in the 13th Century, may have run its course. The religious precepts have abandoned the mythos of organized religion and have embraced a replacement in Scientism. Even in the liberal arts, the perfectly oxymoronic realm of "political" science, screams out at me as one deeply grounded in history and also in various forms of political action. Politics is an art, not a science. That art is grounded in probability factors, not in any realm of provability.
Thus, my rural centric speculations have gone a bit "New Age" as it were, while at the same time envisioning a reprise of ancient understandings. Hypothetically, let us consider a concatenation of land-based micro-campuses within, say a 30 mile radius, which would comprise a Cosmoversity. Our scientific endeavors have rediscovered a phenomenon which both the ancient Hellenes and many of the tribal peoples of Turtle Island and in pre-Christian Europe as well...a Cosmic vision.
A Canadian thinker, Richard Bucke, back in 1906, authored a book titled "Cosmic Consciousness" in which he postulated a gradual development of such a phenomenon which he conceptualized that a handful of individuals, most particularly, Leonardo, the Florentine, personalized Renaissance awakening and developed visions which had not been part of European thought for nearly 2,000 years. Over time, Bucke's analysis was that this consciousness development became shared by more and more individuals up to the early 20th Century and into a projected future as becoming relatively commonplace.
When one considers cosmic time-cycles in terms of world-ages, we do seem to be at the hinge of a turning-point.
Just a tad of the thoughts I've explored on the Cosmoversity concept...these campuses would literally be built from the ground up and would include housing for scholarly teachers and seekers. The divisions would follow such interests and fascinations as motivated engroupments. For example, base level would likely be in the liberal arts, with prime focus on history, geography and literature which most would accept as having attained classical status. In dramatic contrast to the current rage in academia as totally selling out to mammon and its expression as Homo Economicus, in dropping liberal arts courses and fully embracing the STEM system; the FOUNDATION for a cosmoversity would return to a not too distant past, where a Grundlage in foundational studies would be paramount.
The 30 mile radius superstructure would include campuses centering on the sciences, where instead of focusing on laboratory learning as the be all and end all, courses such as biology and geology would be highly interactive with the local and regional environmental actuality. Field trips into outside regions would logically broaden perspectives in those fields. Metalurgy and its chemical antecedents could be explored through hands-on forges and such which would be located in the immediate environs.
Morpheus calls, so these thoughts will soon succumb to the dream-state. The concept of the Cosmoversity is something which could certainly be fleshed out if it would be of interest to any and all who are envisioning a transition from a clinically insane culture into one which is both literally grounded at the same time as oriented towards a future erected by a harmonious and esthetically uplifting set of possibilities.
The educational system you envision Carstie is very likely to become a reality, as futurist and systems scientist Dr. Anneloes Smitsman is promoting Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) and this fits your model idea. She also embraces both present and indigenous wisdoms as pathways to make a thrivable society. I urge you check out her work.
Thank YOU Joan. Will check out the DAO and get some bio info on Dr. Smitsman. Decentralization is imperative for human survival.
EXCELLENT SUMMARY OF PAST AND PRESENT LIFE IN OUR COUNTRY!
I am grateful to everyone who liked this. For those who want more, I recently gave a talk on our shared spirituality--what our Confucian friends refer to as forming one body with Heaven, Earth, and the Myriad Things: https://www.chilit.org/docs.ashx?id=1115652
Marianne is on board with all of that.
Marianne, what you published tonight is an astute overview of the chronic illnesses that have damaged not only our nation but the world as well. You have voiced these concerns over the years. Indeed, we must focus our energies on several fronts using our collective intelligence: replacing our failed economy with a stable-state style one that's inclusive; governance, based once again on inclusion and ethics--with public financing of campaigns instead of dark money. Then, for the sake of our existence as a species, we must not tarry but realize the urgency of our situation--as the sounds of misguided warm drums beat even louder this evening. There's no argument, I think, that we are at multiple tipping points that must be addressed. Earth can no longer support the extractive growth required for the expansion of our economy because we only have finite resources. So all new economic and governance approaches need to take into account regenerative practices--policies that help all of life thrive and not just for a chosen few. Finally, Marianne, I think the greatest gift you bring to the people is your unique ability to unite people with loving truths and deep insights that are restorative and healing.
It takes courage to work on transformative change as you have been doing Marianne most of your adult life. Now we must support you and make a collective commitment to stay the course in order to avoid total societal and ecosystem collapse. We can and must evolve, and Nature has great examples to help guide us along the way to building a more loving, balanced, and harmonious society. Warm regards always, Joan Halgren.
Thank you Joan. You consistently steer a stable course in the direction of the spirit path, which native people call "the Red Road", an understanding that All are One and that One is All. Life calls us to do our bit and you are well attuned to this realization. Blessings.
Carstie, thank you for your sweet comments. Glad too that you mentioned indigenous people. We can wisely learn from them how to save ourselves since their cultures have more experience being closer to Mother Earth. Peace to you, Joan.
Wow!!! Thank you, Marianne! Your heart-voice-spirit on the national stage is certainly needed. I was immensely grateful to you for your willing to stand up in the line of those willing to serve the country's leadership in 2020. You and Michael Moore are prophets among us. Bless you and take care!
Yes it’s up to us❣️Everyone with spiritual heart and wisdom needs to fully support Marianne and get her elected President!🦅🇺🇸
Thumbs up Marianne. You would make a fantastic president!
A vision of progress with your moral and spiritual guidance can really change this world for the better for all of us! I so believe in you Marianne and your message needs to resonate with the masses and I think this time around it will.
Amen! YES!!! Thank you, Marianne, you have my vote & I will continue to share your right minded, loving wisdom with many more💛
Namaste’
Just, WOW! 🙏
The most direct way to reduce fossil fuel emissions is to reduce consumption. At the moment, even as solar and wind power increase, fossil fuel emissions are also increasing! This is because energy demand is going up. Why? Think of all the container ships we see pictures of, and the stuff that is in them.
Of course, reducing consumption would slow the economy. Understandably, folks are terrified of this. Another Great Depression would be awful. Yet our current ecological /climate change trajectory is even worse. A friend of mine in India tells me that where she lives they no longer have relaxed outdoor social events with food, because it has become too hot. Here in Australia we had catastrophic fires across the whole continent… The trend is global, and worsening rapidly.
It’s tricky to work out how we can slow the economy without collapsing it catastrophically. I have yet to find a degrowth thinker who has thought this through well. Nor have I myself thought it through, to be frank. But I think a first step is to recognize that economic growth, because it depends on industrial production, is destroying our environment in ways that will make life hellish for coming generations.
Another aspect is defanging the wealthy, which you are already on top of. However, I suggest that fostering public acceptance of the need to live economically modest lifestyles is also critical.
Andrew Gaines
Inspiring Transition
andrew.gaines@InspiringTransition.net
www.InspiringTransition.net
Greta Thunberg will have reason to hope when she sees that mainstream society is committed to turning things around.
Just this week I was physically obliged to become a type of consumer for the first time in some 78+ years. Previously, I had never purchased a new piece of furniture. However, due to intense back-pain resultant from a crushed disc in my thoracic region and with development of chronic pain due to the gestation of rheumatoid-arthritis in all five vertebrae in the lumbar region, it became necessary to purchase a new mattress and box-spring. The old one, third-hand, had become so squishy that the pain became unbearable.
Prior to this occasion, all my furniture and appliances had been previously used by other people. For over 12 years, I found both a challenge and an unending form of discovery and even entertainment as an over the road antiques dealer...or a professional recycler if one thinks about it. The challenge was to begin with minimal capital and very little merchandise to gradually build up the inventory to the point where self-support became reasonably steady despite the unending expenses involved in traveling 25 states to do some business.
Congruent with all of this, the life pattern was such that even doing those antique shows, by season's end there were only a few hundred dollars to tide over until the new season began with the New Year. Most of the income ultimately went into acquisition of new merchandise to keep that show on the road. It was quite the balancing act. One compensation was that I was not obliged to file Federal Income taxes...much less pay into the WarDefense system which has dominated this ruptured republic, even before my birth during the latter stages of the Second World War and the subsequent U$$A imperium, currently sporting military bases in over a hundred foreign lands.
Best we can hope for is a live well-lived. That philosophy has been a lodestar for decades. However, such a life journey such as mine is not a possibility for many. Together, we must unite, first with sharing thoughts and ideas and ultimately being part of some radically new directions essential to the mutual creation of a life worth living in loving all that is.
Carstie, regrets about your back problems.
Re “Together, we must unite, first with sharing thoughts and ideas and ultimately being part of some radically new directions,” some of us are forming a League of Evolutionary Catalysts to do just that. https://app.box.com/s/j0wwhkr27r9mzxbn6jw7hhtj65ivqtro tells the story.
Hooray for you, and for all of us who stand with you, and for you. This is such exciting news, especially for elders like me, who have waited more than 60 years to vote for a candidate other than "...the one LEAST morally repugnant." Do not underestimate the power of the people as we rise to claim the birthright of all Americans...To paraphrase the words of the late great Martin Luther King, "Let justice roll down like thunder, and righteousness like a mighty stream!"
Powerful, direct, honest and crucial. We are standing strong, being the change we want to see in the world. The government is not on the course to benefit the people but on it's self serving journey so we must turn to one another, to help and support those in need and speak our minds. A country where homelessness and poverty are now considered a crime, where unbridled rage, pain and hate lead to mass shootings. No, we will not give up. We will lead with LOVE and be ready to help with a better vision. Thank you Marianne.
Brilliant. There are so many layers of unconscious greed. I have been trying for 20 years to awaken people to the side-effect of ocean warming and its ultimate death due to our continued use of military sonar. Where to start? And, how can I help you break through?
With God’s help we can🙏❣️
Amen. Looking forward to hearing lots more from you, Marianne, including your announcement on March 4! Godspeed and much love. 💕
This is why I supported you in 2020 and why I always will. We need change. Big change. Very little is working in America right now, too many people are suffering in countless ways. This is not how our country is meant to be. Keep speaking loudly, Marianne.
I have noticed that Musk is no longer putting your materials regularly on my Twitter feed. Since the oligarchs are trying to make you invisible, I will daily search and share your work, writings, comments etc. And I have noticed that same thing regarding the MMT proponents whom I have followed since 2016. So, best wishes in your endeavors. There's a ton of work to do and many bridges to build in the process.
Russell Gallman, you are to be commended for working to share Marianne's writings and podcasts I assume as well. Bravo.