Western civilizational-dysfunction: How language distorts reality

Pender Island, January 2, 2016

“I want us to be very clear. You will not defeat us.”

The following is a commentary by a national political leader manifesting the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. That person is David Cameron, Prime Minister of the U.K. who says, in his January 1, 2016 New Year’s address to the nation;

“And we will take on another social problem too. When our national security is threatened by a seething hatred of the West, …one that turns people against their country and can even turn them into murderous extremists. I want us to be very clear. You will not defeat us. And we will not just confront the violence and the terror, we will take on the underlying poisonous narrative of grievance and resentment. We will come down hard on those who create the conditions for that narrative to flourish. And we will have greater confidence in, … indeed we will revel in, our way of life because if you walk our streets, learn in our schools, benefit from our society, you sign up to our values; freedom, tolerance, responsibility, loyalty. These are the big challenges of our age; some of the biggest our nation ever faced. And this year is a test of our metal.” – David Cameron

David Cameron is speaking to others with a grievance against the actions of the colonial powers, as if they were an independent body of people, an independent body of ‘evil people’ who had divided themselves from the relational social collective, and were on the attack against another independent body of people, the independent body of ‘good people’ that he represents. He is confused as to the physical reality of the world dynamic wherein ‘relations are all there is’, where conflict is a coincidence of opposites rather than two separate, independent factions. Where the world is only given once, as a transforming relational continuum.

In the physical reality of our natural experience, we live within a unum that is undergoing continual relational transformation and is therefore a unum-in-opposition [Heraclitus]. Eruptions of violence that manifest through particular relational forms within a transforming relational unum do not imply a local authoring source of the violence, however, it is an ‘economy of thought’ to assume that the source of the conflict arises from the relational forms through which the tensional energy is released. For example, the ‘child-soldier’ is a vent for releasing relational tensions in the social collective, though not the jumpstart source of such release. The source, being relational, is non-local, yet Western civilization, because of its elevating of reason and moral judgement into an unnatural precedence over intuition and the instinct to cultivate, restore and sustain relational balance and harmony, scapegoats the ‘venting’ child-soldier [or ‘miner’s canary’] by making him out to be the local jumpstart author of the violence who is fully and solely responsible for the results of the violence.

The extended family/community that points the finger of blame at the child-soldier [the alleged guilty offender], by portraying him as the local jumpstart cause of the violence, render themselves, because of the binary logic of moral judgement, as ‘innocent victims’ although they, too, are included within the relational continuum and share in the sourcing of the relational tensions that found release through the child-soldier.

Binary logic that permeates noun-and-verb Indo-European language-and-grammar underpins the theological and secularized theological [scientific] notion of ‘independent being’ which permits the reasoned deconstruction of purely relational conflict, making it out to be violent intentions authored by ‘evil independent beings’ that aim to maim and kill ‘good independent beings’. Since it is physically impossible to divide up a relational continuum into ‘independent beings’, this portrait of conflict as the battle between ‘good independent beings’ and ‘evil independent beings’ amounts to paranoid schizophrenia, as in Cameron’s statement;

“I want us to be very clear. You will not defeat us.”

As Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien observed in a nationally televised interview on the first anniversary of 9/ll [2002], polarization arises within a relational social collective from a build up of relational tensions do to unrelenting humiliation of colonized peoples by Euro-American colonizing powers; i.e. divisions arise from simultaneous RELATIONAL [relative] tensions within a transforming relational unum [continuum].

“… 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.” – Jean Chrétien

Cameron’s paranoid schizophrenic worldview [which couples with a mirror image paranoid schizophrenia arising in the ‘feared others’] cultivates an ‘auto-immune disease’ within the global social collective.

This archetype of mirrored paranoid schizophrenia is a general template for ‘mental illness’. As Thomas Szasz, Ronald Laing and Raymond Cochrane have all pointed out [and as is the case with ‘child soldier’], the source of the disturbing energy is not situated within the individual that vents this energy: it derives from relational social tensions.

In ‘Crazy for You’, Jill Astbury similarly interprets WHO statistics that show that women have twice the incidence of affective disorders as men, as indicating that women tend to be the first point of breakdown for venting tensions in a relational social dynamic. The emotional disturbance that manifests through women is a venting from the tensioned relational continuum [e.g. the extended relational matrix of family, friends, co-workers].

Once the ‘others’ are looking on the emotionally disturbed person as if her disturbing behaviour [which can be very scary and suggestive of superstitious ‘possession by the devil’ paranoid fears] derives from within her, the emotionally disturbed person can see in their eyes, that she is nothing [sub-human] and that they would like to ‘get rid of her’ [and get the other normal person back]. This paranoid schizophrenia mirrors back into itself like the infinite images in mirrors that face each other. As is the case with terrorism, one faction will be more solidly anchored in the dominant social structure so that the one that breaks down first will be first identified as the defective one that must be straight-jacketed or taken into custody for the protection of the public, the good, innocent, normal people, who will be determined not to be distracted from their status quo practices by the disturbances coming from deranged people.

“I want us to be very clear. You will not defeat us.”

Eruptions of conflict within an interdependent relational social dynamic are like earthquakes that associate with the transforming lithosphere. Those through whom relational tensions release are miner’s canaries who ‘take the hit’ for the needed reconfiguring/transformation that seeks to lower tensions. These ‘miner’s canaries’, in a transforming relational social dynamic are the so-called ‘mentally ill’, the so-called’ criminal elements’, and the so-called ‘terrorists’ or ‘rebels’.

In Chrétien’s interpretation of terrorism, there is one global collective that is undergoing a build-up of relational tensions within itself, that is the source of eruptions of violence. The perceived cure becomes the restoring of balance and harmony within the global relational social dynamic.

In Cameron’s interpretation of terrorism, the relational Unum is perceived to be ‘splitting into two’; ‘the evil’ and ‘the good’ [an impossibility in physical reality], and the perceived cure becomes ‘the elimination of the evil’. This is like environmentalists trying to construct houses in the forest without destroying any forest. It is a view that is blind to the physical reality of our experience wherein ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ are conjugate aspects within a single, ‘coincidence of opposites’ dynamic [relational transformation].

Cameron uses ‘two voices’ at the same time as he splits the ‘us’ into ‘you and us’;

“…a seething hatred of the West, …one that turns people against their country and can even turn them into murderous extremists. I want us to be very clear. You will not defeat us.”

Cameron’s ‘you will not defeat us’ treats conflict not as something ‘relative’ as in relational tensions within a transforming relational unum, but as a collection of ‘independent beings’ that can morph into two real polar opposites; ‘the good’ and ‘the evil’ implying ‘the innocent’ and ‘the guilty’ so that the remedial action becomes one of smoking out ‘the evil offenders and potential offenders’ and eliminating them in order to protect ‘the good and innocent’.

Cameron’s view is like the view of the self-appraised ‘normal’ person who judges the individual undergoing emotional distress [venting tensions in the relational social matrix that the ‘normals’ are contributing to], as the local source of her own emotional distress; i.e. as defective others aka ‘evil independent beings’. The ‘evil eye’ that Cameron aims at the terrorists mirrors the ‘evil eye’ that the terrorists give to Cameron and herein ensues bilateral paranoid schizophrenia, which began as relational social tensions that could have been [and still can be] resolved through restorative justice processes.

This view of Cameron’s, which seems to be the default view of Western civilization [i.e. as Nietzsche says, it is a ‘being’-based view that puts reason and moral judgement into unnatural precedence over intuition and restoring of balance and harmony] is radically unlike the view that understands eruptions of violence as deriving from relational tensions within a relational social collective or transforming relational unum, wherein those tensions are buffered by local absorption or reconfigured by local push-back. This latter view is common to indigenous aboriginals who have been chronically humiliated and exposed to cultural genocide through the policies of the Euro-American colonizers. As Ward Churchill said of the ‘terrorist’ 9/11 action, on September 12, 2001, the day after the attack on the WTC towers;

“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”.

Ward Churchill might have also noted that the binary logic of reason and moral judgement does not acknowledge that the child-soldier is a ‘vent’ for relational tensions in the overall social matrix, and not the local jumpstart authoring source, meaning that the good and innocent doing the judging were co-contributors to the tensions in the relational matrix which sourced the push-back through the ‘venting actions’ of extremists.

In a relational social unum, internally tensioned against itself, the tension is ‘relative’ and push-back is natural. The issue of how the push-back is done; i.e. with cluster bombs, drones, napalm or beheadings does not change the reality that the tension arises ‘relatively’ as in a ‘coincidence of opposites’. There is nothing in physical reality that established an absolute ‘norm’ of ‘correct behaviour’ that defines ‘bad behaviour’ in terms of such behaviour being discernible as a departure from some absolute norm of ‘good behaviour’. In a relational social dynamic there is no absolute ‘norm’ or baseline. European ‘absolutism’ is the source of global societal dysfunction, as is the title of this note, and as is the inference in Russell Mean’s 1980 comments in Mother Jones;

“The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate thinking”: what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken” – Russell Means

What Means is addressing is that

“The process itself [articulating views in subject-verb-predicate rhetoric] epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate thinking”: what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken [what is spoken from the ‘heart-voice’ rather than the ‘head-voice’].” – Russell Means

The European view conceives of the world in a mechanical way which sees dynamics in terms of material parts whose actions speak for themselves.  This mechanical view is a ‘de-spiritualizing’ view that fails to acknowledge how influence flows through the relational social dynamic and how people locally vent that which is nonlocally sourced.

In the indigenous aboriginal ‘peace-making’ tradition, evil must be transformed in a restorative justice process in which there is no splitting of the community into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ followed by wars of elimination of the evil that correspond to refining and distilling out ‘the good’.

How the global relational social dynamic unfolds in 2016 and beyond depends a lot on whether the schizophrenic views of society continue to dominate, as they have been encouraged, by political leaders such as Cameron, Hollande and Obama.

Chrétien’s views on terrorism are similar to those of Russell Mean’s and Ward Churchill, perhaps because Chrétien derives from an ‘under-dog’ culture, the Quebecois Franco-Canadien minority, that has experienced ‘humiliation’ by the winning ‘imperialist/colonialist’ Anglo-culture, and realizes that such humiliation can come from sleeping in the same bed with an elephant whose rolling around can cause injury more from insensitivity than from maliciousness, an elephant that will interpret ‘push-back’ as an unprovoked and unjustified “poisonous narrative of grievance and resentment”.

Question:

Do those that view terrorism as ‘push-back’ within a relationally tensioned social unum, such as Chrétien, Means and Churchill ‘have it right’? [the non-dualist view of conflict], or do those that view terrorism in terms of the war of ‘the good’ against ‘the evil’ such as Cameron, Hollande and Obama ‘have it right’? [the dualist view of conflict].

This essay is to suggest that the views of Cameron, Hollande and Obama are Western civilization ‘mainstream’ views which, because they draw from binary logic based discursive reason and binary logic based moral [‘good-and-evil’] judgement, infuse dysfunction into the global social dynamic that manifests as ‘the war on terrorism’, ‘the war on criminal behaviour’ and ‘the war on mental illness’. In all cases, these ‘wars’ attempt to eliminate something [perceived as] ‘going wrong with others out there’, as if the global social collective can be split into the ‘normals’ and the ‘abnormals’ when the global social collective cannot, in any real physical, phenomenological sense, be ‘split’ at all [the world is only given once, as a transforming relational continuum]. What we are dealing with is paranoid schizophrenia, an auto-immune disease in which the relational collective is attacking its own miner’s canaries aka alarm systems.

“I want us to be very clear. You will not defeat us.”

The binary logic comes from noun-and-verb language-and-grammar which RE-presents the dynamics of our relational experience in the fragmented terms of ‘independent material objects and organisms’ and ‘what these independent entities do’. This is a view that comes from language that does not reconcile with our experiencing of dynamics. For example, thanks to language, we talk about the atmosphere as if it were a factory that produced widgets called ‘storm-cells’, however, these ‘cells’ never ‘individuate’ from the energy-charged relational unum, they remain as ‘features’ within it, so that in order to understand what a storm-cell is, we must understand the relational continuum in all its depth, which is impossible. One alternative, facilitated by noun-and-verb language-and-grammar, is to measure all of the properties of the cells relative to a notional absolute space and absolute time reference/measuring frame and then describe the cells in terms of a category of notional widgets [local, independent material entities] on the basis of ‘common properties’ and variations therein.

This method of giving meaning to ‘humans’ and/or ‘storm-cells’ by way of notional categories whose members have common properties and variants therein, bypasses the complexity of having to take into account the physical reality of ‘cosmic fetalization’ of relational features such as storm-cells and human forms.

“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” … “The properties of one mass always include relations to other masses,” … “Every single body of the Universe stands in some definite relations with every other body in the Universe.” Therefore, no object can “be regarded as wholly isolated.” And even in the simplest case, “the neglecting of the rest of the world is impossible.” – Ernst Mach

In the world seen as a transforming relational continuum, there are no ‘independent material objects or organisms’;

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

Mach, Schroedinger, Bohm and Faraday are addressing the physical reality of our actual, natural experience, whereas the world of ‘independent material entities and organisms’ is a ‘world of talk’, a language-built ‘operative reality’ that does not reconcile with the physical reality of our actual, natural experience. In the physical reality of our actual experience, we are relational features in a transforming relational continuum. Because we are features in a common flow-field, all of us are influenced by all of us; i.e. “Every single body of the Universe stands in some definite relations with every other body in the Universe.”   This can also be expressed in terms of ‘field’ where we acknowledge that ‘gravity is everywhere at the same time’.

The common energy-charged relational continuum gathers within itself the relational forms that are its agents of relational transformation;

“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

This difference in the (a) views of Jean Chrétien, Russell Means and Ward Churchill [terrorism is people-who-have been humiliated for generations by the Euro-American colonial powers, ‘pushing back’], versus the (b) views of Cameron, Hollande and Obama [people have separated into two real physical groups; ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’], corresponds to this difference in (a) the physically real experiencing of the world as an energy-charged transforming relational continuum, and (b) the subject-verb-predicate discursive world of notional ‘independent material objects and organisms’ that reside, operate and interact in a habitat that is notionally ‘independent’ of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it.

The criticisms of Western civilization, by Russell Means and Ward Churchill, are the same criticisms aimed at Western civilization by Friedrich Nietzsche; i.e. it is the unnatural elevating of reason and moral judgement above relational experience based intuition and inherent tendency to restore balance and harmony, that leads to societal dysfunction or ‘incoherence’.

Only Western civilization being-speak literalists would think that it would make sense to divide the entire space of the surface of the globe up into two sovereign states giving 99% of the space to one [e.g. a European culture state] and reserve 1% of the space to the other [e.g. an indigenous aboriginal culture free space] then think it meaningful to consider both as ‘independent states’ each with the right to pursue their own self-interests in whatever manner they choose. The indigenous aboriginal 1% would see no sense in conceiving the two states as ‘independent’ since what the 99% did would shape the dynamics of the entire world-habitat which are at the same time influencing the dynamics of 100% of the inhabitants of the world; i.e. what the 99% did to earth, air, water and fire would not be contained within the imaginary line boundaries of the 99% European state, and vice versa for the 1%.

Is it possible for the massively powerful majority to humiliate the scarcely powerful minority just by pursuing their own self-interests in an insensitive way? Yes, what would stop it? [the error lies in the belief in ‘independent being’]. The mouse that sleeps with the elephant had better hope that the elephant is sensitive and caring. But in the case of the cultural genocide of the indigenous aboriginals of Turtle Island, by Euro-American colonizers, the attempts at converting them to the European colonizing culture was likened to curing them of a disease or deficiency [their ‘savage’ and ‘ignorant’ pagan conditioning].

Actions have no intrinsic goodness or badness in themselves.

“an action in itself is quite devoid of value ; the whole question is this: who performed it? One and the same ” crime ” may, in one case, be the greatest privilege, in the other infamy. As a matter of fact, it is the selfishness of the judges which interprets an action (in regard to its author) according as to whether it was useful or harmful to themselves (or in relation to its degree of likeness or unlikeness to them).”— Nietzsche on ‘Morality’ and ‘Herd Behaviour’ in ‘The Will to Power’.

To those of the European colonizer culture, the forced removal of indigenous aboriginal children from their parents and putting them in residential schools to ‘kill the indian, save the man’, was a charitable act.

“We will come down hard on those who create the conditions for that narrative [poisonous narrative of grievance and resentment] to flourish. And we will have greater confidence in, … indeed we will revel in, our way of life because if you walk our streets, learn in our schools, benefit from our society, you sign up to our values; freedom, tolerance, responsibility, loyalty.” – David Cameron

As with the cultural genocide of indigenous aboriginals of Turtle Island by purveyors of of European colonialism [including what was once overtly, proudly called ‘British Imperialism’], there is no acknowledgement in Cameron’s present interpretation of terrorism that people are being differentially oppressed/privileged by the dominating colonizing culture and that such oppression/privileging may be the source of the ‘poisonous narrative’ and terrorist actions.

Just as there was dismissal of Chrétien’s suggestion that terrorist attacks were inductively sourced ‘push-back, meaning that the terrorism derived from the ongoing oppression of the Euro-American colonizing powers [this was dismissed with cries of ‘don’t make excuses for evil terrorists’], there continues to be such dismissal, of the continuing testimony from reliable monitoring sources; e.g;

Robert 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 says that Western colonial powers have left a legacy that has led to the instability and continued violence in the Middle East;
1. The Syrian 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.

* * *
What is the basis of the assumption of ‘man’ as ‘independent being’?

At Issue is whether the global social collective is, as linguistic idealization depicts, a collection of ‘independent beings’ with their own local, internal process driven and directed behaviours, who are fully and solely responsible for the results of their behaviours, … or, whether, as in the physical reality of our actual, natural experience, we are all relational forms within a transforming relational continuum. The former ‘schizophrenic’ view of individual relational forms as ‘independent beings’ is the enabler of the now globally dominant view encouraged by Cameron, Hollande and Obama, of a global populace split into ‘good people’ and ‘evil people’. The alternative view of a global populace, as relational forms included within a world given only once as a transforming relational continuum, has been largely silenced. The silencing of the Chrétien et al view associates with the simple and straightforward appeal of the ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ binary logical view which has been historically supported by Western monotheist beliefs of Christianity, Judaism and Islam which portray ‘man’ as an ‘independent being with free will and mastery over his acts; e.g;

“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.” – Vatican Archives, The Catholic Catechism.

Western science likewise depicts man as an independent being’ through analytical inquiry that breaks man down, notionally, into a number of layers of smaller and smaller parts and explains the independent operation of the ‘whole local system’ in terms of the operations of its parts contributing to a mechanical ‘whole’. This analytical fragmentation and mechanical reassembly is made possible by imposing a notional reference/measurement frame;  – absolute space and absolute time, which allows a notional break-out and separation of relational forms from the transforming relational continuum.

In the philosophy of Plato and Socrates, the notion of man as an ‘independent being’ is tied to man’s intellectual sense of self [i.e. independent being is language and reason derived];

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

Further support for language derived sense of ‘independent being’ in contradiction to the ‘relations are all there is’ findings of modern physics, comes from the investigations of linguist Benjamin Whorf;

“It is sometimes stated that Newtonian space, time, and matter are sensed by everyone intuitively, whereupon relativity is cited as showing how mathematical analysis can prove intuition wrong. This, besides being unfair to intuition, is an attempt to answer offhand question (1) put at the outset of this paper, to answer which this research was undertaken. Presentation of the findings now nears its end, and I think the answer is clear. The offhand answer, laying the blame upon intuition for our slowness in discovering mysteries of the Cosmos, such as relativity, is the wrong one. The right answer is: Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are receipts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them.” – Benjamin Whorf, ‘The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language’

In Newtonian physics, it is ‘standard procedure’ to ‘break out’ relational forms from the transforming relational continuum by imposing the absolute space and absolute time reference/measurement framing using these measures to describe the relational form (e.g. a storm-cell) in terms of ‘categories’ established by ‘common properties’. In this manner the relational forms can be compared across multiple ‘appearances’ and their similar properties, and variations therein, rather than seeking to understand them relative to the transforming relational continuum in which they gather. Seeking meaning/value in terms of categories can lead to assigning meaning/value by putting category into an unnatural precedence over ‘cosmic fetalization’;

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’

* * *
‘Independent being’, as discussed, … is an idealization born of noun-and-verb language-and-grammar. While it is a useful concept for discursive communicating on simple matters, it can lead to ‘incoherence’ in the relational social dynamic if confused for ‘reality’. That is, it can lead to mutually mirrored paranoid schizophrenia as is currently being intensified. Rather than being ‘one relational social matrix’ in which relational tensions breed conflict, as in nature, generally, there has been increasing paranoid schizophrenia in police and minority relations, as well as in Christian – Muslim relations. Such incoherence develops in concert with substituting a collection of notional ‘independent beings’ for a relational social matrix.

Review of the relational view of the world, from which point of view, David Cameron’s views are ‘schizophrenic’ in the sense that he is splitting our inherent ‘One-ness’ into two parts, the ‘good part’ and the ‘evil part’ and treating both parts as ‘real’ rather than as one relational matrix within which relational tensions are sourcing conflict as a ‘coincidence of opposites’, is contributing to a mutually mirrored paranoid schizophrenia.
Modern physics, meanwhile, supports an understanding of the physical reality of our experience in relational terms; i.e. in terms where ‘relations are all there is’, and relational forms, rather than being understood as ‘independent’ material objects and organisms, are understood as relational features in the transforming relational continuum;

“By the principle of Occam’s razor, physicists and philosophers prefer ideas that can explain the same phenomena with the fewest assumptions. In this case you can construct a perfectly valid theory by positing the existence of certain relations without additionally assuming individual things. So proponents of ontic structural realism say we might as well dispense with things and assume that the world is made of [relational-spatial] structures, or nets of relations.” – Meinard Kuhlmann, ‘What is Real’, Scientific American, August 2013

Escaping from the ‘bewitching of our understanding by language’ [Wittgenstein] can be aided by finding ways to ‘visualize’ the world in the modern physics terms where ‘relations are all there is’ so that we will not be stuck with a view that insists on seeing the world dynamic in terms of it being driven by ‘independent material entities and organisms and what they do’.

One such archetype for a purely relational form that is local, visible and tangible, although NOT an ‘independent being’ is toroidal flow as in a convection cell.

A planet and/or a human being and/or a particle can be understood in this manner; i.e. as a relational feature in an energy-charged transforming relational continuum;

Although the purely relational view is certainly intuitively accessible; i.e. man as a relational feature within the transforming relational continuum, it is commonly contradicted and trumped by the Western theological, scientific and psychological view of man as an independent being; all of which have a common origin in noun-and-verb language-and-grammar; e.g;

Theological;

“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.” – Vatican Archives, The Catholic Catechism.

Scientific;

“It is sometimes stated that Newtonian space, time, and matter are sensed by everyone intuitively, whereupon relativity is cited as showing how mathematical analysis can prove intuition wrong. This, besides being unfair to intuition, is an attempt to answer offhand question (1) put at the outset of this paper, to answer which this research was undertaken. Presentation of the findings now nears its end, and I think the answer is clear. The offhand answer, laying the blame upon intuition for our slowness in discovering mysteries of the Cosmos, such as relativity, is the wrong one. The right answer is: Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are receipts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them.” – Benjamin Whorf, ‘The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language’

Psychological;

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

Those raised within ‘Western civilization’ and speaking a noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammar have a lot of ‘civilizational baggage’ such as elevating reason and moral judgement into an unnatural precedence over intuition and the inherent will to restore balance and harmony, to continue to ‘bewitch our understanding’.

Conclusion:

In physical reality [the reality of our natural experience], there is no justifiable basis for assuming that one part of the world [some ‘collection of independent beings’] is attacking some other part of the world [some other ‘collection of independent beings’] since our experience is of a world that is given only once; i.e. a world given as a transforming relational continuum. In other words, ‘conflict’, rather than deriving from two separate and opposing entities, derives from a ‘coincidence of opposites’. In the philosophy of Heraclitus, conflict is ‘union-in-opposition’.

We are accustomed to thinking of conflict in terms of two positive, but opposing, agencies because we visualize the opposing two things on a stage or in a ‘theatre of operations’ (a reference/measuring frame). However, simultaneous convergence and divergence is also conflict of the ‘coincidence of opposites’ form. For example, if people are dispersed in the space on the surface of a sphere, and connected with one another by relational tensions or springs, … as some converge, others will at the same be diverging, and vice versa. Rocks diverge away from the peaks of mountains and, at the same time, converge towards the pit of the valleys. The view is not that ‘two things are moving in opposite directions but that there is relational transformation [the terrain is slumping]. Instead of two ‘real’ opposites, there is one ‘relationally transforming’ reality; this is the physical reality of our actual, natural experience.

In addition to physical reality, there is an ‘alternative reality’ that comes to us by way of language and discursive reasoning that Western society has been [unnaturally] putting into precedence over the physical reality of our natural experience.

The hallmark of ‘Western civilization’ is the setting aside of the physical reality of our experience, and putting in its place as ‘reality’, an intellectually idealized [language-based] pseudo-reality which serves as an ‘operative reality’.

This pseudo-reality depicts the world in terms of symbols (words) that are given persisting meaning (‘identity’) and put into subject-verb-predicate constructs so that the subjects are portrayed as the local authors of cause-effect behaviour. We do this even with storm-cells where we can plainly see that what we are talking about is relational form, … relational ‘features’ within a transforming relational continuum. These forms are in no way ‘independently existing material entities, but using language to define them as such allows us to ‘construct a symbolic reality based on the movements and interactions of notional, ‘independently-existing’ local objects and organisms.

The world presented through the imagery of subject-verb-predicate constructs delivers a symbol based ‘operative reality’ wherein we name the local, visible and tangible ‘forms’ that we can see and touch, and speak of ‘their dynamics’ as if they were independently-existing things. As discussed, these relational forms are ‘appearances’, … ‘variations in the relational structure of the world-plenum’.

It is in this rhetorical ‘reality’ that ‘conflict’ as the battle between ‘the good’ and ‘the evil’ arises, … NOT in the physical reality of our actual, natural experience, wherein the world is given only once and ‘relations are all there is’.

We cannot construct a house in the forest without destroying some forest. While people can themselves get into conflicts over which value to assign to the same act, there is a way out of the dichotomy, and that is to acknowledge that we are included in a transforming relational continuum. The logic of relational transformation [physical reality] is ‘both/and’ logic rather than binary ‘either/or’ logic. The rhetorical reality of positivist logical propositions is not the physical reality of our natural experience.

The field of psychology, which informs the general public as to the origin and nature of eruptions of emotional distress in individuals, perpetuates the view of the individual human as ‘independent being’, setting the stage for the mutual mirroring of paranoid schizophrenia that permeates David Cameron’s statement;

“I want us to be very clear. You will not defeat us.”

As for the world’s ‘miner’s canaries’ that are labelled as ‘the mentally ill’, ‘the criminals’ and ‘the terrorists’, they continue to be treated as scape-goats that binary logic based ‘discursive reason’ and binary logic based ‘moral judgement’ identify as the local authoring source of disturbing behaviour, while in the same binary stroke, identifying those whose discursive reasoning and moral judgement is dominant, as good, innocent, victims of such disturbance. In this way of viewing the world dynamic; i.e. in terms of ‘independently-existing material objects and organisms’, the physically real source of the ‘venting’ of relational tensions through ‘the child-soldier, the sensitive person, the angry oppressed person who ‘pushes back’, is lost from view, and what remains for the fingers-of-blame to point at, are science and theology approved; ‘independent beings with internal process driven and directed behaviours who are full and solely responsible for the results of their actions’.

Retaining the relational view and avoiding the incoherence as in collective paranoid schizophrenia means retaining an intuitive hold on ‘the coincidence of opposites’ as a basic physical reality.

As Nicholas of Cusa observes;

“The coincidence of opposites is beyond the reach of discursive reasoning. The coincidence of opposites is a ‘unity to which neither otherness nor plurality nor multiplicity is opposed’ — Nicholas of Cusa, ‘Learned Ignorance’

Nicholas also wrote De coniecturis on the topic of using intuitive conjectures or surmises to rise to better understanding of the truth. The individual might rise above mere reason to the intuitive vision, but the same person might fall back from such vision. In this Heraclitean ‘falling asleep’ and ‘awakening’, the former seems to be currently dominating.

Without a re-awakening, the vicious circle of mutually mirrored paranoid schizophrenia may continue in its global escalation.

* * *

Footnote: “Progress”: What is it? Where is it going?

There are clues to answers to this question, one is the ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ that associates with ‘competition’ , another is the prophecy coming from indigenous aboriginals that the white man who contaminates his bed will one day suffocate in his own waste, and another in Russell Means comment that the European culture, which is now globally dominant, de-spiritualizes our common living space.

“Distilled to its basic terms, European faith—including the new faith in science—equals a belief that man is God.” – Russell Means

This assumption is echoed in Western monotheist doctrines; e.g.;

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

This view is ‘inverted’ relative to the physical reality of our natural experience as affirmed by the relational interpretation of modern physics wherein ‘relations are all there is’.

In our natural experience, we are included in a transforming relational continuum. That is, ‘Nature’ is this relational continuum and we can’t predict how it will continue to unfold. As John Lennon says; “life is what happens to us while we are busy making other plans”.

Religion and science have been presenting things in an upside-down manner which puts ‘hitting’ into precedence over ‘fielding’.

That is, there is a combination of dualism and inversion in Western ‘semantic reality’ relative to the physical reality of our natural experience. This dualism and inversion is in regard to how we see the relation between genesis which is male, hitting, asserting, acting, transmitting, …. and, …. epigenesis which is female, fielding, accommodating, receiving. In the physical reality of our natural experience, the relation is relative and is beyond the capability of language to describe, other than in convoluted terms such as “all things arise in the gap between unfolding situational possibility that is inductively actualizing actional potentials”. We can intuitively visualize this in the case of fluid dynamics where, as fluid opens up situational possibility it is at the same time actualizing its own actional potentials; i.e. this fluid-dynamic is a transforming relational continuum in which relational forms gather by the coincidence of opposites of epigenesis-genesis.

Western civilization, in building its semantic reality from the subject-verb-predicate constructs of noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammar, is implicitly ‘framing’ relational forms within a notional absolute space and absolute time reference/measuring frame. This ‘framing’ gives the impression of splitting into separate aspects, the coincidence of opposites [epigenesis and genesis, fielding and hitting], and retaining only the ‘male’ influence [genesis, hitting, asserting, action] as if the ‘female’ influence [epigenesis, fielding, accommodating, receiving] was non-existent, crediting all ‘hitting results’ or ‘genesis results’ to the hitter or genetic agency.

While Darwinian evolution is ‘all-genesis, no-epigenesis, Lamarckism was based on the coincidence of opposites of epigenesis and genesis. For example, in the development of a bubble in boiling water, we could impose a microwave field and shape it so as to heat up the interior of the bubble and make the bubble grow faster and/or cool off the fluid at a fair distance away from the bubble which would also serve to induce and shape the growth of the bubble. Lamarck terms such field effects ‘les fluides incontenables’ [fluids that can contain but which cannot be themselves contained] which act on ‘les fluides contenables’ [fluids which can be contained by ‘fields’]. Because of the subject-verb-predicate structure of our noun-and-verb language-and-grammar, we say ‘the bubble is expanding now slowly, now quickly and now bulging below its equator, which gives the sense that the bubble is the author of its own development; i.e. language and its subject-verb-predicate representations reduces the sense of the dynamic to ‘all-genesis’, ‘no-epigenesis’ [all male influence, no female influence].

This is a real physical phenomenon with psycho-social ramifications. For example the ‘ego’ is our image of ‘self’ as “like God; … created with free will and master over our acts.”

If the child of a privileged class or of a powerful person ‘takes his turn at bat’, those who are ‘fielding’ his hitting may accommodate his hitting efforts more than they would others, and because our language captures dynamics in subject-verb-predicate constructs, we say, his batting average is X, implying that he is fully and solely responsible for the results of his behaviour. Everything ‘checks out’ here science-wise since we measure his hits using our absolute space and absolute time reference/measuring frame. There is no accounting for the influence of fielding in the hitting-fielding coincidence of opposites since our noun-and-verb language presents dynamics in all-hitting, no-fielding terms. One has to ‘go to relativity’ to take into account the ‘female’ influence within the ‘male-female’ coincidence of opposites, and this takes us beyond the capabilities of straight-forward usage of noun-and-verb language-and-grammar since we can no longer separate out the influence of the hitter and the influence of the fielding on the hitting result.

Likewise, if we pop a blown up paper bag next so someone, we say ‘we make them jump’ but some people do not jump and some jump and scream and a war veteran with PTSD may ‘go postal’ and in all cases one says that ‘the bag-popper’ is responsible for the result, but those who ‘field’ the ‘hitting’ may be not very accommodating or highly accommodating and it is impossible to separate out the exact contribution of the hitter and the fielder, because, in the physical reality of our natural experience, ‘relations are all there is’, and there are no such things as ‘independent beings with internal process driven and directed behaviours that reside, operate and interact in a habitat that is notionally independent of the inhabitants that reside within it. That is;

“By the principle of Occam’s razor, physicists and philosophers prefer ideas that can explain the same phenomena with the fewest assumptions. In this case you can construct a perfectly valid theory by positing the existence of certain relations without additionally assuming individual things. So proponents of ontic structural realism say we might as well dispense with things and assume that the world is made of [relational-spatial] structures, or nets of relations.” – Meinard Kuhlmann, ‘What is Real’, Scientific American, August 2013.

It is only the habitual capture of such events in the ‘all-hitting, no-fielding’ terms of subject-verb-predicate constructs that has us giving all the credit to the ‘male’ aspect for the results of the actions which may be more due to the ‘female’ aspect than to the ‘male’; i.e. the fielding can make a hitter putting in the same or similar effort ‘look very good’ or ‘look very bad’. This is how cronyism and racism can make minorities look very bad while making themselves, even if applying lesser skills and effort, look much better. Western civilization’s semantic reality captures dynamics in all-hitting, no-fielding terms, and this applies to moral judgement based Western retributive justice, as well.

What obscures this physically real coincidence of opposites [epigenesis – genesis, fielding-hitting] nature of dynamic for us is that while our senses capture the local, visible, tangible aspects of dynamics, relational influence is non-local, non-visible, and non-material [relations are all there is]. So that if a mobster wants to ‘buy a baseball game’, he is going to pay a team to have them pitch and field more accommodatingly than they would otherwise, so as to make the opposing hitters look very good. There are a thousand ways to miss a catch, so it is not something one ‘does’ but something one doesn’t do that one usually does, that is the treachery here. How can anyone be blamed for something they didn’t do?

* * *

Understanding this funny business with the reducing of the female-male coincidence of opposites nature of dynamics, by noun-and-verb language-and-grammar, to an all-male, no-female semantic reality [Newtonian science aka ‘discursive reason’] that imputes God-like powers to humans [relational forms in the transforming relational continuum] is important to this continuing explanation of ‘progress’.

In treating this same subject in ‘Design for Evolution’, Austrian-American physicist, systems scientist and evolutionary theorist, Erich Jantsch, makes a point about ‘progress’ by comparing the different ‘values’ attached to organization that are implied in ‘Robinson Crusoe’ (Daniel Defoe) and ‘Suzanne et la Pacifique’ (Jean Giraudoux). Both find themselves for the first time in the South Pacific and while Robin Crusoe’s behaviour is directed by his European knowledge which he imposes on his new habitat to the extent he can, Suzanne lets the dynamics of the new habitat shape her diet, dress, dwelling, demeanor and, … her identity. .

These differences in values attached to organization lead directly to different ways of viewing ‘people’. Those coming from (a) will impute to themselves and other peoples (races, tribes) the notion that their behaviours are directed from their interiors [all-genesis, no-epigenesis], while those coming from (b) will impute to themselves and other peoples the notion that their behaviours, as with their own, are inductively orchestrated by the situational dynamics they find themselves in [epigenesis and genesis as coincidence of opposites (relativity)].

What is going on here is that man has the option to be inspired by nature and to let the situational possibility he is uniquely situationally included in, actualize his actionable potentials as in (b) or, instead, using his acquired knowledge to impose structure on his surroundings as in (a).

Western civilization is characterized by (a), wherein man is seen as an ‘independent being’, “like God; … created with free will and master over his acts”, carrying within him the God-given cosmic intelligence that prepares him for the task of creating the female receptacle [structuring his habitat] to complement his genetic [male] potentials. To an indigenous aboriginal, this is inverted to the way of Nature since it implicitly puts the divine power of evolution into the interior of man, whereas, in the (b) view, the divine power or ‘great mystery’ is immanent in the transforming relational continuum.

‘Progress’, then, is the reshaping of the world that reflects man’s knowledge imposed on his surroundings. The more that man knows, the more it shows up in the structure he imposes on his surroundings. These surroundings, while they are structured to accommodate man’s actionable potentials, run counter to the flows of nature; e.g. freeways block the paths of snakes and donkey-carts, pipelines trouble the migration of reindeer, dams prevent fish from reaching their spawning grounds, etc. etc.

As Russell Means notes, the (a) values based ‘progress’ of Western European society clashes radically with the (b) values evolutionary direction of indigenous aboriginals. Orienting to (a) values is to orient to the mechanical aspect of the world, to that which is ‘local, visible and material’, while orienting to (b) values is acknowledge the full physical reality of our natural experience wherein we allow the environmental [epigenetic , fielding] influence of the transforming relational continuum [Nature] to inductively actualize our actionable [genetic, hitting] potentials.

To ignore the female, inductive influence as in (b) is to ignore our inherent spirituality, in the indigenous aboriginal view, and this ‘spirituality’ is part of the physical reality of our natural experience, … removed only by intellectual abstraction in our semantic reality which reduces the epigenetic-genetic coincidence of opposites, to all the all-genesis, no-epigenesis Darwinist view of evolution.

This indigenous aboriginal view, which holds that spirituality is intrinsic in the physical reality of our natural experience, is pervasive in their (b) values culture; e.g;

Richard Atleo aka Umeek, a hereditary chief of the Nuu-chah-nulth [Nootka] people, in his book, ‘Tsawalk’, uses the same relational structuring [articulated with different terminology] as Erwin Schroedinger does in modern physics, in observing;

“The material universe is like an insubstantial shadow of the actual substantial Creator. In this worldview, the highest form of cognition, of consciousness does not occur in the insubstantial shadowlike material realm, but in the realm of creation’s spiritual source’.”
“The Nuu-chah-nulth saw the material world as a manifestation of the spiritual.”

While Western science habitually scoffs as the statements of ‘superstitious’ non-scientific peoples [our Western imposed labeling and categorizing], their view of the physical reality of our natural experience is supported by modern physics, and the problem with our Western scientific view [which has still not incorporated relativity and quantum physics findings] is that it is a ‘semantic reality’ that incorporates ‘economies of thought’ such as the ‘independent being’ of relational forms such as humans which is a convenient simplification but which does not reconcile with the relational world of our natural experience where ‘relations are all there is’. As Bohm discovered, the flow-based languages of indigenous aboriginals acknowledged the non-dualist [relational] ‘coincidence of opposites’ that is beyond the scope of subject-verb-predicate structures in noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammar; i.e. the limitations of our language have been ‘bewitching our understanding’ as Wittgenstein has said, and what is needed to capture a relational world is a language that does not depend on fixed identity material objects;

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’

With this background, it is possible to revisit Russell Mean’s curious statement (1980), ‘For the world to live, Europe must die’

Means is speaking to the fact that the now globally dominant Western society is based on a semantic reality that is mechanical and has stripped out spirituality [in its institutional structures of government, commerce and justice. As Means points out;

“Newton, for example, “revolutionized” physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these “thinkers” took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into a code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended; they “secularized” Christian religion, as the “scholars” like to say—and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three, Answer!

 

 

This is what has come to be termed “efficiency” in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment—that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one—is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why “truth” changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stop-gaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stop-gaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive.

…

 

 

In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real estate speculator may refer to “developing” a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be “developed” through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open—in the European view—to this sort of insanity.

 

 

Most important here, perhaps, is the fact that Europeans feel no sense of loss in all this. After all, their philosophers have despiritualized reality, so there is no satisfaction (for them) to be gained in simply observing the wonder of a mountain or a lake or a people in being. No, satisfaction is measured in terms of gaining material. So the mountain becomes gravel, and the lake becomes coolant for a factory, and the people are rounded up for processing through the indoctrination mills Europeans like to call schools.

 

 

But each new piece of that “progress” ups the ante out in the real world. Take fuel for the industrial machine as an example. Little more than two centuries ago, nearly everyone used wood—a replenishable natural item—as fuel for the very human needs of cooking and staying warm. Along came the Industrial Revolution and coal became the dominant fuel, as production became the social imperative for Europe. Pollution began to become a problem in the cities, and the earth was ripped open to provide coal whereas wood had always simply been gathered or harvested at no great expense to the environment. Later, oil became the major fuel, as the technology of production was perfected through a series of scientific “revolutions.” Pollution increased dramatically, and nobody yet knows what the environmental costs of pumping all that oil out of the ground will really be in the long run.”—Russell Means

“Progress” is therefore going ‘where’, exactly?

“Progress” is something we talk about in terms of advances in our human understanding and capability, all of this falling within our Western ‘semantic reality’. Semantic reality is a logical, mechanical reality that does not incorporate relational influence since our noun-and-verb language-and-grammar does not support what Wittgenstein calls ‘the synoptic view’. We can speak all of the benefits to man of building a hydro-electric power generating dam across a mighty river, but as with ‘building a house in the forest’, all construction is at the same time destruction in the transforming relational continuum, the physical reality of our actual, natural experience.

“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

We are thinking linearly when we make our plans to build the dam and while we know that there will be ‘externalities’ as we euphemistically are calling them, the point is that our linear descriptions of ‘building a house in the forest’ [which at the same time destroys forest] and/or ‘constructing a dam on a river’ are logical propositions which in no way capture ‘what is really going on’. The imagery of ‘construction’ is an ‘all-genesis, no-epigenesis’ imagery. In the physical reality of our natural experience, construction and destruction are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of relational transformation. Our semantic reality is based on one-sided imagery of independent beings and what these independent beings do [construct a dam, build a house in the forest because that’s how noun-and-verb Indo-European language-and-grammar represent dynamics. One would need a flow-based [relational] language in order to capture the ‘synoptic’ understanding of the physical relational reality that transcends our Western subject-verb-predicate semantic reality.

“There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and an end, is a sort of contradiction [Elsewhere Wittgenstein quotes Heraclitus “everything is in flux” on this same problem of being forced to capture a complex continuing dynamic by notional ‘parts’]. One difficulty with philosophy is that we lack a synoptic view. We encounter the kind of difficulty we should have with the geography of a country for which we had no map, or else a map of isolated bits. The country we are talking about is language, and the geography its grammar. We can walk about the country quite well, but when forced to make a map, we go wrong. A map will show different roads through the same country, any one of which we can take, though not two, just as in philosophy we must take up problems one by one though in fact each problem leads to a multitude of others. We must wait until we come round to the starting point before we can proceed to another section, that is, before we can either treat of the problem we first attacked or proceed to another. In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads. So I suggest repetition as a means of surveying the connections.”

The limitation here is not just with the architecture of our language, it is with the architecture of logic and reason in a physical reality wherein ‘relations are all there is’. Intuition informs us of the shortfall in reason in that it delivers only the linear view and is incapable of the synoptic view.

The different orientations of Robinson Crusoe and Suzanne de la Pacifique give rise to a fundamental difference in the social relational dynamics in a world inhabited by many Robinsons and Suzannes. The person or group that constructs a dam on the river conditions the common relational habitat which is at the same time conditioning the dynamics of others, not only the fish in the river, but other animals and humans who, upstream from the dam, are flooded out or marooned on islands, and downstream, can no longer count of sufficient water for canoe transportation, beaver lodges etc.

The relational social dynamics will differ depending on whether the world is filled with Robinsons (a’s) or Suzannes (b’s), as described above;
Those coming from (a) will impute to themselves and other peoples (races, tribes) the notion that their behaviours are directed from their interiors [all-genesis, no-epigenesis], while those coming from (b) will impute to themselves and other peoples the notion that their behaviours, as with their own, are inductively orchestrated by the situational dynamics they find themselves in [epigenesis and genesis as coincidence of opposites (relativity)].

In a world filled with Robinson Crusoe (a’s), reason is placed in an unnatural precedence over intuition and thus the reasoning that supports constructing the dam, that, because it transforms the common relational space, has devastating effects for one’s neighbours, makes a lot of sense for oneself. We have watched this play out in the ongoing cultural genocide of indigenous aboriginals. There is an old aphorism that describes this shortfall in putting discursive reasoning in precedence over intuition; i.e. the principle of Lafontaine “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure” (“The reasoning of the most powerful is always the best”).

Rearranging the relational structure is a physical reality, the influence of which we actually experience. It is the primary physical reality which cannot be ‘reached’ by subject-verb-predicate representations of noun-and-verb language-and-grammar. As McLuhan said;

“Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs.” — Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media’ [the transforming relational ‘medium is the message’]

The family farms are rendered inoperable by sons and daughters leaving to work for the factory operations. The mom&pop coffee shops and grocery are abandoned on ‘the old highway’ when the routing of the highway is moved to better serve the factory operations.

Yet we talk about constructing and operationalizing a Cadillac factory as if that explained ‘what was going on’. What if there were 11 different factories being operationalized in the same valley, what meaning would there be in a given project manager’s speech detailing the construction plans and operations and describing what would be delivered to the community? How could he even know? As we listened and watched the view graphs and videos, we would get a sense of what would happen. After listening to 11 such presentations, we would realize that none of the presenters could possibly know ‘what they were doing’. None of them was in possession of the ‘synoptic view’. Besides, the plans they showed were generic and could have been adapted for any town; i.e. they were presented as if the figures were independent of the ground when the physical reality was that it was more like the town getting a facelift, pulling some skin from there over to here, relationally transforming what was already there.

Such incomprehensible-by-reason relational unfolding is called ‘progress’. The carefully reasoned individual project is an intervention into a transforming relational continuum. The logical propositions that represent the project construct a ‘semantic reality’ that those involved use as their ‘operative reality’, and they talk about it as if it were ‘real’, however, the physical reality of our actual experience is something else, it is this relational transformation that we are included in that no-one understands in advance, that is called ‘progress’.

Science is not determining ‘progress’. Science lives in the ‘semantic reality’ [intellectually idealized] world of project management where the figures are separated from relational ground as in a laboratory experiment. The experimentalists employ analytical inquiry and do not mix 11 experiments together, experimental sciences does the opposite, it selects, separates out and measures properties pertaining to physical phenomena so as to extract correlations which suggest cause-effect relations; e.g. there is a correlation between the concentration of DDT in the habitat and the population of mosquitoes. Science can determine that there is an inverse relation between these two, and thus predict that by increasing the concentration of DDT we can reduce the population of mosquitoes. What is really going on, is relational and irreducibly complex and science is not even on the path of trying to understand it.

Science [mainstream as in common use] reduces the relational complexity of our natural experience to ‘mechanics’. For convenience and economy of thought, science pretends that there exist local, visible, material entities that are independent of one another and independent of the habitat that they collectively reside, operate and interact within. Science explains physical phenomena using these unrealistic but convenient assumptions, ignoring the fact that the movement of things is simultaneously conditioning the fields which contain them which are at the same time inducing movement and transformation of things. [coincidence of opposites as implicit in Mach’s principle]. As Mach says;

“1. Purely mechanical phenomena do not exist. The production of mutual accelerations in masses is, to all appearances, a purely dynamical phenomenon. But with these dynamical results are always associated thermal, magnetic, electrical, and chemical phenomena, and the former are always modified in proportion as the latter are asserted. On the other hand, thermal, magnetic, electrical, and chemical conditions also can produce motions. Purely mechanical phenomena, accordingly, are abstractions, made, either intentionally or from necessity, for facilitating our comprehension of things. The same thing is true of the other classes of physical phenomena. Every event belongs, in a strict sense, to all the departments of physics, the latter being separated only by an artificial classification, which is partly conventional, partly physiological, and partly historical.

2. The view that makes mechanics the basis of the remaining branches of physics, and explains all physical phenomena by mechanical ideas, is in our judgment a prejudice. Knowledge which is historically first, is not necessarily the foundation of all that is subsequently gained.” – Ernst Mach, ‘The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development’, Chapter V, ‘The Relations of Mechanics to Other Departments of Knowledge (Physiology)’

Science works within ‘semantic reality’ where it sounds like we know what we’re doing, but we don’t understand the physical reality of our actual, natural experience, since what we are experiencing is the transforming relational continuum. When we use language to talk about our experiencing, that generates a semantic reality which is told in single-issue-at-a-time discourse, and whose subject-verb-predicate constructs are not capable of furnishing the synoptic view. The warnings to scientists about truth-in-advertising have been given but, perhaps because of our cultural needs, are rarely heeded;

“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 sense of ‘advancement’ associated with ‘progress’ stems from the advancement of knowledge of how things work in a mechanistic sense. As Heraclitus points out;

“The knowledge of many things does not teach understanding” – Heraclitus

Man is capable of many spectacular achievements; the modernizing appearance of the habitat (skyscrapers, superhighways, air travel etc.), the development of sophisticated tools such as computers, cell phones and internet communications, technology to repair the body (artificial limbs) and help it heal (pharmaceuticals) and construct vehicles to carry man to the moon and mars.

Of course, many creatures are being trodden underfoot as the flip side of this glorious ascendancy of Western ‘civilized man’, which reminds us of the ‘semantic reality’ within which these ‘advances’ are being achieved.

Are these achievements, then, really ‘real’?

As has been discussed, the physical reality of our natural experience is ‘relational’ as in the transforming relational continuum while these stories in terms of ‘what things do’ are but a single facet of a much more complex relational ‘physical reality’. This question of ‘what is real’ is like asking whether ‘the child soldier killed the people in the café’ is really ‘real’. It is certainly not ‘complete’ so that if we acknowledge that physical reality is a transforming relational continuum, the breaking out of this local, visible, tangible imagery cannot be ‘physically real’, but only a semantic representation based on ‘appearances’. One could cite Faraday, Mach, Bohm, Schroedinger here once again. To an indigenous aboriginal, it is impossible to break this appearance out of the interconnecting Unum, and that is where the expressions like “it takes a whole community to raise a child” come from and it is where ‘restorative justice’ comes from since in understanding physical reality as a relational continuum, it is impossible to track down the ultimate authoring source of such dynamics; i.e. the authoring source clearly does not jumpstart from the interior of the child-soldier;

“In the book ‘Causality and Chance in Modern Physics’ Bohm argued that the way science viewed causality was also much too limited. Most effects were thought of as having only one or several causes. However, Bohm felt that an effect could have an infinite number of causes. For example, if you asked someone what caused Abraham Lincoln’s death, they might answer that it was the bullet in John Wilkes Booth’s gun. But a complete list of all the causes that contributed to Lincoln’s death would have to include all of the events that led to the development of the gun, all of the factors that caused Booth to want to kill Lincoln, all of the steps in the evolution of the human race that allowed for the development of a hand capable of holding a gun, and so on, and so on. Bohm conceded that most of the time one could ignore the vast cascade of causes that had led to any given effect, but he still felt it was important for scientists to remember that no single cause-and-effect relationship was ever really separate from the universe as a whole.”

Intuitively, one understands the relational complexity in the physical reality of the world of our natural experience, and the inherent shortfall in the semantic reality we build from subject-verb-predicate statements such as ‘the child-soldier killed the people in the café, or the astronauts successfully travelled to the moon and back. Were they not puppets in the hands of a vast technical effort that consumed resources that took food off the table of impoverished others. Here, I am not speaking literally, but am referring to the inscrutable relational complexity of physical reality, that is dropped out in our constructing of semantic reality.

When we ‘start talking about’ the advances of man, then, … are we in ‘semantic reality’ or are we in ‘the physical reality of our experience with all its relational complexity’?

There are two ‘evolutions’ going on; i.e. one in each. Suzanne understood herself to be a relational form gathering within the transforming relational continuum, while Robinson understood himself as an independent being’, “like God; … created with free will and master over his acts”.

In Robinson’s reality, he was fully and solely responsible for the results of his own behaviour. He was the seed stock of God-given intelligence that was funnelling into the world through him.

In Suzanne’s reality, she understood herself as putty in the hands of a cosmic intelligence that was immanent in the world, which not only contained her but continually created her, and which had been described by Emerson;

“Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’

Man’s Robinson Crusoe view of self follows the logic of the subject-verb-predicate constructs of noun-and-verb language-and-grammar; i.e. the subject is the jumpstart source of the action and its result. Man’s Suzanne de la Pacifique view of self starts further back, in the transforming relational continuum which gathers her as a relational form. This Suzanne as storm-cell never leaves the flow and enters into a space that she is independent of, and it, independent of her. She is always in the relational space and serving as an agent of transformation within it, as in Emerson’s description.

As Emerson also says in the same essay, while the relational continuum of nature authored the ecosystem including the pair tree that produces pears, the talent of the pear tree to produce pears is not in the same class as the genius of nature that authors the ecosystem and the talented pear-tree; i.e. it is only semantic reality that depicts the pear tree as producing the pear [implying that the pear tree is the jumpstart causal author, as in the case of the child-soldier as the causal author of the killing of the people in the café].

The spectacular works of man, therefore, are not at all ‘the works of man’ in a jumpstart authoring sense since man is a relational feature within the transforming relational continuum. What they are is an attempt by man to construct his own accommodating habitat in the inverse direction than is assumed by Suzanne. That is, it is an attempt by the male to dominate the female [genesis is all there is and epigenesis is a void], rather than accepting that the female and the male [epigenesis and genesis] are ‘ONE’ as in ‘the coincidence of opposites’, and as in Suzanne’s worldview.

Given that there is a diverse multiplicity of Robinsons in the world pushing very different genetic constructions as if they are operating in a habitat that is independent of its inhabitants, there is ‘hell to pay’ since “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”. Furthermore, since discursive reasoning is in an unnatural precedence over intuition in Western civilization, paranoid schizophrenia symptoms arise in those whose well-meaning logical actions are conditioning the relational commons and inducing angry push-back from the less oppressed less powerful. Because ‘reason’ does not show the relational linkage between the behaviour of the powerful elephant and the painful experience of the mouse in the common relational bed, attacks by angry mice can only be coming from ‘evil’ in the interior of the terrorizing mice. Such will be the interpretation of the powerful people who stick to the binary logic of reason and moral judgement and who believe that both elephant and mouse are “like God; … created with free will and master over his acts”.

The ‘advances’ are thus the manifesting of man’s attempt to construct the habitat that would have delivered man, if man had been the sole inhabitant to provide for in the accommodating receptacle of habitat. It continues to advance in its custom tailoring to serve its creator, the man or corporation or state that is behind its genesis. It is troubled by fact that there are many genetic plan pushers who are all operating in the same relational space, and NOT in the absolute space and absolute time reference/measurement frame they are assuming. I.e. all genetic constructions are interfering with all genetic constructions and this can only be resolved by the imposing of one overall dominating plan, which may require many wars. The alternative is to adopt Suzanne’s worldview which acknowledges the epigenetic-genetic coincidence of opposites as the fundamental dynamic, which gives rise to the ethic of cultivating, restoring and sustaining relational balance and harmony.

The feeling of being included in something greater than ourselves, where we are the continually reborn coincidence of opposites of epigenesis and genesis in relational world where ‘all is One’, is suggested by the physical reality of our natural experience.  The transient relational forms in the transforming relational continuum are “like an insubstantial shadow of the actual substantial relational continuum.  That is, the world of local, visible, material entities is a ‘semantic reality’ that fails to capture the physical relational essence of the world of our natural experience.

Here, one is reminded of the suggestion of Whorf, that our noun-and-verb language-and-grammar has dumbed us down (dumbed Western civilization down) and our seeming ‘advancing’ is back to where we started from as we bump into the limitations of language and get the sense of a physical reality that transcends our subject-verb-predicate representations.   One is also reminded of Poincare’s comment that “Cantorism is a disease that mathematics will have to recover from”, … which might as well be saying; ‘noun-and-verb language is a disease that the people of Western civilization will have to recover from.  The problem is the circular logic by which we assume a category of thing exists and use that assumption to justify the collecting of members and affirming the existence of the member by way of the common properties of the members. By decomposing a relational form in the flow into notional parts, we can build its existence back up from notional common properties based parts without ever having acknowledge outside inward cosmic fetalization, as is clearly evident in the case of a storm-cell and any relational feature.

‘Progress’ is Western man’s attempt to reverse engineer a custom tailored containing space, using the humans gathering within that space as the sourcing authors.  The advances have been helpful to some men, those closest to the genetic influences, but not so much to other men and other participants in nature.   This experiment, which is well underway, is based on the assumption that;

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

At the moment, Robinson Crusoe, while confused and faltering, is clinging to the lead and blocking the path that Suzanne de la Pacifique needs to show the natural precedence of her ways

* * *

Notes:

-The ‘Omega point’ for the Robinson Crusoe advance is given in the evolution theory of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Cosmogenesis) as the point where everyone becomes of ‘one mind’ (noogenesis).

– The inversion which puts the male in precedence over the female is cited by Joseph Chilton Pearce as coming from the Epistles and Gospel of Paul; e.g.

“A man has no need to cover his head [in the temple] because man is the image of God and the mirror of his glory, whereas woman reflects the glory of man.” Paul repeats much the same litany in Ephesians 5 and echoes it again in Colossians 3, clearly outlining the supremacy of the male and the inferior status of the female. In Ephesians he urges, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling,” as he likewise admonishes women to obey their husbands

 

 

In his first letter to Timothy, Paul explains: “A women must be a learner, listening quietly and with due submission. I do not permit a woman to be a teacher …” (Please note the declarative tense of this astonishing prohibition, which I italicized lest its importance be overlooked.) He continues: “[N]or must woman domineer over men. She should be quiet for it was the woman who, yielding temptation, fell into sin . . . “ — and of course dragged down poor innocent Adam with her. Thus Paul positions his archetypal Eve – and therefore all women – as the originators of original sin, that dark workhorse Augustine rode to the heights of sainthood and of which there is not a whit of suggestion in any of Jesus’ own words or actions. Following Paul, this misogynist virus wormed its way into most Christian doctrine and the many versions of the gospel that followed. Very little of the New Testament or gnostic writings escapes this Pauline inversion of Jesus’ way. In addition, in Paul’s revival of Eve as every woman, he gives himself grounds to bar women from holding church positions within his own jurisdiction, an exclusion picked up by all of Christendom and holding for close to two millennia.” – Joseph, Chilton Pearce, ‘The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit’ – The Anatomy of Evil.

– As BBC documentary producer Adam Curtis has shown in his films ‘The Trap’ and ‘Bitter Lake’, the binary logic of ‘game theory’ together with the binary logic of ‘good and evil’ used by political leaders easily degenerates into paranoid schizophrenia. One can think of this in terms of ‘hitting and fielding’ in that alliances are formed which take advantage of how cronies can open up more accommodating receptivity that inductively actualizes their own actionable potentials or ‘makes their own hitting look good’. By splitting the relational dynamics of self and other into two and not seeing that the animosity coming from another may in fact be co-sourced by oneself [as is the case with terrorists and colonizing powers] there is the feeling that one is being hunted by evil others in some kind of irrational game.