The Decline/Transformation of Western Civilization

Author’s Preface:

To write on the topic ‘The Decline/Transformation of Western Civilization’ gets difficult quickly, when the point is brought up that our ‘operative reality’ derives from the architecture of our language, and that our noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language, like the language I am writing this essay in, falls radically short in its ability to capture the physical reality of our natural experience.

Nevertheless, this is the only ‘communication tool’ that I have at my disposal for sharing the findings of my philosophical investigations; … understandings that are in no way limited by the limitations of language, and which language can only play the role of fingers pointing to the moon, or ‘Wittgenstein ladders’, that position the reader to make a leap to an understanding that springs forth from reflections on her own experience.

I am writing about the role of science in society, and how the relationship between science and Western civilization has been like that of the spine to the body, the main pillar of support for progressive growth. But since the end of the 19th century, the certainty furnished by science has collapsed and with it, the spine, as if from a degenerative condition in the bone material. Scientists remain silent on this issue, and we continue to forge ahead on flywheel effect, grasping at straws which aim to continue to assert our scientific control over a ‘predictable’ [NOT!] nature, over the climate, even.

Western Civilization is shaped by acceptance and belief in a pseudo ‘operative reality’ which embraces as the highest values ‘reason’ and ‘morality’, both of which are in turn built dependently upon binary logic. The degenerative spinal condition starts right here. Binary logic that gives us ‘truth or falsehood’, ‘good or evil’ is intellectual idealization that plays no role in the physical reality of our natural experience.

The ‘is’ or ‘is not’ premise that is foundational to the notion of ‘being’ in ‘human being’ and/or ‘material being’ in general, has been the basis for constructing our mental models of the world ‘from the bottom up’. We find this positivist, constructivist concept inherent in our noun-and-verb language-and-grammar [no surprise here since our language architecture was invented for inventory management purposes by the Phoenicians].

On this basis, our Western science understanding of nature is materialist and starts from the inside, from the tiniest of material beings [particles] which determine ever larger cells, organs and body structure so that all primary onus is on inside-outward deterministic intention while outside-inward situational possibility is rendered as after-the-fact interference. While modern physics has changed all this, so that we can now see space as an energy-charged plenum that is the source of all ‘things’, re-thinking ‘things’ as the coincidence of opposites of situational possibility and actualizable potentials that gather as relational forms in a transforming relational continuum, … this remains a hard pill to swallow for Western civilized peoples, who pride themselves on their Darwinist origins [inside-outward asserting genesis], and on the corresponding notion that they are fully and solely responsible for the results of their own inside-outward asserting actions.

We can smile and nod our heads in affirmation when we hear John Lennon’s aphorism “Life is what happens to us while we are busy making other plans”, but our Western institutions of government, commerce and justice continue on, honouring their foundations of discursive reason and moral judgement as befits a collection of ‘independent beings’ that reside, operate and interact in a habitat deemed ‘independent’ of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it [a habitat that ‘bottoms out’ in an absolute space and absolute time reference/measuring frame].

‘Measurement’, backed up by an absolute space and time reference frame, is the secret to the ‘truth’ of scientific propositions. By measuring the spatial extension of the storm-cell, we notionally isolate it from the transforming relational continuum in which it is inextricably included. Its ‘centre’, relative to our absolute measuring frame, becomes the centre of its independent being, whose movements we can now track within our absolute reference/measuring frame. What was, to our natural experience, relational transformation with relational features gathering and regathering within, becomes to our intellect, local, visible, material being, notionally with its own internal process driven and directed development and behaviour; … “Katrina is growing larger and stronger”, … “Katrina is moving towards the Gulf Coast”, … “Katrina is wreaking destruction on New Orleans”, … “Katrina is moving overland and dissipating”.

Logical propositions like this are tautologies which express nothing other that the definitions and operations we plug into them [Wittgenstein]. This ‘empty talk’ is what scientific ‘reason’ is all about. It is a useful discursive sharing tool that meanwhile takes on a ‘disconnect’ from the physical reality of our natural experience. We jointly [by agreeing on labels and definitions] construct a synthetic [intellectually idealized] ‘operative reality’ from this measurement based decomposition of the transforming relational continuum, into a collection of categories of independent material objects and organisms.

Based on this notion that the relational forms of the transforming relational continuum such as ourselves are ‘independent material beings with internal process driven development and behaviour, and who are fully and solely responsible for the results of their actions’, we bring ‘moral judgement’ together with ‘reason’ as the primary basis of understanding and engaging with the world we live in. That we [Western civilizeds] give highest value to this combination of binary logic based concepts is what is currently in collapse [Nietzsche] with these two being superseded by their more natural, ‘relational’ counterparts; intuition and harmony.

The constraining of our view of dynamics to inside-outward asserting actions allows ‘reason’ to impute full and sole responsibility to the child-soldier for his terrorist actions, and to the powerful business man, for his wealth accumulating results, rather than acknowledging that “it takes a whole community [dynamic relational matrix] to raise a child-soldier and/or a wealthy businessman”.

The ‘independent beings’ in Western civilization’s noun-and-verb language-and-grammar based ‘operative reality’, since they are seen as forming locally, from the inside-out, are notionally cut off from their natural inclusion in the unbounded universe [transforming relational continuum]. The uniqueness of each relational form is no longer seen as coming from the universe plenum, but thanks to noun-and-verb language, gets ersatz traction for its particularity from the intellectual concept of ‘categories of things’ with ‘measured attributes’ that differ between different instances of a category, such as ‘larger or smaller’, ‘heavier or lighter’, ‘darker or lighter in colour’ etc. etc.

As we observe the developing storm cell, we could be viewing it as an inclusional feature within the relational continuum, which it is, in physical reality, but by our act of measuring it and listing its local visible and tangible attributes, we construct its ‘independent being’ that facilitates working it into our reasoned discourse based on an ‘operative reality’ that is in terms of notional ‘independent things’ and ‘what they are doing’. It is not that this ‘operative reality’ based on binary logical reasoning is not ‘useful’, it is only that in confusing it for ‘reality’, we cultivate incoherent behaviour and cognitive dissonance.

This is where the ‘de-spiritualizing’ comes in, which Russell Means speak of in saying; “For the world to live, Europe must die”.

Rising up out of a mundane, despiritualized ‘operative reality’ into a more natural reality is the theme of Nietzsche’s ‘beyond good and evil’ uebermensch. It is not as if this is some new breed of man that the world has never before seen, but rather a case of Western man’s restoring to natural primacy, the values of intuition and harmony over the values of reason and morality, a restoration that is not needed for speakers of relational language such as the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island [those amongst them who have retained their original language and traditions].

* * * end of Author’s Preface * * *

The Decline/Transformation of Western Civilization

Our society seems to be struggling with problems it doesn’t [we don’t] know how to define or to deal with; an economic system, the behaviour of which seems beyond our control, the growth of terrorism, the growth of pharmaceutical drug taking, the growth of mental disorders [the ‘invisible plague’], the growth of occurrence of murder-suicide massacres, the growth of alarm over climate change, and a general feeling that something is amiss (e.g. the ‘Occupy Wallstreet Protest’ and concern over the widening ‘have’-‘have-not’ split. This gives us the sense of a decline of our ‘civilization’; e.g;

“The great perplexity of our time, the churning of our age, is that the youth have sensed — for better or for worse — a great social-historical truth: that just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies: it can be the viciously destructive heroics of Hitler’s Germany or the plain debasing and silly heroics of the acquisition and display of consumer goods, the piling up of money and privileges that now characterizes whole ways of life, capitalist and Soviet.” – Ernest Becker, ‘Denial of Death’

Interpretations of what is going on have been suggested, and the one that my continuing philosophical investigations affirms, is Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche suggests that we are in the collapse of the 2500 year old Western civilization that began with the embrace of the ideas of Plato and Socrates, which, in Nietzsche’s terms, ‘put reason and morality’ into an unnatural precedence over intuition/instinct and balance and harmony-cultivating.

What comes to mind is Nietzsche’s aphorism ‘God is dead’ and ‘we have killed him’ which he as linked to ‘grammar’ and ‘bewitchment’, in the same way as Wittgenstein.   This is what I would like to share; i.e. an explanation of what is intended by this.

I can explain the kernel of his argument where he speaks of the ‘devalution of the highest values’. These would be the values we put into ‘reason’ [science] and ‘morality’, and I am right with him on this, based on personal experience and other areas of investigation.   I will explain it briefly here, and then expand further on it in the rest of this note.   I am not expecting anyone to ‘believe this’ [I do] but I think it important so I am sharing it in case, if you don’t see it now, … you might come back to it later, as things get messier as would be expected if there is no ‘awakening’ to what is going on with us.

Here are two examples that demonstrate what Nietzsche (and others in different ways) are talking about with respect to ‘the collapse of Western civilization’ [the devaluation of the highest values as we restore intuition and harmony to their natural precedence over reason and morality.

1. The Child-Soldier.   The child-soldier is the product of the culture [“it takes a whole community to raise a child-soldier”]. Meanwhile, noun-and-verb language-and-grammar allows us to construct subject-verb-predicate representations; “the child-soldier killed the people in the café”. Science can prove this and moral judgement can condemn and punish it on the basis of the ‘logical truth’, however, the logical truth depends on using symbolic representation which imputes ‘independent being’ to the child-soldier. Both Western science and Western religion employ this ‘economy of thought’ which imputes ‘independent being’ to humans, in this case, the child-soldier. The teaching in the Catholic church, which is general in Christianity, Judaism and Islam is as follows;

“Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.”

1731  Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility.  By free will one shapes one’s own life.  Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.

1732  As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning.  This freedom characterizes properly human acts.  It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach.”

As Nietzsche points out, and this is reinforced by the findings of modern physics and aligns with indigenous aboriginal understanding, ‘relations are all there is’, which means that the individual is not the jumpstart author of his behaviour, that is simply an intellectual idealization used by both Western science and Western religion. It is an ‘error of grammar’ wherein our experience is of a relational dynamic [a ‘manning’ activity within the relational social dynamic] and we re-cast the ‘manning’ with the subject ‘man’ that inflects a verb and generates a predicate; “the man killed the people in the café”. In other words, we break out of the transforming relational continuum, an ‘event’ . This ‘break out’ is language-assisted intellectual idealization which does not reconcile with the physical reality of our natural experience.  In science, we are also warned about taking such logical propositions literally;

“We … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Ernst Mach

The point is also made by Wittgenstein, that logical propositions gives us back what we put into them; i.e. the definitions we construct them from;

“The propositions of logic are tautologies (6.1), and hence say nothing (6.11). Any attempt to give content to logical propositions is misguided. That they are true shows itself in their structure, and this structure helps us to understand the formal properties of language and the world (6.12). We cannot express anything by means of logical propositions.”

The point is that defining a man as an ‘independent reason-driven being who is master over his acts’, is what we get back in a statement such as “the child-soldier killed the people in the café”.

In understanding the world as a transforming relational continuum, the observer is also included in the relational dynamic that he and everyone are included in. The judge and jury who are judging the slave who has attacked someone of the slave-master class, are using this principle; “Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.”.

Intuition suggests to us that the violent attack is because ‘”when you push people around, some people push back”. for example;

Native spokesperson, Ward Churchill, on the day after 9/11 observed;

 

 

“Looking back, it will seem to future generations inexplicable why Americans were unable on their own, and in time to save themselves, to accept a rule of nature so basic that it could be mouthed by an actor, Lawrence Fishburn, in a movie, The Cotton Club.

 

 

“You’ve got to learn, ” the line went, “that when you push people around, some people push back.”

 

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As they should. … As they must. … And as they undoubtedly will.

 

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There is justice in such symmetry”.

 

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Prime Minister Jean Chrétien commented, in a Mansbridge interview broadcast nationally on September 11, 2002 [first anniversary of 9/11];

 

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“… it is a division in the world that is building up. And I knew that it was the inspiration of it [9/11]   … You know, you cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others.  And that is what the Western world, not only the Americans, the Western world has to realize, because they are human beings too, and there are long-term consequences if you don’t look hard at the reality in 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. … we’re looked upon as being arrogant, self-satisfied, greedy and with no limits. And the 11th of September is an occasion for me to realize it even more.”

In understanding the world, as in modern physics, as a transforming relational continuum, it makes no sense to try to understand things other than in the context of the continuing relational unfolding, however, science, and language, impose simplifications that deliver ‘economy of thought’;

“Origin of Mathematical Physics. Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.
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First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.
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Next, we try to decompose the phenomena in space. What experiment gives us is a confused aggregate of facts spread over a scene of considerable extent. We must try to deduce the elementary phenomenon, which will still be localised in a very small region of space. — Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics”

The sticking point here is that while science accepts the breaking down of the transforming relational activity continuum, by boxing up bits of it in absolute space and absolute time reference/measurement windows that we can look at ‘out there’ as if we are disconnected from what goes on in them, … both modern physics and the physical reality of our natural experience, inform us that everyone is included in the ‘one relational dynamic’, and it is therefore impossible to attribute particular actions to particular authors. As Poincaré said, it is non-sense to say ‘the earth rotates’ since the earth is included within a relational celestial dynamic and it is decidedly NOT the author of its own behaviour.

“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” – Mach

Space is not [empty] Euclidian’ … “Space is a participant in physical phenomena” … “Space not only conditions the behaviour of inert masses, but is also conditioned in its state by them.” — Einstein

In the physical reality of our natural experience, we are included in the dynamics we are looking out at, which means that we cannot judge the behaviour of the ‘child soldier’ as if we were excluded from it; i.e. we cannot make the ‘innocent-guilty’, ‘good-evil’ binary splits, except as a convenient ‘economy of thought’.   Indigenous aboriginal justice never develops these categories since ‘categories’ are not implied in the architecture of indigenous aboriginal language architectures; i.e. it is ‘restorative justice’ which seeks to restore balance and harmony in the full community, and it assumes that while violence manifests through individuals within the community, such eruptions of violence derive from relational social tensions in the overall relational community matrix.

HERE WE HAVE A PROBLEM. The physical reality of our natural experience, which is beyond articulation in any case, eludes capture in a particular way, by binary logic based discursive reasoning and binary logic based moral judgement [built into noun-and-verb language and grammar].

As it turns out, we have to ‘go beyond good and evil’ and all such binaries to view the world in a manner that includes us inside of it. The style of expression we need is relational; aka ‘poetic’.

“He who understands me, finally recognizes [my logical propositions] as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it) . . . . then he sees the world rightly”

”Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information. “ … “Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.” – Wittgenstein

We cannot, therefore, say that there is any more ‘reality’ of a physical phenomenal nature in “The child soldier killed the people in the café”, than in “the earth rotates:’, both of these logical propositions alluding to activities within the transforming relational continuum.

The ‘error of grammar’ that we are talking about, in saying “the child soldier killed the people in the café” is the same sort as in saying “lightning flashed”;

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

“ … isn’t it obvious that when we say, “The lightning flashed,” the flashing is the same as the lightning, and that it would be enough to say, “There was lightning”? Everything labeled with a noun is demonstrably a process or action, but language is full of spooks, like the “it” in “It is raining,” which are the supposed causes, of action. Does it really explain running to say that “A man is running”? On the contrary, the only explanation would be a description of the field or situation in which “a manning goeswith running” as distinct from one in which “a manning goeswith sitting.” (I am not recommending this primitive and clumsy form of verb language for general and normal use. We should have to contrive something much more elegant.) Furthermore, running is not something other than myself, which I (the organism) do. For the organism is sometimes a running process, sometimes a standing process, sometimes a sleeping process, and so on, and in each instance the “cause” of the behavior is the situation as a whole, the organism/environment. Indeed, it would be best to drop the idea of causality and use instead the idea of relativity.” – Alan Watts, ‘THE BOOK: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who Your Are’

This language-based objectifying of a relational activity so as to use the now-independent ‘object’ as the subject in a subject-verb-predicate construct, gives the impression that the death of the people in the café is the full and sole responsibility of the child-soldier, which is, of course, non-sense, just as it is non-sense to say that the deaths of those in 9/11 is the full and sole responsibility of team Al Qaida, or that the injury to the slave-master is the full and sole responsibility of the slave.

These eruptions of violence do not occur in empty space, they transpire in a relational social matrix; i.e. in the transforming relational continuum that includes all, as Ward Churchill and Jean Chrétien are saying.

* * *

The manner in which noun-and-verb language-and-grammar constructs ‘scapegoats’ of those participants in the relational social matrix through whom violence manifests/erupts, exonerating all others [as justified by imposing the notion of ‘independent being’ on participants], not only applies to ‘those accused of evil deeds’, … it also applies to ‘those accused of good deeds’.

That is, it is also the case for a ‘powerful man’ that “it takes a whole community to make a man powerful”. The powerful business man (e.g. ‘Donald Trump’) derives his power from the labours of others. The powerful president derives his power from the labours of his people, the more people, the more power.   It is impressive to hear a powerful leader speak and to be bold in his political promises and commit to achieving what the people dream of achieving.   Meanwhile, the people are going to furnish the labour for such achievements, and if the leader takes a ‘courageous stand’ and promises to drive communism out of Vietnam, he will attempt it with the labours, lives and limbs of the people.   The attribution of ‘powerful’ to a man and/or the attribution of great material accomplishments to a man that makes him a ‘powerful man’, is the same sort of error of grammar that was unveiled in the case of the ‘child-soldier’.

* * *

Discursive reasoning [binary logic based] and moral judgement [binary logic based] together deliver an ‘operative reality’ which is far from the ‘physical reality of our natural experience’ and which, when taken literally, leads to incoherent actions and cognitive dissonance.

Noun-and-verb language-and-grammar constructs this ‘operative reality’ in terms of material objects and organisms [notional ‘independent beings’ that are masters of their own actions] which contradicts modern findings of the nature of the physical reality of our natural experience;

“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances).” – Erwin Schroedinger

“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” — David Bohm

“Fields of force are the primary reality, and ‘matter’ a secondary or derived phenomenon” —Michael Faraday

The fact that our visual and tactile engaging with relational forms in the transforming relational continuum gives us the sense of their ‘relative independence’ [no thing is free from the continuing relational ‘recycling’ within the flow of life] lends itself to the noun-and-verb language-and-grammar architecture, allowing us to, in the impressions given by the symbolic representations of language, ‘shift the authoring source’ of the world dynamic from the relational matrix itself, to the secondary features; i.e. to the relational forms which are continually gathering and being regathered within it.

In a transforming relational continuum, the meaning of a relational form derives from the full global relational context of the relational form’s situational inclusion within the continuum.

However, noun-and-verb language has developed ‘categories of forms’ where the meaning of particular instances of the category are derived from comparisons of similarities and differences in the measured attributes of the members of the category.   This bypasses the ‘relational’ understanding of these forms that comes directly from their unique situational inclusion in the transforming relational continuum; e.g. the storm-cell, instead of being understood through its situational inclusion in the transforming relational continuum, may be understood by comparison to the measured attributes of other members of the category, ‘storm’.   In other words, we ‘break out the form as a separate entity or ‘independent being’’ by measuring its attributes, rather than by understanding its uniqueness in its relational context within the transforming relational continuum.   This reduction of the cosmic persona of relational forms, and substitution of attribute comparisons within a ‘category of thing’ is not found in the relational languages of indigenous aboriginals. This ‘dropout’ is important to the understanding of the devaluation of the ‘highest values’, ‘reason and morality’ that associates with the ‘problems’ with Western civilization, is commented on as follows by F. David Peat in ‘Blackfoot Physics’.

“The problem with English is that when it tries to grapple with abstractions and categories it tends to trap the mind into believing that such categories have an equal status with tangible objects.  Algonquin languages, being for the ear, deal in vibrations [waves] in which each word is related directly, not only to process of thought, but also to the animating energies of the universe.

 

… [in modern physics] It is impossible to separate a phenomenon from the context in which it is observed.  Categories no longer exist in the absence of contexts.

 

Within Indigenous science, context is always important. Nothing is abstract since all things happen within a landscape and by virtue of a web of interrelationships.  The tendency to collect things into categories does not exist within the thought and language of, for example, Algonquin speakers.

 

This leads to a profoundly different way of approaching and thinking about the world.  For, in the absence of categories, each thing is mentally experienced on its own merits, and for what it actually is.  Rather than indulging in comparison or judgment, Indigenous speakers attempt to enter into relationship with them.

 

What is needed, Bohm argued in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, is a new sort of language, one based on processes and activity, transformation and change, rather than on the interactions of stable objects.  Bohm called this hypothetical language the “rheomode.”  It is based primarily on verbs and on grammatical structures deriving from verbs.  Such a language, Bohm argued, is perfectly adapted to a reality of enfolding and unfolding matter and thought.

 

David Bohm had not known when he wrote of that concept that such a language is not just a physicist’s hypothesis.  It actually exists.  The language of the Algonquin peoples was developed by the ancestors specifically to deal with subtle matters of reality, society, thought, and spirituality.

 

A few months before his death, Bohm met with a number of Algonkian speakers and was struck by the perfect bridge between their language and worldview and his own exploratory philosophy.  What to Bohm had been major breakthroughs in human thought — quantum theory, relativity, his implicate order and rheomode – were part of the everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, Mic Maq, Cree and Ojibwaj.” – F. David Peat, ‘Blackfoot Physics’

There is a lot more to this story, that can be brought in to flesh out the skeletal framework presented in the above paragraphs, but the essential point is that our noun-and-verb language-and-grammar with its subject-verb-predicate constructs allows us to fabricate an ‘operative reality’ understood intellectually by way of binary logic based reason and its complement, binary logic based moral judgement.

This is a problem since discursive reasoning and moral judgement [both of which are binary logic based] ‘launder out’ the circular flow from the transforming relational continuum through the relational forms that are continually gathering and regathering within it. That is, discursive reasoning and moral judgement deliver an ‘operative reality’ that denies our own involvement in ‘what is going on out there’, and thus mistakenly rejects the observations of Ward Churchill and Jean Chrétien that the violence directed against the colonizing powers derives from actions of the colonizing powers in earlier phasing of the transforming relational continuum.

The current rallying of world leaders of global structures and institutions [all of which have also been architected using reason and morality] in the face of ‘terrorism’, to a re-strengthened binary, ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ interpretation of the world are poised to exacerbate the rising incoherence and cognitive dissonance.

Recovery from this decline could be facilitated by the development of a relational language that would become the primary instrument of shared understanding, demoting English and the other noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammars, at least that usage which is in discursive reasoning mode, to a secondary, support role.

Such a transition would involve the subsumation of moral judgement based retributive justice with ‘restorative justice’ which orients to restoring balance and harmony in the overall relational social dynamic. For example, instead of going with ‘don’t make excuses for terrorists’ [don’t fall off the binary gold standard of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’] on Middle East issues, one would go with something of the ilk of Robert Fisk’s view and proposal which instead of assuming that; “the present depends only on the immediate past, … embraces in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon”;

http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/canada/britishcolumbia/story/1.3237373

Robert Fisk has been covering the conflict in the Middle East for over 30 years, but he says he’s never seen anything as devastating as the situation in Syria today.

Fisk is a veteran Middle East correspondent for the British paper The Independent who has been covering conflict in the Middle East for over 30 years. He is in Vancouver today to share his insight into the Syrian Civil War and the rise of ISIS, as part of his seven-city lecture tour, “Goodbye, Mr. Sykes! Adieu, Monsieur Picot!” with Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East.

Western colonial powers have left a legacy that has lead to the instability and continued violence in the Middle East, he said.

5 things to know

Here are five things Fisk wants every Canadian to know about the Syrian crisis:

 

 

1. The conflict has its roots in the Sykes-Picot Agreement: This treaty between France and the U.K. divided the Ottoman Empire into spheres of influence after World War I. This led to borders that made no sense, and countries that are basically creations of France and the U.K., Fisk says.

 

2. ISIS is the result of Sykes-Picot: When The U.K. and France set up these countries, they set them up for their own benefit, Fisk says, not for the benefit of the people living there. They became unstable dictatorships where education was hard to come by, and Fisk says this laid the groundwork for ISIS and al-Qaeda.

 

 

5. Military intervention by Canada is not the solution: Instead, Fisk said, world powers need to collaborate with the Arab peoples to find long-term solutions to the damage done by Sykes-Picot and build countries that serve the people who live in them. “Canada should be there as it used to be: as a peacekeeping force to bring help and protection to those who suffer,” he said.

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Summary of this ‘stating of the case’:

The hypothesis presented here is consistent with Nietzsche’s; i.e. reason and morality have, since the time of Plato and Socrates, been put into an unnatural values-precedence over intuition and harmony.

Much of our lives, within the family, has been well grounded in natural experience which brings intuition and the cultivating of balance and harmony into their natural precedence over discursive reason [we don’t have parliamentary debates in the natural family] and moral judgement [we apply restorative justice within the family].

Meanwhile, the influence of our institutions of government, commerce and justice, all of which are based on putting ‘reason’ and ‘moral judgement’ first, has continued to grow.

There is much talk in the same vein as that of Robert Fisk, and much stronger in some cases such as in the critique of Ward Churchill (“Some People Push Back”: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.), that we are in a mature phase of colonialism where many of the seeds of repressed anger sown in the early days when the ethic of white supremacism and ‘might makes right’ was overt [that have continued to smolder and sporadically flare], are today’s ‘chickens coming home to roost’. The colonial power alliance, rather than acknowledging the persistence of unresolved tensions [e.g. also in the attempted cultural genocide of the indigenous aboriginal peoples] has opted, since Reagan and Thatcher [as shown by BBC documentary producer in ‘The Trap’ and ‘Bitter Lake’] for a re-strengthened retreat to the simple narrative of ‘good and evil’, wherein the actions of ‘people pushing back’ from centuries of repression and cultural genocide arising from global colonization are interpreted using the binary logic of discursive reasoning and moral judgement based retribution.

In other words, allowing the tools of reason and moral judgement to ‘run away with the workman’ [Emerson] has provided the foundation for a great deal of oppression so that ‘push back’ coming from the long and deep roots of colonization is interpreted using the simple ‘good and evil’ narrative, in conjunction with a view of man in the Christian belief, the independent being of which carries over into the Western scientific view:

“Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.”, … this giving him the freedom for … “choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning.  This freedom characterizes properly human acts.  It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach.”

As discussed, the use of binary logic which imputes independent being to relational forms, combined with a scientific economy-of-thought based view, wherein;

Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world depends only on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past.

… basically dismisses all ‘push back’ interpretations that see present eruptions of violence as backlash from relational tensions arising earlier within the interdependent relational social matrix [a relational sourcing which does not even exist in a worldview which sees humans as ‘independent beings’ that reside, operate and interact within a habitat that is notionally ‘independent’ of the inhabitants that reside within it.].

The assumed ‘independent being’ of humans also leads to scapegoating, not only of push-backing people in the case of terrorism, criminality and ‘mental illness’, but to isolation and alienation of individuals, particularly within urban environments where proximity of residence can also coexist with extreme isolation.

What life have you, if you have not life together?
There is not life that is not in community,

… And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor
Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance,
… When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?

 

 

 

— T. S. Eliot, ‘Choruses from the Rock’

Prior to telephones and other technological ‘advances’, direct personal engaging was more the order of the day.   Yesterday, the myth of the peacemaker still had a chance, where Dekanawideh, the peacemaker, understood peacemaking as reconciling with the evil Adodarho; i.e ‘peacemaking’ is relational transformation, rather than eliminating those who one gets crosswise with. Today, a list is drawn up of evil ones and drones and/or smart bombs are programmed to go out and eliminate them.   There is no need for relational engaging.

Taken together, the continuing development of this inversion of values within the transforming relational continuum is playing out in terms of rising nihilism, with only fringe growth of beyond good-and-evil restorative justice, the way of Nietzsche’s ‘uebermensch’, which restores intuition, harmony and relational transformation into its natural precedence..

* * * end of main body of essay * * *

Part II: What to Look For:

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the medium of language” (“Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandnes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache” P.U. 109)

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” (“Ein Bild hielt uns gefangen. Und heraus konnten wir nicht, denn es lag in unsrer Sprache, und sie scheint es uns nur unerbittlich zu wiederholen” P.U. 115)

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

[Something that shows up while looking ‘beneath’ the language that is ‘bewitching our understanding’ as Wittgenstein, Whorf and Nietzsche say]

The possibility that the following may ‘click’ with your intuition, … that;

1. Nietzsche was right; … Western civilization since Plato and Socrates, built upon binary logic based reason and moral judgement, is collapsing.

2. That we are headed into a period of ‘nihilism’ wherein our elevating of reason and morality into unnatural precedence over intuition and harmony [continually restoring relational balance and harmony] will be subsumed by restoring to natural precedence, intuition and harmony. Thus, “the devaluation of the highest values” – Nietzsche.

3. Reason and morality have been the architectural principles of our institutional systems of governance, commerce and justice, as well as Western monotheist teachings [Christianity, Islam, Judaism] and it is these institutional practices that are most involved in this transition. That is, there is not much difference between the relational social dynamics at the level of family of an indigenous aboriginal family that does not elevate reason and morality into an unnatural precedent, and a Western family, but there is a huge difference in the Western culture, the social dynamics of which is shaped by all kinds of ‘binary logical concepts’ such as ‘competition’ and the very notion of ‘who we are’ that is taught to us in christian settings [i am not knocking ‘Christians’, but i am saying that our understanding can be ‘bewitched’ by certain concepts such as ‘who we are’ as expressed in this common Western civilized concept of the ‘human BEING’;

“Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.

 

 

1731  Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility.  By free will one shapes one’s own life.  Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.

 

 

1732  As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning.  This freedom characterizes properly human acts.  It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach.”

Taking this literally would mean that the child-soldier [i use this metaphor for the quote/unquote ‘mentally ill’, the ‘criminal’ and ‘the terrorist’, all of whom are seen in the indigenous aboriginal understanding, and the Machian, Bohmian, Schroedingerian etc. modern physics understanding [where ‘relations are all there is’] as ‘relational entities’ who are channellers of what is brewed up within the relational social matrix.   In other words, we can look at the ‘child-soldier’ as the catechism tells us to, and that is a kind of simple or ‘economy-of-thought’ based way to look at him, as someone who is fully and solely responsible for his own behaviour, and this is how western justice does look at humans, as ‘independent beings that are fully and solely responsible for their own behaviour’, … but this is not ‘reality’; i.e. it is not the physical reality of our natural experience. the physical reality is that there is no such things a ‘independent being’; i.e. that is intellectual idealization.

So, there are masses of self-declared ‘innocent victims’ and only a few ‘guilty offenders’ according to this view of the human ‘being’ in the catechism. now i am not saying that Jesus told us to take the catechism literally, but i am saying that many people do, and not just religious people because ‘science’ says the same thing; i.e. it makes the same simplistic assumptions about humans.   Therefore, no matter how oppressive the colonizing powers are on colonized peoples, such as the peoples of the middle east and indigenous aboriginals on turtle island, or even on people that have been taken as slaves, … if one of those people ‘pushes back’ with violence, they will become branded as ‘guilty offenders’ and everyone else will be ‘innocent victims’; i.e. the mentally ill, the criminals and the terrorists who are ‘channelling’ conflictual tensions from the relational social dynamic matrix, will be the ones ‘scapegoated’ thanks to ‘taking literally’ the teachings of science and the church, …reasoning that Ernst Mach warns in his critique of ‘the science of mechanics’, should not be confused for ‘reality’;

“We … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Ernst Mach

Meanwhile, the Western world is doing exactly that, and the false edifice of the binary logic constructs of ‘reason’ and ‘morality’ are collapsing. they HAVE been taken literally, making them foundational in our Western society is what gives Western society the character that it has [1].

Now, the social dynamics amongst family and friends, as i say, are close to common between relational societies like the indigenous aboriginals and Indo-European families, but the institutions which dominate the overall social dynamic, differ radically, because ‘reason’ and ‘good and evil’ moral judgement prevail were elevated into the highest value, in Western civilization since Plato (428 – 347 BCE) and Socrates (470 – 399 BCE).

Thus, moving a still open-minded person from an indigenous aboriginal family [which puts intuition and harmony first] into a Western civilization acculturated family [which, nominally, puts reason and morality first], would not be that great a transition, particularly if the family was ‘on their own’ in a rural or wilderness environment outside of the societal mainstream. The Western cultural institutions of government, commerce and justice, that the members of the Western culture impose on themselves, are where the elevating and applying of reason and morality, in a strict literal sense, is most felt. The suggestion is, therefore, that informal family dynamics of diverse cultures tend to put intuition and harmony into precedence over reason and morality, and that elevating reason and morality to precedence is ‘a Western thing’. It is the ‘thing’ that is undergoing collapse. It is the European way of socially interacting; i.e. governed by the values of reason and morality, that is projected by Nietzsche (in 1890) to collapse over two centuries. As Nietzsche said, this transition will involve the ‘devaluation of the highest values’, namely, the binary logical values of ‘reason’ and ‘morality’.

4. The leadership of Western institutions, who have ‘assumed responsibility’ for keeping the world running smoothly ‘according to Western values’ , are increasingly challenged in trying to make this ‘reason and morality’ based system ‘work’. This is because it is a binary logic based intellectually idealized system that is fundamentally ‘at odds’ with the physical reality of our natural experience.   Right now, the solution is seen in terms of applying the binary principles ever more stringently.

5. Why should this collapse occur now, after all this time?   As mentioned, the literal imposing of reason and morality on us from the outside-in, has been steadily growing with science and technology and with government, commerce and justice using science and technology.   There were no people in private planes crashing them into IRS offices right after the American revolution. Who has not felt the exponential rise of outside-inward pressures, over their lifetime? This has created crushing pressures on minorities. Who does not have friends who have taken their own lives or attempted to do so because of the manner in which things can close in you in the modern world? Those of us who have escaped this, might say that we have done it, and anyone can do it, but maybe it’s more realistic that ‘there but for fortune go you or i’.   A friend who was ‘on the rise’ in a consulting position for IBM was sacked in a downturn. He was a single parent taking care of two teenagers. He was totally energized to find a new way to make a living, but when his funds gave out and the power went out in the house, his young daughter called him some nasty names, and he washed her mouth out with soap, she called the police and he was thrown in jail and his kids taken from his care. After being reproached by his sister who he stayed with when his teenage son raised the money for his bail, in a moment of despair, while making a sandwich for himself, he stabbed himself twice in the chest narrowly missing his heart. when he was released from hospital I went to visit him, in a section reserved for the criminally insane. Later, a friend helped him get out to california where he got a job labouring on a friend of the friend’s farm.

If we are doing alright, we never fall into situations like this, however, our Western society seems to have this quality that everyone is struggling to stay afloat and if you start to sink, unless you have a supportive family and/or supportive circle of friends [if you are an independent type, you may never ask for help].   I know that Western religious groups can be very empathic in such cases, so i don’t want to give the impression that i am anti-religious people. to me, the situation is far too complex to make such simple causal inferences.

Meanwhile, I understand what Russell Means is saying here; http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/russell-means-mother-jones-interview-1980

What he is saying is that Western European society, as epitomized in its attempt to control and dominate, to colonize, to put binary logic based reason and morality into an unnatural primacy, is a society that ‘de-spiritualizes’. It is a culture that must die. Nietzsche is saying the same thing. People of European descent who are ‘insiders’ are saying the same thing;

“The great perplexity of our time, the churning of our age, is that the youth have sensed — for better or for worse — a great social-historical truth: that just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies: it can be the viciously destructive heroics of Hitler’s Germany or the plain debasing and silly heroics of the acquisition and display of consumer goods, the piling up of money and privileges that now characterizes whole ways of life, capitalist and Soviet.” – Ernest Becker, ‘Denial of Death’

“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.” – R. D. Laing

“They are playing a game.  They are playing at not playing a game.  If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me.  I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.”  – R.D. Laing

 

“The function of education has never been to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them…acquiescence, not originality. …Schools are the central conserving force of the culture. … In order not to fail, most people are willing to believe anything and to care not whether what they are told is true or false.  Only by remaining absurd can one feel free from fear of failure.” – Jules Henry, cultural anthropologist, in ‘Culture Against Man’
“It is Henry’s contention that in practice education has never been an instrument to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them. … Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiousity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that. Love is the path through permissiveness to discipline; and through discipline, only too often, to betrayal of self.” – R. D. Laing, psychiatrist and philosopher

 

I acknowledge that all things have both good and bad in them, and we can find these in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia or Reagan’s America. That is the point, really, that if we use the binary values of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, depending on our prejudice, we can select out a preponderance of one or the other to characterize the same thing. This is the thrust of Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’, and he makes this point very well. The ‘winners’ talk a very different story than ‘the losers’.

Who makes the public statements in the wake of the latest massacre in the U.S.?   Is it not always ‘the winners’, the Presidents, Governors and Mayors who have no idea how such things could have happened? Why not invite those ‘losers’ to speak who have been on the edge of doing such things, but have managed to restrain themselves and regain their ‘spirituality’.

The point is that Western society is a materialist society that CAN BE despiritualizing. It is very unlike the indigenous aboriginal societies that colonization has all but exterminated; e.g. the Iroquois Confederacy;

“To Engels, Morgan’s description of the Iroquois [in Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society and The League of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois] was important because “it gives us the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no state.” Jefferson had also been interested in the Iroquois’ ability to maintain social consensus without a large state apparatus, as had Franklin. Engels described the Iroquoian state in much the same way that American revolutionaries had a century earlier: “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households — still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal — including the women.” — Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders

 

6. Western society promotes the binary value of ‘win/lose competition’ as the foundation of Western society’s operative dynamics.   It assigns the binary value ‘good’ to win/lose competition. Western science views win/lose competition as the evolutionary force in nature, as in society.   Science supports Darwinism which gives us the concept of racial supremacy [the relative superiority [winner class] and inferiority [loser class] of biological ‘races’. While others [Nietzsche included] would argue that Darwinism is nonsense, and that the concept of ‘species’ as ‘independent categories’ is intellectual idealization that is contradicted by the physical reality of our natural experience. In fact, there is no such thing as a ‘category’ in indigenous aboriginal languages. ‘The origin of species’ is ‘us’; i.e. our noun-and-verb language-and-grammar assisted intellectual idealization. Species are not ‘independent beings’; i.e. humans are not ‘independent beings’, … but relational forms in a transforming relational continuum.

7. International political strategies in the modern world are based on binary logic as in ‘game theory’. BBC documentary producer Adam Curtis’ ‘The Trap’ DOCUMENTS how we have applied this logic in Western government and commerce

Part 1 — Fuck You Buddy

This first episode examines the rise of a mathematical model about human behaviour called Game Theory developed during the Cold War, and the way in which its premises filtered into economic thought. The programme traces the development of the theory with particular reference to the work of the mathematician John Nash, who constructed such models for which he won the Nobel Prize in economics. He invented games reflecting his beliefs about human behaviour, including one he called “Fuck You Buddy,” in which the only way to win was to ruthlessly betray your playing partner. While these games were mathematically coherent, they only worked correctly when the players obeyed the ground rules that they should behave selfishly and try to outwit and betray their opponents. As the 1960s became the 70s, the theories of a Scottish psychiatrist R.D Laing and the models of Nash began to converge, producing a widespread popular belief that the state was purely and simply a mechanism of social control which calculatedly kept power out of the hands of the public. This episode shows how this belief allowed economic models that left no room for altruism to unrealistically look credible, and then how this went on to serve the free-market beliefs of Margaret Thatcher who believed that by dismantling as much of the British state as possible, a new form of ‘social equilibrium’ would be reached. This was a return to Nash’s work, in which the paradoxical claim was that if everyone was pursuing their own selfish interests, a “stable society” would result. But as the mathematically modelled society is run on cold scientific data—performance targets, quotas and statistics—it is precisely this data in the information age, combined with the false belief that ruthless selfishness can provide stability and a fair society, that has created “The Trap.”

8. Western society is divided in the sense that some interpret binary ‘good and evil’ logic in a literal manner [Poincaré refers to this way of thinking as ‘realism’] while others see ‘good and evil’ as a pragmatic idealization that should not be confused for ‘reality’. The realists believe that the present is not connected with the remote past, so that when people who continue to feel humiliated by the colonizing powers which continue to prevail in the world, ‘push back’, their violent actions are deemed to derive fully and solely from their own interior; i.e. from an ‘evil’ that resides in their interior.   This holds us, as members of the colonial power alliance, to be ‘innocent’ and sees terrorist actions as NOT being rooted in the remote past, arising from present evil; e.g;

In May of 2015, Stephen Harper rallied Canadian troops in Kuwait, reminding them that they were there “to comfort and defend the innocence in this part of the world, and to make sure this threat does not despoil our home and native land…. Make no mistake: by fighting this enemy here you are protecting Canadians at home because this evil knows no borders, and left uncontained, it will spread like a plague.”

At the same time, there are others have not seen such violence as a simple story of ‘good and evil’, but rather as ‘people pushing back’. Among these, Jean Chrétien and North American indigenous aboriginals, the latter perhaps because, having been the target of cultural genocide, understand ‘push-back feelings’, whether or not acted upon.

Native spokesperson, Ward Churchill, on the day after 9/11 observed;

 

 

“Looking back, it will seem to future generations inexplicable why Americans were unable on their own, and in time to save themselves, to accept a rule of nature so basic that it could be mouthed by an actor, Lawrence Fishburn, in a movie, The Cotton Club.

 

 

“You’ve got to learn, ” the line went, “that when you push people around, some people push back.

 

 

”

As they should. … As they must. … And as they undoubtedly will.

 

 

There is justice in such symmetry”.

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien commented, in a Mansbridge interview broadcast nationally on September 11, 2002;

 

 

“… it is a division in the world that is building up. And I knew that it was the inspiration of it [9/11]   … You know, you cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others.  And that is what the Western world, not only the Americans, the Western world has to realize, because they are human beings too, and there are long-term consequences if you don’t look hard at the reality in 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. … we’re looked upon as being arrogant, self-satisfied, greedy and with no limits. And the 11th of September is an occasion for me to realize it even more.”

 

9. The ‘de-spiritualizing’ built into Western European culture that comes from noun-and-verb language-and-grammar and its power of ‘bewitchment’ of our understanding [Wittgenstein] is not bundled into relational or ‘flow-based’ languages. That is, the subject-verb-predicate constructs of Indo-European/scientific languages have us understand that the unfolding actualities we observe derive from independent authors who are fully and solely responsible for their own behaviour and the results that we see [e.g. the child-soldier, the storm-cell]. That is, after all, the meaning given by christening a relational form with a name, making it a ‘subject’ in grammar, and having it inflect a verb, in which case it becomes understood as the full and sole author of a deed. People who shoot others are seen to be fully and solely responsible for their actions, as that is all that grammar allows., and therefore all that discursive reasoning allows, in a ‘literal’ sense; i.e. ‘the child-soldier shoots and kills the four villagers’.   In Western justice, this is the end of story, however in the restorative justice of peoples with relational languages, it is impossible to isolate the child-soldier and his actions from the relational dynamics of the community he is included in.   Thus, his actions would be understood more in the sense of finding one’s children fighting, where it is impossible to determine whether the one who is currently perpetrating an act of aggression is in push-back mode. The inappropriateness or viciousness of the attack is different from the question of whether it is pushback; i.e. if you give a mild poke to a stray dog, the violence of the response may be highly disproportionate to the poke, but of course that dog may have been poked many times, so that it’s tolerance threshold is low and pent up anger is high. In other words, “the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants” [Mach’s principle]. Whether a male encounters a female who ambient relational dynamics have put into a romantic mood, or whether she reaches out to pat a dog who has earlier been repetitively poked and teased, the encounter cannot be understood in two-body Newtonian terms.

Our ‘inhabitant dynamics’ undergo continual conditioning from the dynamics of the habitat we are situationally included in. The habitat is the mother of the inhabitant, but the inhabitant is what attracts the observer’s attention and noun-and-verb language and grammar allows us to subjectize the inhabitant as if it were an independent being and have the subject inflect verbs and general predicates, leaving behind all memory of the natural primacy of the habitat not only in orchestrating the behaviours of the inhabitants but in creating the inhabitants.

“The spirit of the valley never dies.

This is called the mysterious woman.

The gateway of the mysterious woman

Is called the root of heaven and earth

Dimly visible, it seems as it if were there,

Yet use will never drain it. (VI)

‘Know the male

But keep the role of the female

And be ravine to the Empire

Then the constant virtue will not desert you

And you will again return to being a babe.”

(Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching  XXVIII)

For children who grow up using the flow-based languages which symbolize the world as a relational continuum in which we are included and in which there is only ‘earlier’ and ‘later’, … physical phenomena such as the inexorable ‘slumping of the terrain’, a statement that is purely relational, may give way, in the noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific languages, to “the mountains are eroding over time and the valleys are filling in over time”.  And of course, these things can be proven true.  We know that we can fill in holes with rock, and we know that ‘rock slides’ or ‘land-slides’ are common, and that they do fill in valleys, and that this process erodes the mountains that the mountains become smaller and more rounded as they age and undergo these aging processes.

But the understanding that ‘the terrain is slumping’ is ‘relational’ and comprehends the coincidence of opposites wherein the mountains are transmitting rocks and the valleys are accommodating receivers/receptacles.  While we can speak of the two aspects of this coincidence of opposites separately, there is ‘really’ only one dynamic going on here, and it is relational transformation.   Here we have ‘wave particle duality’ [the wave view is non-dualist and the particle view is dualist since once we focus on matter as one thing, we need to invent space as the container and operating theatre.   That is, the material view depicts matter and space by way of binary logic, as two independent things; motion is therefore ‘matter moving through space’, whereas, in an energy-charged transforming relational continuum, ‘relations are all there is’.   As with the storm-cells in the lower troposphere on a hot summer afternoon, we can talk about them as ‘inhabitants that stir the habitat’ but they are, in the physical reality of our experience, ‘habitat-stirrings that are stirring the habtat’ (agents of transformation in a self-organizing relational continuum).

* * *

Summary:

There is a lot more to this than has been said here, but this may be enough to put the suggestion as to what is going on, on the table.

This is not pointing the finger of blame at anyone, at any group; it is beyond good and evil, where Nietzsche was, and where indigenous aboriginal traditionalists are, and where the so-called ‘relational theorists’ of modern physics, like Mach, Bohm, Schroedinger are.

It is nevertheless affirming Russell Means suggestion that Western European culture [its reason and morality based institutions] is ‘de-spiriting’, as has also been suggested by Becker and Curtis and Laing and others. This is not to say that ‘everyone has been de-spirited’, but that the win/lose competition of the free market economy that we all help to sustain, is ‘de-spiriting’. Do we have the ‘spirit’ of ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (‘we are all related’)?   Not those of us while we are in the mode of taking seriously our ‘catechism’ and our ‘science’, both of which declare our ‘independent being’, as does our sovereign state government and our corporate charters. [Jesus, by all accounts did not push the binary moral judgement on people, else he would have with Mary Magdalen, yet he acknowledged that prostitution manifests through individuals but is not jumpstart authored from within them].

The pervasive binary absolutism in our Western culture; i.e. in our discursive reasoning and in our moral judging, allows us to be impervious to the complaints of ‘losers’ in our competitive society, both on a scale of individuals and on the scale of nations (e.g. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan). When people push back, what makes us think that that we are the innocent ones? Yes, it is written into the definition of our ‘self’ in the terms that; “Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.”, and it is this ‘independent being’ view of self that is written into our sense of justice, therefore we can, with impunity and the full backing of justice system, abuse and suffocate others, through our competitive process which makes losers out of others in the same fell stroke that it makes winners out of us.

Intuitively, we know that it is not so simple as ‘terrorists are guilty offenders and we are innocent victims’. In understanding the world as a relational continuum, there is no past, present and future, and so it is ludicrous to depict ourselves, the descendents of the European colonizers of the Middle East and the Americas, as having nothing to do with the continuing miseries of colonized others who are still ‘pushing back’ to unfetter themselves from our oppressive powers, our power to ‘humiliate’, as was part of the cultural genocide of indigenous aboriginal peoples of Turtle Island.

To conclude this note, I will restate what one might look for, and increasingly recognize as we continue to move from earlier to later in the transforming relational continuum;

1. Nietzsche was right; … Western civilization since Plato and Socrates, built upon binary logic based reason and moral judgement, is collapsing.

2. That we are headed into a period of ‘nihilism’ wherein our elevating of reason and morality into unnatural precedence over intuition and harmony [continually restoring relational balance and harmony] will be subsumed by restoring to natural precedence, intuition and harmony. Thus, “the devaluation of the highest values” – Nietzsche.

3. Reason and morality have been the architectural principles of our institutional systems of governance, commerce and justice, as well as Western monotheist teachings [Christianity, Islam, Judaism] and it is these institutional practices that are most involved in this transition.

4. The leadership of Western institutions, who have ‘assumed responsibility’ for keeping the world running smoothly ‘according to Western values’ , are increasingly challenged in trying to make this ‘reason and morality’ based system ‘work’. This is because it is a binary logic based intellectually idealized system that is fundamentally ‘at odds’ with the physical reality of our natural experience.   Right now, the solution is seen in terms of applying the binary principles ever more stringently.

5. Why should this collapse occur now, after all this time?   As mentioned, the literal imposing of reason and morality on us from the outside-in, has been steadily growing with science and technology and with government, commerce and justice using science and technology.

6. Western society promotes the binary value of ‘win/lose competition’ as the foundation of Western society’s operative dynamics.   It assigns the binary value ‘good’ to win/lose competition. Western science views win/lose competition as the evolutionary force in nature, as in society.

7. International political strategies in the modern world are based on binary logic as in ‘game theory’. BBC documentary producer Adam Curtis’ ‘The Trap’ DOCUMENTS how we have applied this logic in Western government and commerce

8. Western society is divided in the sense that some interpret binary ‘good and evil’ logic in a literal manner [Poincaré refers to this way of thinking as ‘realism’] while others see ‘good and evil’ as a pragmatic idealization that should not be confused for ‘reality

9. The ‘de-spiritualizing’ built into Western European culture that comes from noun-and-verb language-and-grammar and its power of ‘bewitchment’ of our understanding [Wittgenstein] is not bundled into relational or ‘flow-based’ languages.

* * *