livingfromlove

Goodbye g.o.r.i.l.l.a...

I've taken the opportunity of a holiday space to rethink and refurbish this Action Research inquiry into facilitating the power of love and confronting the love of power.

To more clearly underline the aims and intentions of the inquiry, I've moved it to new location and put it into a new more accessible format. I've also changed the title from g.o.r.i.l.l.a. to livingfromlove. This may also help me manage the incoming tide of powerfreakery that here, as in the rest of life, tends to swamp the living from love.

To keep the earlier unfolding of the inquiry easily accessible, I've created a separate CONTENTS listing the material as it emerged... from earliest to latest.

In honour of the antecedents of this phase of the inquiry, I'll quote a few paragraphs from its opening statement

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posted at: 09:32 | permanent link to this entry

Goodbye g.o.r.i.l.l.a...

I've taken the opportunity of a holiday space to rethink and refurbish this Action Research enquiry into facilitating the power of love and confronting the love of power.

To more clearly underline the aims and intentions of the enquiry, I've changed the title from g.o.r.i.l.l.a. to livingfromlove. This may also help me manage the incoming tide of powerfreakery that here, as in the rest of life, tends to swamp the living from love.

To make the unfolding of the enquiry more easily accessible I've created a separate CONTENTS listing the material as it emerged... from earliest to latest.

In honour of the antecedents of this phase of the enquiry, I'll quote a few paragraphs from its opening statement

There are 0 writeback comments for this entry

posted at: 11:31 | permanent link to this entry

Reaping the whirlwind

- the  London bombings
The London 7/7 bombings and the 21/7 failure, lend impetus to this enquiry into the naturalness or otherwise of domination. I was touched by the number of people who called to check that I was OK and surprised at the less than visceral shock evoked in me by the images and reporting of these close at hand events. Was this perhaps because I had taken care to try to keep in touch with the parallel atrocities in Iraq and occupied Palestine? Maybe... I certainly felt that some kind of blowback from the Iraq and Afghanistan attacks was inevitable. Not a dissident view this, since police chiefs have been talking up the possibility of a UK attack for some months.

What surprised me more was that, in the media I see—excepting Robin Cook in the Guardian and Tony Benn, BBC Newsnight—there was barely a voice that asked the obvious question about  7/7, why would anyone want to end their life in this way, as a suicide 'smart bomb'? Was this a question that, out of undue respect for the victims and their families was unaskable? Was the UK going to repeat the denial of culpability that was prevalent in the US ?

Since a) I wasn't finding answers to this line of questioning and b) prompted by blatantly dominationist writing in a couple of the publications I have access to, I started to look for myself.

On Tuesday July 26th Mark Steyn begins a piece in the Daily Telegraph:
Steyn ignores, or hasn't seen the Jane Mayer's article, New Yorker July 11-18, which details the torture and ill treatment of Guantanamo prisoners (and the role of psychological and medical professionals in devising it). As she tells it, even FBI agents complained to their superiors about Guantanamo interrogations:

How do you suppose, coupled with the Abu Ghraib images, Steyn's blatant denial of the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo reads to an adherent of Islam in the UK or the rest of the world?

The Steyn article led me to another article, in the Spectator, The myth of moderate Islam where Patrick Sookhdeo pilloried a Pakistani writer Abid Ullah Jan for having apparently applauded the London bombings. 'The gist of the article', Sookhdeo claimed:

Sookhdeo goes on to argue that:


Moving off Ullah Jan's text, Sookhdeo says that in the Qur'an:


Sookhdeo argues that the notion that 'Islam is peace' doesn't stand up to close inspection of the Qur'an, an often quoted verse does say that ‘If you kill one soul it is as if you have killed all mankind.’ but he goes on, the full and unexpurgated version of Q5:32 states:


Hmm. All the Muslims I have met have been notably gentle, kind and caring, so what is it that has got up the noses of those who see their destiny as suicide bombers?

That something is up the nose and more, of Abbid Ullah Jan, is easily apparent from even a casual dip into some of the writing helpfully listed here.

Rage is what first comes to mind, the rage of a lightning conductor, someone who is trying to channel the huge emotional charge of oppressed subordination so that it reaches the ears of  dominant ruling classes. A tough role, Al Jazeera is another example, and one likely to damage those who hold it.
 
In the first piece I came to, The "Death Cult" or Superfascism Ullah Jan answers my question of why anyone would want to end their lives as a suicide bomber. It's nothing to do with Islam.

Ullah Jan dismisses any suggestion that there is a message within Islam, misinterpreted or not, that requires this martyrdom. He goes on:

And so I was returned to my theme of domination. Ullah Jan distinguishes in this article between jihad and jihadism:


He sees jihadism as a label:


In support of this he points to evidence suggesting that the Russians were seduced into invading Afghanistan by the CIA's promotion of jihad and the information that the generation of jihadis that Bin Laden orchestrates were nourished by vast amounts of US produced educational material:


I begin to feel hooked by two narratives here. One story says that the 'terrorism' in London, Madrid, Bali, Sharm al Sheik and Israel is due to an insane distortion of Islam which seeks by these means to bring a sharia law caliphate to the presently non-Muslim world.

The other story tells us that the extremity of self-immolation of suicide bombers can only be accounted for as the coming to focus of a reservoir of rage due to 80+ years of imperial and colonial oppression of Muslim peoples by western governments through military force and the privileged promotion of corporate interests.

Following C.S Scott's highly recommendable notion of dominant and subordinate political narratives that are often unable to hear each other, let alone empathize with the other story, this sounds promisingly like such a pairing.

The dominant narrative can't/won't hear the subordinate narrative, partly because it is perceived as coming from a 'barbaric', or 'primitive' culture but mostly because to accept it all would fatally undermine the politics of the dominant story. (if hostage takers empathize with their captives, they are much less likely to be able to kill them)

The subordinate narrative, with neither the assets nor the power to negotiate with the narrators of the dominant story, tells its tale through welding whatever spiritual imperatives that are to hand to the indigenous ingenuity of the suicide bomb.

Through doing this, the oppressed of the worldwide muslim communities, finding a smart weapon that upstages the smart weaponry of the dominant, reproduce in the streets of Baghdad and London and Bali and Madrid, the domination of the oppressor. Non violent direct action doesn't (yet) seem an option.

Paradoxically, this matching of resources compromises the subordinate storytellers' cause, since it enables a curious perversion of blaming and media collusion in the re-telling of the dominant story.  Prime Minister Blair labels the violence and damage of the London bomber's actions as 'evil', or 'criminal', shutting down consideration of the oppressed muslim world's bombings as a subordinate voice, with something to tell us that we need to listen to. In doing so he endorses the US in its denial of culpability  and joins the 'war on terrorism', the transparent subtext of which is the licencing of US  'full spectrum dominance' worldwide.

And so I get back to my beginning question, how come so few people seem to ask why the London and other bombers would do something so extreme?

I'm inclined to conclude that we don't ask this question because we inhabit cultures of domination where the stories we are told, and that we are licenced to tell ourselves, are sharply restricted to those that don't unduly disturb the narrators of the dominant story i.e. ourselves.

The answer we would find, as I seem to have found, is that for hundreds of thousands of people in the middle east this, and this, and this, and this, is the subordinate story they presently inhabit. Such stories of pain, hurt, grief and suffering are hard to bear, and if we can avoid them, we do.

After all, who except suicide bombers, would want to be a lightning conductor carrying the emotional charge of a 100 years of oppression, betrayal and exploitation of the Middle East?

_____________________________________________________________
Abbid Ullah Jan is a regular contributor to media-monitors network-canada.

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posted at: 11:29 | permanent link to this entry

Pause for breath

Pursuing an enquiry like this is necessarily a haphazard matter. The demands of employment and households knock me off my enquirer perch.  By the time I have climbed back up events have moved on, agendas have disappeared and priorities have changed (note the bird in a cage metaphor, an example of how despite our best efforts, domination can live on in us !)

Also, the exploration and development of satygraha—positive programme—tend to be overwhelmed by new items of evidence, new insights into the how and why of domination.

And I begin to see an awkward tension between the unfolding of the enquiry process and reporting on it. Too much detail of the process (such as this piece) obscures its usefulness and yet the validity of the enquiry requires being explicit about its process. I'm looking into how to keep the process more distinct from the 'findings' or reports. 

Another example of the tail wagging the dog is that by far the most visited area of g.o.r.i.l.l.a. is the Picture Gallery.  This pleases me a lot since one of the reasons I write and publish here on the web is that it contradicts one of the hidden  aspects of domination—the hegemony of text (and some would say, English text) OK, I could have published on these topics in refereed journals, but academic publishing, though incomparably more accessible and cross-indexed than it used to be, remains a vehicle for text and diagrams.

And as I found with my experience of The Mind Gymnasium, writing and developing an extensively illustrated book requires a quantum leap of resources compared with monochrome text. In consequence a hierarchy of importance is supported that unconsciously sells us the notion that anything and everything of consequence can necessarily be  expressed in text and that images are of much less consequence.

This flies in the face of daily reality where tv and cheap colour printing, and more recently, the Internet, digital still and cameras, dvds, colour printers, camera phones, photocopying etc, have made the image ubiquitous. Owning the means of production for publishing writing and images has become as commonplace as owning a phone. (The  challenge to conventional politics that this poses has yet to work its way through our electoral processes.)

Dominance weather
Like mobile phones the image is multilingual. And much of the surge of political conflict of recent years seems to me to have been image fed.

For example if you are one of countless Muslims who live near this advertisement in central Brussels, how do you handle its challenge to your cultural preferences?

 

It speaks but what does it say?

That corporate capitalism, on the way to exhausting its exploitation of the material world, is now busy colonising intimacy, sexuality...


...and human feeling, turning them into things, products?

'Oh well we all know this' you say. But is this colonization just a trivial aspect of modern life, unworthy of the kind of attention I give it here? Or does it, as I believe, amount to a kind 'dominance weather' that clouds the skies of daily life, hiding our psychotic devotion to the comfort zones of consumerism, religion and wealth creation, and disconnecting us from feeling the damage that dominance causes?

So that when, as James C. Scott has pointed out, tension between this, and other, opposing ideologies become very heightened, and the lightning strikes of 'terrorism' kill those near and dear to us, we see it as god-denying, ie 'evil', and 'enemy'-driven, not the result of the core beliefs about human nature that we hold to be true.

The response to such lightning strikes by one London tabloid seem to me a good examples of this 'dominance weather'.

In the face of the 9/11 attack on new York, the Daily Express brandishes its crusader logo and its christian credentials.
 



A month later, the worldview embodied in the Daily Express crusader logo has been matched by the claim 'The world at war'... (with Islam?)



In the week after the July 2005 bomb attacks on the London underground,
again under it crusader logo, the Daily Express claimed (below) to know what the core values of its readers demanded.


As I guess most of the world knows, the 'terrorist' the headlines refer to was a Brasilian electrician unconnected with the recent bombings in the UK, who was killed by eight bullets from armed police while held face down on the floor of a London underground tube train.

Newspapers intentionally reflect and reiterate those attitudes that are proven to sell newspapers. This headline screams for the merciless vengeance of raw dominance. Meanwhile the crusader (top) and the notion of 'evil' (bottom) both identify the page as brandishing a christian worldview.  Do they reflect, or create, or colonize, the worldview of the Express's 2 million readers?

If you haven't visited this enquiry's accumulation of other vernacular evidence of how deeply domination seems to be embedded in our daily lives, take a deep (preferably broadband) breath and visit the Picture Gallery now.

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posted at: 08:22 | permanent link to this entry

Giving children the education they deserve.

As the scale and depth to which domination and the love of power is entrenched in our daily lives become visible A question that arises real fast is how do we  move from the love of power to the power of love?

So far as we become aware of this distortion of human potential in ourelves, we do what we can to rectify it. And then comes another question, how do we help ensure that our children or grandchildren don't be come affected (I was going to say infected) by the cultures of dominance that we inhabit?

Conventional education, at least in the UK  too often seems to amount to 'schooling', regimes of deference of one or another kind in which, in classes or 30 or more, the child is required to drink from the fountain of a one fits all state-defined curriculum.  Many perhaps most, seeing the 'jobs', 'career', 'qualifications', writing on the wall shutdown creativity, imagination and self-direction, and get on the hoop-jumping that is demanded. Not surprisingly, a substantial vein of children decline this opportunity, embrace some form of  'Oppositional Defiant Disorder' and find better things to do with their minds and energies, with corresponding benmefits and drawbacks

So if this is the prospect for your child what do you do? One option a tough option is to found a school that educates that how curioys that it needs to be said, is child-centred rather than adults centered as state and private education  too often is.

In response to these kinds of concerns, a colleague, Richard House, inspired the founding of a Waldord Steiner School in Norwich, Norfolk, UK. I asked him to tell me how he did it

Well, that’s a big question, with many facets.

I have had 7 or so years experience of the Steiner schools movement now, since undertaking my first, Steiner Class Teacher training in the late 1990s. As well as being involved in the founding of a new Steiner school here in Norwich over the same time period, I am a trustee of a major and long-established Steiner teacher training course and a regularly published writer on educational issues.

The decision to found a school in Norwich was very much a collective decision taken by a diverse group of  people (of which I was a part) who both had major reservations about the nature of mainstream education and schooling systems, and also greatly admired the holistic educational experience that Steiner (Waldorf) education offers. I could say a great deal about both of these motivations, as I personally identify strongly with both of these influences.

There is currently very little if any choice for parents and families who are dissatisfied with ‘mainstream education’ (in which category I include both state schools and independent schools which broadly follow the national curriculum, and which mimic the testing and assessment regime of the state sector). Of course, families can opt for home education – and indeed record numbers are doing so; but for those parents who are either not inclined to home-educate, or for whom it would be quite impractical, Steiner schools, Montessori schools (which only commonly go up to about 8 years of age) and schools in the ‘human scale education’ (HSE) movement are just about all that is on offer in the UK.

Geographically, 7 years ago there were just two other Steiner schools in the whole of East Anglia – a small one in rural Norfolk and a larger one in Cambridge. I know a number of families who have actually changed careers and life-styles in order to relocate their family so that they live near a Steiner school – there must be literally hundreds if not thousands of families who have done this over the years. Norwich is a very independently minded part of the country, with lots of radical thinking people – the kind of medium-sized city that is a potentially ideal location for a Steiner school.

The original founding group consisted of three parents of young children who wanted a Steiner Kindergarten and school for their children, and an elderly anthroposophist who has been a student of Rudolf Steiner’s manifold cultural contributions for many years. (‘Anthroposophy’ refers to the spiritual stream founded by Rudolf Steiner after the First World War, a movement which draws upon Steiner’s many ‘spiritual scientific’ insights into humanity, life and the cosmos.)

As I understand it, this is fairly typical of the way in which Steiner schools first begin: although there is a lot of support available for new initiatives from the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship, new schools necessarily emerge from the independent initiative of local groups who see a vision for a new school in their area and/or for their children, and set about bringing it about. But needless to say – founding a new school which is independent of the state system, and which has to be entirely self-financing through the efforts of people who are commonly not materialistic people with lots of spare wealth at their disposal, is far far more easily said than done! But I guess your next question will perhaps take us more into the actual process of founding our school – though of course (and as Steiner himself always emphasised), schools are always and necessarily unique.

But first, a bit about Rudolf Steiner himself and the educational system he spawned, as a kind of mystique often surrounds the man, which it is best to demystify at the outset. Not least, it’s a mystery to many just how one of humanity’s most original and wide-ranging thinkers and seers is so comparatively little recognised in the range of fields on which he has had, and continues to have, such a profound influence. The author of over 30 books and the deliverer of over 6,000 lectures in his lifetime, his full collected works (in German) come to a staggering 350 volumes; and his lasting legacy includes uniquely innovative ‘impulses’ in fields as wide-ranging as curative education and social therapy (the world-renowned Camphill Communities); biodynamic agriculture (a precursor of organic agriculture); holistic (anthroposophical) medicine; architecture and design; the arts (Eurythmy, painting, speech and drama); organisational consultancy; ethical banking and finance – and, of course, education.

Steiner held passionately to a consistently holistic, non-mechanistic approach to human experience; and it is only now, when so-called ‘new paradigm’ cosmologies are beginning to undermine the Zeitgeist of a materialistic modernity, that Steiner’s remarkable insights are beginning to attract the widespread attention they richly deserve.

Some eighty years after the first ‘Waldorf’ school was founded with Steiner’s blessing in Stuttgart (in 1919), Steiner Waldorf is now the world’s largest and most rapidly growing independent schooling movement, with well over 800 schools and 1,500 Kindergartens worldwide. So flexible and adaptable has the Waldorf educational approach proved to be in different cultural conditions that it is represented in countries and continents the world over. Steiner’s educational philosophy is developmentally informed, with the teacher’s task being to provide the appropriate learning environment consistent with the needs of the unfolding child. This in turn requires, on the teacher’s part, a profound understanding of the subtleties of the developing child; and much of Steiner’s educational and other writings are taken up with a detailed articulation of such an understanding.

There is a lack of competitive testing and examinations in Waldorf education, with co-operation and ‘community’ being far more valued than the individualistic competitiveness that inevitably creates winners and losers. The recently articulated  notions of ‘emotional intelligence’ (Dan Goleman) and ‘spiritual intelligence’ (Dinah Zohar) were quite explicitly prefigured by Steiner in his educational philosophy, critical as he was of the one-sided intellectualism which he saw as giving a severely limited understanding of the world.

Steiner also saw education as very much a living creative art rather than as a programmatic science, with human relationship being an absolutely central aspect of any educational experience. In Steiner education, what we might call the being-qualities of the teacher are seen as being far more important than the amount of purely factual information that the teacher knows; and it follows that the teacher’s own personal development is seen as being a quite crucial aspect of being a successful Waldorf teacher. For Steiner, education at its best is also seen as being an intrinsically healing force for the child – and sometimes for the teacher too.

Organisationally, the Waldorf school has a ‘flat’, non-hierarchical structure, with no headmaster/mistress, and with a College of Teachers which works consensually to decide matters of school policy, administration etc. In Steiner’s time this was a quite unheard-of social innovation; and it is only in recent years that the emergence of similar, non-hierarchical forms is beginning to make itself felt within ‘new paradigm’ organisational arrangements. Freedom is, therefore, a central aspect of the education – not least, freedom from the quasi-authoritarian ideology that, almost unnoticed, dominates so much conventional schooling. Finally, Steiner was a fierce defender of the right to a childhood unburdened by imposed and misguided adult-centric agendas.

The extraordinary neglect of his vast corpus probably has at least something to do with Steiner’s thorough-goingly holistic, non-mechanistic approach to human experience, which, early in the last century, was quite literally decades ahead of its time; and it is only now, when so-called ‘new paradigm’, postmodern epistemologies and cosmologies are thankfully beginning to undermine the Zeitgeist of modernity, that Steiner’s remarkable insights, which both incorporate yet also transcend modernity, are beginning to attract the rich attention they deserve. To give just one example, over a century ago Steiner was the leading international scholar of Goethe’s much-neglected scientific works – and yet it is only in recent years (cf. Henri Bortoft’s The Wholeness of Nature, Floris 1996) that Goethe’s scientific worldview is beginning to gain widespread recognition within the emerging paradigm of ‘New Science’.

Steiner was a relentless scourge of the one-sided materialism that prevailed in his day, and he brought a spiritually informed perspective to his educational worldview, which viewed the human being as far more than a material body. His educational philosophy is developmentally informed, with the teacher’s task being to provide the appropriate learning environment consistent with the needs of the unfolding child. This in turn requires, on the teacher’s part, a profound understanding of the subtleties of the developing child; and much of Steiner’s educational and other writings are taken up with a detailed articulation of such an understanding.

Between birth and seven, for example, the child learns predominantly through imitation, repetition, rhythmical activity and free, unhindered play; and its main task is the (unconscious) development of the will in a milieu of reverence. In this schema, formal, intellectual learning is strictly avoided until the change of teeth (between six and seven), and Steiner stressed how the introduction of formal, abstract learning (e.g. reading and writing) before this age was positively harmful to the child – a finding which is at last beginning to be confirmed by recent child-developmental research. (This is indeed a common experience – that modern scientific research announces allegedly newly discovered knowledge about human development, yet which on closer examination, Steiner had himself systematically articulated in the early decades of the last century.)

There is a lack of competitive testing and examinations in Waldorf education; and the intrinsically holistic approach in Waldorf education means that teaching is always done from the whole to the part, and not the other way around – thereby providing an antidote to the mechanistic reductionism of the modernist worldview. Moreover, the recently articulated, holistic notions of ‘emotional intelligence’ (Goleman) and ‘spiritual intelligence’ (Zohar) were quite explicitly prefigured by Steiner in his educational philosophy, critical as he was of the one-sided intellectualism which he saw as being only capable of giving a severely limited understanding of the world.

The ‘death of childhood’ is a theme that is increasingly echoing throughout modern culture, and Steiner was a fierce defender of the right to a childhood unburdened by imposed and misguided adult-centric agendas. Overall, Steiner’s educational philosophy and Waldorf praxis together provide an impressively coherent and comprehensive ‘new paradigm’ antidote to the worst excesses of a materialistic worldview that has brought our world to the foothills of ecological disaster and unsustainability; and in this sense it is supremely relevant as we struggle through the death throes of modernity and towards a new post-materialistic worldview.

Here are just a few quotations from Steiner on education which give a flavour of his philosophy:

·         If… mechanical thinking is carried into education,… there is no longer any natural gift for approaching the child himself. We experiment with the child because we can no longer approach his heart and soul.

·         If… the teacher continues to overload [the child’s] mind, he will induce certain symptoms of anxiety. And if… he still continues to cram the child with knowledge in the usual way, disturbances in the child’s growing forces will manifest themselves. For this reason the teacher should have no hard and fast didactic system.

·         For real life, love is the greatest power of knowledge. And without this love it is utterly impossible to attain to a knowledge of man which could form the basis of a true art of education.

·         You cannot teach a child to be good merely by explanation… What you actually are… is the most essential thing of all for the child.

·         Illnesses that appear in later life are often only the result of educational errors made in the very earliest years of childhood. This is why… education… must study the human being as a whole from birth until death.

·         In a state school, everything is strictly defined… everything is planned with exactitude. With us everything depends on the free individuality of each single teacher… Classes are entrusted entirely to the individuality of the class teacher;… what we seek to achieve must be achieved in the most varied ways. It is never a question of external regulations.

·         The important thing is that we do not rob teachers of their strengths of personality by forcing them to work within the confines of government regulations.

·         It is inappropriate to work towards standardising human souls through future educational methods or school organisation.

·         Our education… only lives when it is carried out. It cannot truly be described, it must be experienced.

·         Receive the children with reverence; educate them with love; relinquish them in freedom.

It will be pretty clear from the above discussion just what kind of motivations underpin our disillusionment with modern mainstream schooling systems and our desire to create something better for our children. Where to start?!…

The devastation that has recently been wrought in Britain’s Early Childhood sector is symptomatic of the pernicious cultural forces that currently hold such uncritical sway in modern culture. Thus, modernist culture’s ‘managerial’ ethos of over-active, prematurely intellectual intrusion into the very being of young children is part of a formal-schooling ideology which, since the mid-1990s, has been colonizing England’s early years policy-making and practice - with the relentless bureaucratization of early learning environments stemming from, for example, mechanistic developmental assessments, centrally dictated ‘Early Learning Goals’, and the imposition of a ‘curriculum’ on to children as young as 3. These trends are, moreover, widely observable in the educational systems of Western world. In England, for example, we read in the Times Educational Supplement of 17^th January 2003 that reception teachers are now having to work their way through no less than 3,510 boxes to tick, as they are forced to assess every child against a staggering 117 criteria. This story broke again last summer, when in the Daily Telegraph of the 21^st June 2004, we read of teachers having ‘to write reports the size of novels’ alongside test scores for five-year-olds. David Hart, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, was quoted as saying that ‘I cannot think of another Government intervention which has caused so much anger among teachers of the early year’.

With OFSTED (the UK’s Office for Standards in Education) taking over responsibility for early-childhood settings, we are witnessing a ‘surveillance culture’ ideology cascading down the education system, right to the earliest of ages. Not without reason did the prominent sociologist, Professor Nikolas Rose, write some years ago that ‘Childhood is the most intensively governed sector of personal existence’. A whole range of factors continues to reinforce the one-sidedly cognitive ‘hot-housing’ atmosphere pervading modern mainstream education.

There is little if any empirical research being carried out on the medium- and long-term effects on children’s overall social and emotional development of the soullessly mechanistic educational ‘regimes’ and one-sidedly materialistic values and practices to which young children are being unremittingly subjected. This is nothing short of a national scandal, at which future, more enlightened generations will surely look back aghast at our wilful neglect of what really matters in living a healthy life. Yet in the face of the mounting malaise and anomie experienced by young people in modern culture, the mechanistic, ‘modernizing’ juggernaut simply ploughs on, apparently quite impervious to the insight that its own policies and practices are substantially contributing to this cultural chaos, and are storing up an anti-social disaster whose dimensions and ubiquity can scarcely be dreamt of.

One common effect of these disturbing trends is what can be called the dismembering of childhood (cf. Neil Postman’s seminal 1990s text The Death of Childhood). Certainly, there is a growing ‘counter-cultural’ public mood which is clamouring for a humane and demonstrably effective alternative to the deeply unsatisfactory fare currently on offer in ‘mainstream society’ – and Steiner education is just one of the many humane cultural initiatives which are increasingly challenging the one-sided materialism of the modern age. Certainly, there are new Steiner education initiatives springing up all over the UK at the moment, so what we are doing here in Norwich, while of course unique, is just a part of a far wider cultural impulse.

 

 

 

 

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posted at: 18:56 | permanent link to this entry

Giving children the education they deserve.

As the scale and depth to which domination and the love of power is entrenched in our daily lives become visible, a question that arises real fast is, how do we move from the love of power to the power of love?

So far as we become aware of this distortion of human potential in ourselves, we do what we can to rectify it. And then comes another question: how do we help ensure that our children or grandchildren don't become affected (I was going to say infected) by the cultures of dominance that we inhabit?

Conventional education, at least in the UK, too often seems to amount to 'schooling', regimes of deference of one or another kind in which, in classes of 30 or more, the child is required to drink from the fountain of a 'one fits all' state-defined curriculum.  Many, perhaps most, seeing the 'jobs', 'career', 'qualifications', writing-on-the-wall shut down creativity, imagination and self-direction, and get on with the hoop-jumping that is demanded. Not surprisingly, a substantial vein of children decline this opportunity, embrace some form of  'Oppositional Defiant Disorder' and find better things to do with their minds and energies, with corresponding benefits and drawbacks

So if this is indeed the prospect for your child, what do you do? One option - a tough option - is to found a school which - and how curious that it even needs to be said - educates in a child-centred rather than adult-centred way, as state and private education too often is.

In response to these kinds of concerns, a colleague, Richard House, was instrumental in the founding of a Steiner (Waldorf) school in Norwich, Norfolk, UK. I asked him to tell me how he did it. He replied:

Well, that's a big question, with many facets.

I have had seven or so years' experience of the Steiner schools movement now, since undertaking my first, Steiner Class Teacher training in the late 1990s. As well as being involved in the founding of a new Steiner school here in Norwich over the same time period, I am a trustee of a major and long-established Steiner teacher training course and a regularly published writer on educational issues.

The  decision to found a school in Norwich was very much a collective decision taken by a diverse group of people (of which I was a part) who both had major reservations about the nature of mainstream education and schooling systems, and also greatly admired the holistic educational experience that Steiner (Waldorf) education offers. I could say a great deal about each of these motivations, as I personally identify strongly with both of them.

There is currently very little if any choice for parents and families who are dissatisfied with 'mainstream education' (in which category I include both state schools and independent schools which broadly follow the national curriculum, and which mimic the testing and assessment regime of the state sector). Of course, families can opt for home education - and indeed record numbers are doing so; but for those parents who are either not inclined to home-educate, or for whom it would be quite impractical, Steiner schools, Montessori schools (which only commonly go up to about 8 years of age) and schools in the 'human scale education' (HSE) movement are just about all that is on offer in the UK.

Geographically, seven years ago there were just two other Steiner schools in the whole of East Anglia - a small one in rural Norfolk and a larger one in Cambridge. I know a number of families who have actually changed careers and life-styles in order to relocate their family so that they live near a Steiner school - there must be literally hundreds of families who have done this over the years. Norwich is a very independently minded part of the country, with lots of radical thinking people - the kind of medium-sized city that is a potentially ideal location for a Steiner school. (Note, however, that across the globe there are numerous examples of Steiner schools which are thriving in what are environmentally very unfavourable circumstances - not least, in sparsely populated rural areas. And despite a great amount of research having been conducted into what makes for a successful school, there still remains something of a mystery as to why some schools thrive in inhospitable circumstances while others struggle in what appears to be an ideal milieu. Perhaps the deep spiritual impulse that underpins these very special schools has something to do with this phenomenon.)

The original founding group of the Norwich school consisted of three parents of young children who wanted a Steiner Kindergarten and school for their children, and an elderly anthroposophist who has been a student of Rudolf Steiner's manifold cultural contributions for many years. ('Anthroposophy' refers to the spiritual stream founded by Rudolf Steiner after the First World War, a movement which draws upon Steiner's many 'spiritual scientific' insights into humanity, life and the cosmos.)

As I understand it, this is fairly typical of the way in which Steiner schools first begin. And although there is a lot of support available for new initiatives from the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship (based in Forest Row, East Sussex),  new schools necessarily emerge from the independent initiative of local groups who see a vision for a new school in their area and/or for their children, and set about bringing it about. But needless to say - founding a new school which is independent of the state system, and which has to be entirely self-financing through the efforts of people who are commonly not materialistically oriented people with lots of spare wealth and resources at their disposal, is far far more easily said than done! But I guess your next question will perhaps take us more into the actual process of founding our school - though of course (and as Steiner himself always emphasised), schools are always and necessarily unique.

It will be useful to say something about Rudolf Steiner and his wide-ranging work and influence, against the cultural backdrop of a Western education system which is in abject crisis. But before this, I will set out ten summary 'recipe-points' for all those considering starting their own school:


If you succeed in achieving some or most of these 'founding principles', it is very likely that before too long, you will have set up an organisation and a community of parents that will generate its own self-sustaining momentum -  not least, because there is so much general disquiet with mainstream education that you will draw to yourselves a great deal of interest, once the quality of what you are offering is recognised in the local area.  


More, now, about Rudolf Steiner himself and the educational system he spawned, as a kind of mystique often surrounds the man, which it is best to demystify at the outset. Not least, it's a mystery to many just how one of humanity's most original and wide-ranging thinkers and seers is so comparatively little recognised in the range of fields on which he has had, and continues to have, such a profound influence. The author of over 30 books and the deliverer of over 6,000 lectures in his lifetime,  his full collected works (in German) come to a staggering 350 volumes; and his lasting legacy includes uniquely innovative 'impulses' in fields as wide-ranging as curative education and social therapy (the world-renowned Camphill Communities movement); biodynamic agriculture (a precursor of organic agriculture, and to which Prince Charles is the latest high-profile convert!); holistic (anthroposophical) medicine; architecture and design; the arts (Eurythmy, painting, speech and drama); organisational consultancy; ethical banking and finance (the Triodos Bank) - and, of course, education.

Steiner held passionately to a consistently holistic,  non-mechanistic approach to human experience; and it is only now, when so-called 'new paradigm' cosmologies are beginning to undermine the Zeitgeist of a one-sidedly materialistic 'modernity', that Steiner's remarkable insights are beginning to attract the widespread attention across the world that they richly deserve. Not least, this is because modern scientific research is consistently yielding results which amply corroborate the indications laid down by Steiner in a whole range of fields nearly a century ago.

Some 80 years after the first 'Waldorf' school was founded with Steiner's blessing in Stuttgart (in 1919), Steiner Waldorf is now the world's largest and most rapidly growing independent schooling movement, with approaching 1,000 schools and 1,500 Kindergartens worldwide. So flexible and adaptable has the Waldorf educational approach proved to be in different cultural conditions that it is represented in countries and continents the world over.  Steiner's educational philosophy is developmentally informed, with the teacher's task being to provide the appropriate learning environment consistent with the needs of the unfolding child. This in turn requires, on the teacher's part, a profound understanding of the subtleties of the developing child; and much of Steiner's educational and other writings are taken up with a detailed articulation of such an understanding.

There is a lack of competitive testing and examinations in Steiner (Waldorf) education, with co-operation and 'community' being far more valued than the individualistic competitiveness that inevitably creates winners and losers. The recently articulated notions of 'emotional intelligence' (Dan Goleman), 'spiritual intelligence' (Dinah Zohar) and multiple intelligences (Howard Gardner) were quite explicitly prefigured by Steiner in his educational philosophy, critical as he was of the one-sided intellectualism which he saw as giving a severely limited understanding of the world.

Steiner also saw education as very much a living creative art rather than as a programmatic science, with human relationship being an absolutely central aspect of any educational experience. In Steiner education, what we might call the being-qualities of the teacher are seen as being far more important than the amount of purely factual information that the teacher knows; and it follows that the teacher's own personal (not narrowly 'professional') development is seen as being a quite crucial aspect of being a successful Waldorf teacher. For Steiner, education at its best is also seen as being an intrinsically healing force for the child - and sometimes for the teacher too.

Organisationally, the Steiner (Waldorf) school has a 'flat', 'post-hierarchical' (or 'holonic') structure, with no headmaster/mistress, and with a College of Teachers which works consensually to decide matters of school policy, administration etc. In Steiner's time this was a quite unheard-of social innovation; and it is only in recent years that the emergence of similar, non-hierarchical forms is beginning to make itself felt within 'new paradigm' organisational arrangements. Freedom is, therefore, a central aspect of the education - not least, freedom from the quasi-authoritarian ideology and unquestioned 'regimes of truth' that, almost unnoticed, dominate so much conventional schooling. Finally, Steiner was a fierce defender of the right to a childhood unburdened by imposed and misguided adult-centric agendas.


The extraordinary neglect of Steiner's vast corpus probably has at least something to do with Steiner's thorough-goingly holistic, non-mechanistic approach to human experience, which, early in the last century, was quite literally decades ahead of its time. It is only now, when so-called 'new paradigm', 'transmodern' epistemologies and cosmologies are thankfully beginning to undermine the Zeitgeist of modernity, that Steiner's remarkable insights, which both incorporate yet also transcend modernity, are beginning to attract the rich attention they deserve.  To give just one example, over a century ago Steiner was the leading international scholar of Goethe's much-neglected scientific works - and yet it is only in recent years (cf. Henri Bortoft's The Wholeness of Nature, Floris Books, 1996) that Goethe's scientific worldview is beginning to gain widespread recognition within the emerging paradigm of 'New Science', the burgeoning growth of the global Scientific and Medical Network, and the like.

For Steiner, between birth and seven, the child learns predominantly through imitation, repetition, rhythmical activity and free, unhindered play; and her main task is the (unconscious) development of the will in a milieu of reverence and beauty, with the developing senses being protected as far as possible from unnecessary technological intrusion and over-stimulation. In this schema, formal, intellectual learning is carefully avoided until the change of teeth (between six and seven), and Steiner stressed how the introduction of formal, abstract learning (e.g. reading and writing) before this age was positively harmful to the child - a finding which is at last beginning to be confirmed by recent child-developmental and even neurological research. (This is indeed a common experience - that modern scientific research announces allegedly newly discovered knowledge about human development, yet which on closer examination, Steiner had himself systematically articulated in the early decades of the last century.)

The 'death of childhood' (cf. Professors Neil Postman, David Elkind et al.) is a theme that is increasingly echoing throughout modern culture, and Steiner was a fierce defender of the right to a childhood unburdened by imposed and misguided adult-centric agendas. Overall, Steiner's educational philosophy and Waldorf praxis together provide an impressively coherent and comprehensive 'new paradigm' antidote to the worst excesses of a materialistic worldview that has brought our world to the foothills of ecological disaster and unsustainability;  and in this sense it is supremely relevant as we struggle through the death throes of modernity and towards a new post-materialistic worldview.

Here are just a few quotations from Steiner on education which give a flavour of his philosophy:


It will be pretty clear from the above discussion just what kind of motivations underpin our disillusionment with modern mainstream schooling systems and our desire to create something better for our children. But where to start?!...

The devastation that has recently been wrought in Britain's Early Childhood sector is symptomatic of the pernicious cultural forces that currently hold such uncritical sway in modern culture. Thus, modernist culture's 'managerial' ethos of over-active, prematurely intellectual intrusion into the very being of young children is part of a formal-schooling ideology which, since the mid-1990s, has been colonizing England's early years policy-making and practice - with the relentless bureaucratization of early learning environments stemming from, for example, mechanistic developmental assessments, centrally dictated 'Early Learning Goals', and the imposition of a 'curriculum' on to children as young as 3. These trends are, moreover, widely observable in the educational systems of Western world. In England, for example, we read in the Times Educational Supplement of 17th January 2003 that reception teachers are now having to work their way through no less than 3,510 boxes to tick, as they are forced to assess every child against a staggering 117 criteria. This story broke again last summer, when in the Daily Telegraph of the 21st June 2004, we read of teachers having 'to write reports the size of novels' alongside test scores for five-year-olds. David Hart, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, was quoted as saying that 'I cannot think of another Government intervention which has caused so much anger among teachers of the early years'.

With OFSTED (the UK's Office for Standards in Education) taking over responsibility for early-childhood settings, we are witnessing a 'surveillance culture' ideology cascading down the education system, right to the earliest of ages. Not without reason did the prominent sociologist, Professor Nikolas Rose, write some years ago that 'Childhood is the most intensively governed sector of personal existence'. A whole range of factors continues to reinforce the one-sidedly cognitive 'hot-housing' atmosphere pervading modern mainstream education.

There is little if any empirical research being carried out on the medium- and long-term effects on children's overall social and emotional development of the soullessly mechanistic educational 'regimes' and one-sidedly materialistic values and practices to which young children are being unremittingly subjected. This is nothing short of a national scandal, at which future, more enlightened generations will surely look back aghast at our wilful neglect of what really matters in living a healthy life. Yet in the face of the mounting malaise and anomie experienced by young people in modern culture,  the mechanistic, 'modernizing' juggernaut simply ploughs on, apparently quite impervious to the insight that its own policies and practices are substantially contributing to this cultural chaos, and are storing up an anti-social disaster whose dimensions and ubiquity can scarcely be dreamt of.

One common effect of these disturbing trends is what can be called the dismembering of childhood (cf. Neil Postman's seminal 1990s text The Death of Childhood). Certainly, there is a growing 'counter-cultural' public mood which is clamouring for a humane and demonstrably effective alternative to the deeply unsatisfactory fare currently on offer in 'mainstream society' - and Steiner education is just one of the many humane cultural initiatives which are increasingly challenging the one-sided materialism of the modern age. Certainly, there are new Steiner education initiatives springing up all over the UK at the moment, so what we are doing here in Norwich, while of course unique, is just a part of a far wider cultural impulse.

Finally, I would be happy to receive communications about, or questions arising from, this posting - to richardahouse[at]hotmail[dot]com. And a big "thank you" to Denis Postle for extending this welcome opportunity to 'spread the word' about this wonderful educational approach more widely through his excellent website.

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Flat earth theology and crucifixation

Papal Catholicism - reflections on the funeral of John Paul II

Occasionally this inquiry is overtaken by events—the US attack on Iraq—the destruction of Falluja—the Bush 2005 Inauguration—that push aside worthy but less urgent topics.  I looked at the death, funeral and eulogizing of Pope John Paul II and the election of a successor, and saw what seemed to be a uniquely transparent example of how the love of power elbows aside the power of love.

Writing about it the  weeks since then, there has been a resonance for me between the papal funeral ceremonial, and the 2005 US Presidential Inauguration that I have already written about here. This is not to compare the persons but to point to the dynamic, the process of collusion and adulation within, or behind, such events. What binds such Followers to such Leaders? 

In the papacy, how could such an original expression of the power of love as the Jesus messages, be so willingly diverted into its antithesis, the love of power?  Even when, as in the recent papal events in Rome, love is on the agenda, is claimed to be the agenda?

The death and funeral of pope John Paul II and the election of a successor provides a promising window into what keeps domination going, into how the damage, cruelty and destruction it entails is kept out of sight.


On 6th of April, the day before Pope John Paul II's funeral, news outlets reported that 2 million Poles were on their way to Rome for the funeral, that all non-official vehicles had been banned from the city, and that it was closed to visitors; Rome was becoming a sea of people.

Many catholics saw him as saintly and waving 'Santo Subito' flags wanted to have him beatified right away. Mainstream media, especially TV, tended to eulogize Pope John Paul II and treat his demise as the loss of a great world leader,



President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush showed up in Rome, and TV had shown images of them, ex-President Bush senior, and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice sitting next to ex-President Clinton (it was hard to tell which of those two seemed the most discomfited by this experience). Three US presidents in a row in pews in St Peter's Church in Rome ‘paying their respects’.

They were joined the following day by Prince Charles, in line to become one day a competing ‘defender of the faith’, who had put back his wedding for a day, seated close to Robert Mugabe, and the reigning monarchs of 10 countries, 57 heads of State, 3 hereditary princes, 17 heads of government, the heads of 3 international organizations and representatives from 10 others, 3 spouses of heads of State, 8 vice heads of State, 6 vice prime ministers, 4 presidents of parliaments, 12 foreign ministers, 13 ministers, and ambassadors from 24 countries who had also come to the funeral.

Why did the funeral of Pope John Paul II matter so much to these visitors that they were prepared to derange their schedules to attend? Was it because, at the papal funeral, like echoed like, they were honouring an operator in their own preferred style?



As ex-president Clinton is reported to have remarked, the late pope was ‘someone who knew how to work a crowd’.

Through my work as a psychotherapist I have from time to time become aware of some of the contradictions behind the face of papal Catholicism that was so explicitly on stage during Pope John II's funeral. Pope John was adamantly against abortion and yet the Pro-Life movement, fed by his papal authority, for all its benign focus on the value of fetal life, is the tip of the iceberg of the christian subordination of women. As though those opting for an abortion were not likely to be deeply distressed about the action they were taking. Love would see that and meet it with compassion. I've found that Papal Catholicism dogmatically spells out what it wants to see, or rather, excludes what it doesn't want to see—anything remotely reminiscent of womanly physicality, of women's bodies, of women as persons in their own right.

Feeling I needed to know more about the origins of papal catholicism, I found a good source in Elaine Pagels Adam and Eve and the Serpent. I discovered for example that St Augustine’s hugely influential take on sexuality 15 centuries ago was part of the accommodation between the previously persecuted christianity and the Rome that, following the conversion of Emperor Constantine, had become enthusiastic about christianity. Papal Catholicism continues the Augustine approach to what it means to be human and Pope John Paul II re-enforced and embodied catholic denial of the body and sexuality, re-iterating the association of carnality and sinfulness, so that for example, some catholic women die of undiagnosed breast cancer because they are unable (feel it would be sinful) to examine their breasts by touch.

The misogyny of papal Catholicism, with its scarcely concealed disgust for women's bodies—was a posture I had come across earlier in this enquiry, one very publicly and very specifically re-iterated during John Paul II's papacy. In the convoluted reasoning of this essay about why woman can never be priests, Cardinal Ratzinger, John Paul II's theological enforcer, (the celebrant of his funeral mass, and more recently, his successor as pope) denies the intrinsic value of women, half the population of the world. In an earlier Ratzinger essay explaining why homosexuality is wrong, papal Catholicism denies the intrinsic value of perhaps one seventh of the population of the world who experience themselves as gay or lesbian.  

In these and other texts, I had already seen the weight of authority which the 'magisterium' of Pope John Paul II’s papacy brought to its domination of the lives of millions of people within the sphere of influence of papal Catholicism. No to sex outside marriage. No to divorce. No to contraception. No to abortion, even after rape. No to condoms as a protection against HIV/AIDS, thus ensuring countless unnecessary deaths and orphaned children. No to women priests. No to married priests, unless they are converts from  other churches. Yes to ensuring young people remain ignorant about sexuality (some years ago, a doctor in a very Catholic village on the west coast of Eire told me that when local couples came to see him because they weren’t able to conceive, he usually found that was because they were practicing anal sex). Yes to naming a basketful of church worthies as saints. Yes to actively centralising the institutions of the church, so that when, a sexual-abuse scandal began to break in the US Church, the senior clerics hid the perpetrators and papered over the accusations. And the Vatican rewarded one of the key figures in the cover-up with a sinecure in Rome.

As a psychotherapist, I see the intrinsic intelligence of the body as a vital human capacity, listening to it, and trusting it, can tell us what matters, what choices are fruitful, and what are problematic or damaging. By denying this 'wisdom of the body', I began to see, papal Catholicism was able to colonize and take possession of its adherents' emotionality, consolidating its dominance by providing non-negotiable facilities such as confession for dealing with the problems thus generated. From this perspective, the sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic church look to be a poisoned fruit of the church's centuries-long history of institutional dominance and sexual repression.

Pope John Paul II also re-broadcast on all wave lengths the christian location of spirituality as outside the embodied material world, insisting that such religious notions as 'God', 'Christ', or a 'Heavenly after-life' existed independently of humankind (a similar notion, that mathematics exists independently of human mentality, has recently been challenged.) Both re-iterate the belief that there are aspects of our mental life that are outside nature, outside embodiment. 'Out there' or as the then Cardinal Ratzinger's body language demonstrated at John Paul II's funeral, 'up there'.



In my experience, this dissociation of the spiritual from the material and embodied, creates a very tense split in people who subscribe to it, so much so that for many adherents, the moral targets of papal Catholicism function as production schedule for the manufacture of guilt. A plethora of feelings are generated that require recourse for their resolution to the already mentioned church resources such as confession, penitence and prayer.

The more I saw of the papal funeral events, the more I realized the extent to which the papacy is an especially pure and transparent example of domination—Dominus, Domine—for papal Catholicism domination, I realized, is intrinsic, spelled out in this and countless other Vatican texts.

But was this framing of the papacy as an exemplar of domination and harm too strong? I began to think not. Looking at the big picture—broadening the frame—meant including:

The church's promotion of the Crusades, still a popular icon and a potent political factor in our times;  the Inquisition, renamed but still at work and headed by Cardinal Ratzinger; the church’s historical denial of science - Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin; the church’s part in the demonizing and killing of at least eighty thousand women as ‘witches’; the church's evangelical collusion in the colonization and destruction of native cultures in Africa,  America and the far east; the papacy's collusion with the German Nazi regime, including  assisting the escape of Nazi war criminals after 1945 ; the continuing propagation of homophobic and misogynistic policies around contraception, abortion and AIDS. This amounts to a massive history of the abuse of power and yet a billion plus people on this earth have signed up to the  catholic christian vision of human nature built on this history. Many more stand in its shadow, as off-message clerics have found down the centuries.

 Matthew Fox, founded Creation Spirituality and was expelled from the Dominican order:
Ferdinand Regelsberger  was excommunicated for ordaining female priests; Tissa Balasuriya, an Oblate priest from Sri Lanka was  excommunicated in 1997 after accusations of heresy, (he questioned the cult of Mary as a docile, submissive icon and said that the church should be less arrogant towards other religions) but was reinstated in 1998 after a worldwide protest.

Many of the liberation theology priests working with the poor in South America found themselves invalidated and redeployed, or in the case of Leonardo Boff, 'silenced'.

Catholic women who have found a priestly vocation in themselves know that they are permanently barred from that role by Pope John Paul II and the people around him. (Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, who officiated at Pope John Paul's funeral, wrote this text confirming that ordination of women priests was contrary to the 'deposit of faith'.

Non-Catholics who have fallen in love with a Catholic are very likely to find themselves negotiating, archaic and convoluted binding agreements about child-care with the church authorities before the church will endorse their love.

Juan Vaca, former US president of the Legionaries of Christ, along with 30 other seminarians under 16, claimed to have been sexually abused by Fr. Marcial Maciel founder of the order. As a Catholic Reporter editorial outlines, these men, including two university professors, a lawyer,  and the order's one-time treasurer, await any sign that the Vatican is taking seriously their accusations against Fr Maciel, described as 'a dominant and domineering personality overseeing a culture in which he demanded absolute and unquestioning loyalty to himself'. Fr Marciel  organised and accompanied Pope John Paul on his visits to Mexico.

As you’d expect of an inquiry, before I started I didn’t know that this study of papal Catholicism would gradually become a catalogue of such papal horribilities. Somewhat naively I thought that these views were a maverick, outsider, off-message take on papal Catholicism, even, as some people might think, a rehearsal of my poorly informed prejudice. At around this point in the writing I came across a series of articles that offered much the same perspective and that made redundant much of what else I might have gone on to say here. 

I realized that in my surprise at the feistiness and depth of some of this critical writing that greeted the funeral of Pope John Paul II, I was in danger of forgetting that there was a centuries' old tradition of vigorous dissent from the papal Catholic take on the Jesus story. 

What do I have to add to it?

Several related notions: that papal catholicism does indeed amount to one of the purest and most transparent forms of dominance; that it models and teaches how to install and sustain dominance; and that it is currently facing, or rather denying, a challenge on the same scale as those from Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin.

Flat-earth theology
Behind the eulogizing of Pope John Paul II, his Catholicism hides from, and keeps hidden, the rich variety of theory and knowhow about persons and personhood that has emerged in the last hundred years or so, from those lines of human inquiry that we call psychology, psychotherapy and cognitive science.

From the vantage points of such psychological enquiry, papal Catholicism is an institution that endorses and promotes a long list of notions and behaviour that are dysfunctional and damaging to persons and human relations—it abuses power—it promotes splitting/dissociation, projection, repression, displacement, and denial definitions,  more—and as we'll see, it abuses the human capacity for trance.

For all its limitations and contradictions, psychological enquiry has been one of the most beneficial items of human flourishing in the last 100 years. Why does Catholicism and Pope John Paul II's version of the papacy reject psychological knowledge about humanity? It is not due to ignorance, this well researched Vatican text about post-modern (New Age) spirituality, recognizes that many strands of psychological development provide an alternative approach to the sacred in persons and daily life but uses this insight to dismiss them. In the face of the openness and diversity of psychological theory and practice, I guess the dogmatic, flat earth theology of Catholicism feels under siege. To see where this defensive obduracy comes from and why it is so resistant to change, I found I had to back off into what I had learned about the history of childhood. 

Psychohistory
Historically, childhood appears to have been severely traumatic for almost all children and this is still true in many parts of the world—think of present-day Iraqi or Palestinian children, or African children orphaned by HIV-AIDS. In History of Childhood Psychohistorian Lloyd deMause and nine other authors assembled very comprehensive historical evidence which shows that until perhaps the last 100 years, abandonment, and infanticide was common, (as abortion, it is still is) violence in education was normal, and children were variously seen as intrinsically evil, needing to be beaten into shape or punished until obedience was unquestioned, more, more i.e. that from our present day perspective, all children could be held to be severely traumatized, including by sexual abuse.

From my psychological perspective, what this amounts to is that until relatively recently, all human beings  had severely painful body memories of distress dating from childhood that were driving, inhibiting or distorting their adult behaviour. Added to this, because of the near universal trauma of birth, everyone whatever their upbringing is likely to have body memories that are comparably formative.

The human bodymind has elaborate and very effective biological ways of surviving such trauma, such as the gating of pain, however, there is a high probability that the body memories of distress from such early traumatic learning will be re-stimulated by present time events. This means that developing ‘comfort zones’, circumstances and behaviors that protect us from this re-activation of traumatic body memories, are likely to be a major feature of adult daily life. Keeping this huge personal and collective history of pain out of consciousness, while at the same time trying to account for the compulsive human  behaviours it drives, is the psychological soil in which Catholicism and other religions have their roots.

Christianity as psychological defence
The notion that Catholicism and other religions were defenses against embodied traumatization has been familiar to me for several decades, through the work of Frank Lake and David Wasdell, what I hadn’t begun to see until recently was how they were propagated and what kept them in place.

How was splitting/dissociation, projection, repression, displacement, and denial being promoted? Looking at papal Catholicism through the lens of psychological enquiry, I realized that there much about it was reminiscent of a hypnosis training I had done some years ago; it seemed to entail a varied menu of enthrallment, spellbinding and the casting of spells, in other words, trance induction—hypnosis. The stock in trade of stage hypnotists and politicians of all shapes and sizes, it appears to be the core ingredient of papal Catholicism too.

This felt to be a promising line of enquiry—that while claiming to be an institutional vehicle for love and caring, Catholicism deployed trance induction to keep its adherents enthralled.  Charles Tart in Waking Up has called this spellbinding consensus trance.  
This is not to argue, as current psychology would support, that we can free ourselves entirely from such trance states, but only to recognize that one of the fruits of psychopractice is to become aware of how much of life is lived on automatic, shaped by the trance inductions, the ‘spellbinding’, or ‘regimes of truth’ we absorbed as children. If we accept this then a vital life task is to install an evolving, enquiry-based process of awarely developing or adopting our own ‘rules of thumb’ around survival, recovery and how to lead a flourishing and fruitful life. Pope John Paul II, like all his predecessors explicitly closed the door on such enquiry. The Truth has been revealed. Worship. Obey.

Faith
If Catholicism (along with other sects) is an institution that provides a psychosocial defence against embodied traumatization, how does it do this? How does the psycho-defence work?

The key discovery so far for me in this enquiry, has been that the entrancing element that matters, i.e. take it away and the whole edifice falls down, is ‘faith’. The Catholic consensus trance is induced and maintained through the phenomenon of ‘faith’.

Pope John Paul II was very explicit in his endorsement of the Catholic articles of faith which are available in a vast Vatican Catechism website that has 2865 items. Here is the table of contents.  Some random samples:


From a psychological perspective, ‘faith’ appears to be a religio-spiritual equivalent of morphine, an anesthetic, a painkiller. Faith that papal catholicism's version of the Jesus story is revealed truth, legitimized by the supernatural event of the resurrection. So far as we hold faith in 'sin', 'repentance', 'forgiveness of sin', 'salvation' etc the church provides an pain-free end point, 'heaven.' Out of sight beneath this highly conditional promise is the subtext which tells us that pain, especially psychic pain due to political oppression, i.e. domination, is a fact of life and you better get used to it (and no matter how bad you feel it is nothing compared with being crucified). The church's global obsession with pain and suffering (see crucifixation below) absorbs (sublimates) and helps anaesthetize embodied pain but excludes enquiry into, or resolution of its origins.

Because it asserts the unique possession of god-given truth, god being all knowing, all powerful, papal Catholicism tells us there is nothing whatever that we can do to change either ourselves or the world we live in, or indeed that there is anything else worth knowing about humanity. There is only consolidation, recycling, conservation, obedience, adoration, worship, and repetition of the articles and practice of 'faith'. 

Telling and re-telling biblical stories, preaching, ceremony, bible study, hearing mass, prayer, worship, adoration and devotion to the artifacts of ‘faith’ such as saints, underlines, reinforces and consolidates the trance that enables acceptance of papal Catholic truths as god-given, and thus 'natural' and 'inevitable'.

Faith generation
I hadn't been long settled in seeing how the dual roles of spellbinding and faith sustain the dominance of papal Catholicism when I came across a startling pointer to the origin of christian faith.

Elaine Pagels details how in the first century after Jesus' death there were a wide variety of groups with very diverse versions of christianity. One strand of these groups, the gnostics, broadly saw christianity as matter of personal inquiry and self knowledge, gnosis, finding christ in themselves. Some of the fragments of what is known about gnostic christianity resemble core ideas of current psychology. Here is Jesus speaking to Thomas:


For gnostic christianity the Jesus story was a metaphor for spiritual development, and the gospels a programme for how to do it. For them spiritual authority was  personal, intimate, derived from experience. This, as you'd imagine led to a democratizing of spiritual authority with a wide range of creatively ingenious ways of taking forward the Jesus story on the basis of lived experience.

By contrast, because it is counter intuitive, contrary to  commonsense, insisting that the resurrection of Jesus is literally true requires the creation of an institution of faith. As Elaine Pagels points out, because the disciples who claimed to have seen and touched the risen Christ had exclusive ownership of this version of the Jesus story, from then on acceptance into this sect of christianity required a quantum jump of faith into believing their supernatural version of the Jesus story was literally true. The handful of disciples who claimed the resurrection experience embodied unchallengeable authority. Whatever the disputes about the meaning of parables and other teachings here was proof of life after death. Secure in the faith that there was an afterlife of peace and plenty, early christians were able to endure appalling cruelty and death with an equanimity that astonished their pagan neighbours.

As Pagels tells the continuing story of the politicising of christianity, by 170 CE the 'literally supernatural' version of the Jesus story was already sedimenting into a christian orthodoxy that drew its authority from the apostolic copyright of the resurrection story. By the end of the second century a centralising, unifying, catholic, ie universal church, tracing a line of authority back to the Apostle Peter, was seeking to eliminate and suppress all other versions of the Jesus story than the supernatural one. Through this insistence on a supernatural take on the Jesus story, the seed of domination christianity was sown and began to germinate.  As, in the following centuries, christian church leaders moved from being persecuted by the police to commanding the police, heresy, being off message, as we'd call it today, became a life-threatening criminal offence. Except for orthodox treatises on their errors, the gnostics disappeared from history for almost two millenia.

After being adopted by the Roman Empire following Constantine's conversion in 313 CE, in  papal Catholicism began to resemble the institutional organisation we know today. Its structure of monarch, bishops, deacons, and laity, mimicked the way the Roman army was organised.  By the 5th Century this alignment of authoritative spiritual power with hugely successful political power seems to have become irresistibly attractive to western Europe.

But however ecstatic the initial encounter, faith in the supernatural fades. Feeding faith, recovering faith and challenging the faithless, became essential activities of the emerging papal christianity. Hypnosis, a branch of modern psychology points to a reliable way of doing this. While about a  third of the population have little capacity for trance, around a third of the population can go into a moderate trance, and another third into a very deep trance. As I see it papal christianity has accumulated a rich mix of trance inductions, ceremony, hymns, psalms, prayer, music, liturgy and theatre and repetitions of the Eucharist, that install and reinstall in the faithful the belief that the supernatural truth of papal christianity is the only truth.

 

Prenez et mangez: Ceci est mon corps (Transl. Take and eat: This is my body)