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)

Cardinal Ratzinger as he then was, celebrates mass at the funeral of Pope John II

In a hypnotic trance the subject is abstracted from ordinary awareness and absorbed in the inner world with the feelings, images, and impressions that populate it. What those feelings, images and, impressions are depends on the expectations that are implicitly suggested—or explicitly imposed–by the hypnotist and by the hypnotic context. 


The abstraction from ordinary awareness for trance inductions that install and maintain faith requires icons— objects to take projection—in papal catholicism, disciples, saints, angels, demons, etc and imaginal landscapes—churches, where the stories of faith can be re-enacted through ceremony, prayer, music,  story-telling, parables, psalms, hymns and sermons. Catholicism provides a rich tapestry of both icons and landscapes. 

Icons
I have come to see papal Catholicism's iconic images of disciples, saints, martyrs, the virgin mother and her son, plus the characters of the bible stories, as ’psychic dolls’, or 'alters' as Lloyd deMause calls them. They are created and  re-created as generation after generation of worshipers, regulated by the fathers who administer the church, direct multiple projections of devotion, adoration, obedience and faith towards them. Here  are a handful of examples collected in the last couple of years.
 

O Jesus que nous adorons maintenant caché dans l'hostie donnez à nos yeux de contempler un jour votre visage dans la splendeur de votre gloire (transl. O Jesus whom we adore at present hidden in the Host. Grant to our eyes one day to see your face in the spendour of your glory.

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In this mass card (left) Jesus struggles to free himself from the Satan's temptations.

St Bambino di Aracceli Roma

Crucifixation
Foremost of the icons of catholic christianity is the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth—along with the resurrection, the central image around which papal catholicism rotates.






             

Sancta Rita, rogad por nosotros Transl. Saint Rita pray for us

Quiconque y mettra sa foi et sa confiancene sera pas trompé Transl. Those who put their trust in me will never be betrayed.

This crucifixion image that commemorates
the dead of the Great War, is on a church wall
200 metres from where I’m writing. Every
time I leave and return home I am confronted
with this man's suffering and agony.


This crucifix is from a web catalogue that
has a hundred or more to choose from.

Why is the crucifixion of Jesus such a potent image for christians?

One of the lenses of psychology—pre- and prenatal psychology and birthwork—argues that the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth has become a profoundly potent icon because it echoes, resonates with, and makes sense of the acute pain due to trauma, held in the bodies of people down the centuries, especially and particularly, the pain of being born. David Wasdell provides a detailed account of this here



The resolution of this universal human experience as we leave the dark universe of the mother's body and enter the light universe of daily life—out of darkness into light—is a recurring theme across christianity:










In this de-construction of the Jesus story, the ‘crown of thorns’ carries an additional iconic resonance, with the acute foetal pain involved in the transit of the cervical vaginal exit from the womb.

The bestseller on this Crown of Thorns web site is a full size crown of thorns guaranteed to have been made from a descendant of the original Jerusalem thorn bush


After the resurrection, for the faithful, supernatural proof that there is life after death, Jesus ascends into Heaven. Heaven, the residence of God and the Holy Spirit holds the promise of a suffering-free existence.

From my pre and perinatal psychological perspective, the notion of Heaven, pictured here in a huge Venetian mural, is an icon that resonates with, and gives a name to the body memories of the foetal ‘paradise’ of the first two trimesters of fetal life, where for most people, all bodily needs are being effortlessly met through the mother’s biology.

Complementary to Heaven, there is the notion of Hell, an imaginal landscape of eternal pain and punishment. This resonates with, and gives a name to, the galaxy of painful bodily experiences of pain due to foetal distress and abusive child rearing and the accumulations of what historically, for many people, seems often to have been a hellish experience of daily life. 
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Duc de Berry Book of Hours


This mosaic of Hell is in the Baptistry in Florence

Alongside all this sits, what I have recently begun to recognize as the undeclared pantheism of christian sainthood.

Top of the list Mary, the 'good mother' that, as psychohistory shows, historically few, if anyone, had. Until relatively recent times absent fathers were normality, mothers did the enforcing and socialising of children. Mary provided an idealized mother who can be appealed to for the sympathy, support, commiseration and caring that was missing from  either a person's childhood, or their daily life, or both. This seems to have been especially relevant for the multitudes of women struggling to survive hurts, injustices and grief in a male dominant world.


'May Our Lady model of purity, bestower of graces,
obtain for you all heavenly gifts.

Mary, the only high visibility icon of papal christianity that has feminine resonance, is loaded with contradictions, beginning with the virgin pregnancy—could claiming divine intercourse have been a neat way of avoiding being stoned to death for adultery? And to delight misogynistic eyes, here is a woman undefiled by sex. How were the poor faithful supposed to go forth and multiply?

This ceramic of the Virgin Mary belongs to a home for abandoned children in Florence, open for four centuries until 1870. It seeks to entrance inmates into accepting two of the prominent features of papal christianity: hubris and servility.

 

The Christ child holds a scroll reading 'I am the light of the world,' Mary's finger points to a message that tells women that 'the Lord has been mindful of the humble state of his servant'.

And then there are the iconic 'fathers', the Father in Heaven and the Holy Father... and the father in the parish church.

Imaginal landscapes
The trance inductions of papal Catholicism, are centred on churches, theatres where its rich imaginal landscape of liturgy and ceremony are organized and orchestrated.


The Duomo Florence

The population of this landscape includes: (note the capitalization signaling iconic value) a Holy Trinity, a Holy Ghost, a Holy Book, a Son, and a Father, the Virgin Mary, The Lord, Saviour, The Devil, Satan, Angels, Saints, Miracles, a Virgin birth, Purgatory, Hell, Life after Death, A Garden of Eden, and Heaven.

But when on the tourist trail we visit the imaginal spaces of ancient i.e. pre-protestant churches and cathedrals, there is little to inform us that historically, for the general population, hearing mass in the churches of christendom was to be witnessing a remote ceremony, with chanting, bells and incense, conducted by priests distant and out of sight behind the altar screens. A process that underlined the kind of ambiguity that an effective screen for projection requires if it is to keep alive adherents' psychic dolls.

Going to church—'hearing mass', taking communion, and contemplating the panoply of saints, having a Son of God who shares our pain, having a Book that details what is right and true about life, and even that there is an end to pain in the heavenly after-life to come—glued in place by the trance inductions of faith—all these provide a spell-binding set of potent iconic characters set in a rich imaginal landscape. Together they form a very effective receptacle for the projection of inner turmoil and pain.

Dominance damages
Historically papal Catholicism may have been an adequate way of meeting the survival needs of, by modern standards, comprehensively traumatized populations (for details see Lloyd deMause: The Evolution of Childrearing). In the light of current knowledge about persons and how they develop, Catholicism’s archaic, pre-psychological insistence on the exclusive ownership of the Truth about persons now seems to me equally comprehensively damaging:

- in direct contradiction of the Jesus message of ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, papal Catholicism models and broadcasts dominance, legitimizing  it as natural and inevitable, perpetuating the damage that arises due to such abuses of power wherever they occur;

- papal catholicism is palliative not transformative;

- the group consensus trance it embodies is the antithesis of inquiry and disallows innovation;

- despite all this, too many world leaders still give adulatory attention to papal Catholicism and some are, at least notionally, signed up to it.

- the institutional culture papal Catholicism models and promotes versions of human power relations that, alongside demeaning and side-lining women, half of the population of the world, helps continue, by other means, the European colonization of the South. The Vatican curia has 114 white western Cardinals (38 of them from Italy) 24 from Africa and the middle and far east and 28 from 'Latin' America. And might it be racist too? A  devout catholic I know, recently returned from Poland,  reported  that the grass roots view there on the recent election of Cardinal Ratzinger as successor to John Paul II,  was that 'it was a choice between a sick man and a black man, and of course the sick man won'.

- the papal monarchy, like other monarchies before and after it, is damaging because it denies self determination, the power of persons themselves to find, or create, a spirituality that meets their needs, rather than the needs pre-ordained by a remote, dogmatic  institution. Especially, through the splitting of spirit from body, it also tends to close off the essential daily task of finding of the sacred in the secular, a task that I feel is now vital for human and ecological survival.

- papal Catholicism's notion of ‘original sin’, an artifact of the political accommodation between christianity and imperial Rome and its companion, ‘evil’, contribute to a profoundly pessimistic model of human nature.

- Buying into the trance inductions of crucifixation and ‘original sin’ and ‘evil’, supports 'bystanding' the damage that cultures of domination such as papal Catholicism entail. We don't have to take responsibility for interrupting the ugly truth that childhood violence and sexual abuse often lay down intolerable bodymind pain that some people feel compelled to re-enact in violence on others through murder, assassination and warfare. We can collude with others in failing to take account of the extent to which cultures of domination such as papal Catholicism are taking us in the direction of ecological disaster.

To summarize, the Catholicism of John Paul II is damaging because it provides a consensus group trance way of containing or defending ourselves against the hurts, humiliations, confusion, sadness, fear and anger that we suffered when we were young, and maybe not so young, and which we carry with us as body memories and thus body posture, character, values, beliefs, and personality formation. The earlier and more traumatic the hurt, the deeper it takes root in the formation of personhood and the more likely it is that current events that echo the original situation will 're-stimulate'—trigger regression in us to experiencing that hurt again. Since none us wants this, we do what we can to keep away from such situations, through aversion, a built in compulsive flinch/flight from, or a compulsive, needy clinging on to anything or anyone that promises to keep us out of the early traumatic feeling. Papal Catholicism does this very well, ensuring that we don't develop the emotional competence that would enable us to attend to and resolve the occluded history rather than hide from it.

Flight from modernity
Papal Catholicism, an arm of 5th century imperial Rome that intrudes into the 21st century, is understandably in flight from modernity, it is intentionally a pre-modern, pre-scientific, pre-psychological institution. This would be fine by me if it was only one voice at the global meeting of minds but this is a loud bullying voice, ruthless in its love of power.

Its compulsive holding to its archaic political origins denies, and is intended to deny, the opening up of human rights, the extensions of democracy and human knowledge of the last century. It denies this because to embrace it would undermine its dominance. And yet what at root is the modernity it denies? Yes, there are still injustices and contradictions, but the developed world features innumerable interlocking technical and ‘knowledge cultures’ —traditions of research and inquiry—built on several centuries of human research, in physics, mathematics, astronomy, biology, medicine, sociology and psychology. Even though corporate colonization of knowledge, or strangulation of it at birth, is common, the fruits of these cultures of inquiry amount to an astonishing flowering of humankind that is becoming very  widely diffused and enjoyed.

One of the fruits of such enquiry is the sharpened perception that single big ideas—single accounts of how and why—are likely to denote tyranny—the imprisonment of intelligence, not infrequently in steel and concrete gaols. Papal catholicism is ultimately in denial of the realization that at this point in history the  intellectual territory of single big ideas is irreversibly mutating into the uncertain landscape of post-modernity, where human survival depends on meaning and value being more and more negotiated rather than dispensed. A world view that paradoxically appears to closely resemble that of 1st century gnostic christianity.

And yet threaded through these, albeit improved, accounts of the worlds we inhabit, domination still seems to prevail, and the accumulations of damage due to dominance-driven living continue to sediment into the impending catastrophe of humanly generated global warming.

Which brings us back to papal Catholicism. In modelling top down hierarchical bullying, both institutionally and in its compelling trance inductions, papal Catholicism insists on a fatally attractive apolitical equation—that change, particularly if it involves social justice, is not only impossible but wrong. This is not to blame papal Catholicism for our impending ecological threat but to see its ethos of dominance as feeding the imperial, bullying, colonizing approach to nature which, literally in the name of god, is a precursor of the ecological damage we are confronting today. While promising a solution to human suffering through obedience to the tenets of faith, it actually epitomizes the over-arching problem humankind faces—that dominance damages.

Conclusion - Brand managing human nature
In claiming possession of a uniquely ‘true’, or ‘correct’ vision of spiritual truth while denying its psychosocial origins, the papacy of John Paul II propagates a way of framing human nature that institutionalizes, behind declarations of the power of love, the reality of the love of power. However papal Catholicism is not only a living embodiment of the love of power, it also teaches us how to manage political power. The Vatican, proprietor of christianity, perhaps the biggest and first among all brands, was an early, if not the first, developer of brand management,

How does this apply to papal Catholicism? Brand management functions through attaching an entrancing feeling or quality to a product or service. In the case of papal catholicism consumer attention has already been flooded by centuries of positive feedback loops (the more we hear of a notion or an idea, the more it seems to be true) through preaching, teaching and evangelizing christianity. Protecting the brand through iconic resonance with saints and the 'deposit of faith' as the Vatican calls it, plus re-iterations of exclusivity and the elimination of rivals and dissent—ensures that papal catholicism holds its place in the spiritual marketplace.

Because so many people take dominance in human relations to be natural, in such a brand management approach to truth-telling, the trance inductions that get financed and institutionalized, such as the papacy that we examine here, seem overwhelmingly likely to be those that shut down open enquiry and that preserve, extend and entrench the power status quo, typically that of top down authoritarian relating.

The phenomena of mass communication of the last 100 years, epitomized by the media coverage of John Paul II’s funeral, challenge papal Catholicism by bringing other world views into catholic living rooms but it also hugely amplifies its capacity to promote its brand of christianity—to generate, sustain, and deepen its spellbinding trance inductions. Through them, huge populations in post-colonial South America, Africa and the Far East have come to subscribe to a damagingly narrow range of intrinsically western notions about what is human and natural about humankind and the planet we inhabit.

So far as it is domination that is regarded as natural and inevitable, this amplifies an especially dangerous situation. Not least because it provides a parallel 'moral' model supporting that of the George W. Bush administration, the US military corporate imperium and its globalizing allies, who are also presently trying to impose the godified righteousness of a 'new world order' on the entire planet, while ignoring the over-arching threat of global warming.

In an earlier draft of this piece (most of this text was written in the days after Pope John Paul's funeral) I wrote:

Since then came the news that Cardinal Ratzinger head of the present day papal inquisition, headlined as  'God's Rottweiler' - Daily Telegraph and the 'Vatican's enforcer' - National Catholic Reporter, close friend of Pope John Paul II and thus someone who no doubt had a big hand in the selection of the almost all the cardinals who voted for him, has been elected as John Paul's successor.



Leaving aside the religious faith dimensions, or the mafia qualities of the Vatican curia, behind all the spells and incantations, these men wearing the silk threads of infallibility on moral issues, are in the modern corporate business of defining what is, or is not, human nature, what behaviors and relationships are human and natural. For any such power, to be concentrated locally as it is in Rome with the global reach of international papal Catholicism, especially if it equates eternal with inevitable, is an ever-present danger. Domination damages.

In case you are inclined to see this present line of enquiry as inadequately rooted in other research, I'll end with George Lakoff’s almost poetic unravelling of the christian faith consensus trance as a metaphor.

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posted at: 12:19 | permanent link to this entry

Cultures of domination

The Holy Enemies of Pax Americana, its mirrors in militant fundamentalism, and papal Catholicism's love affair with power all seem transparent examples of institutional domination. So much so that we can fail to notice that the excesses of the imperia we have elected, or adopted, or had thrust upon us... torture, state terrorism... the killing and traumatization of civilians... are on a continuum that includes the world we inhabit and support.

I call this continuum, a culture of domination, a multi-threaded mix of custom and practice, close at hand, in us and around us, that makes the bullying,  victimhood and damage of domination seem natural and inevitable. 

As evidence of this naturalisation, to bring it into awareness, I collect images of my local cultures of domination. Take a look at the selection of them below. I've found, as I hope you will, that rather than seeming to be a given, like the weather, by bringing them out into the light of day they become more susceptible to choice, interruption and confrontation. And less undermining of 'living from love'.


One of the high status locations of European civilization, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.



Figures on the entrance gates to the Royal Palace Prague.


High up on an outside wall of San Marco in Venice, Hercules teaches someone a lesson.


Hercules again.


In a shop window near where I live, this banner and the toys (below) that it promotes, introduce young boys  to the delights of bullying and violence.



 




Smash! Crunch!  Toy on sale in an Italian market.


For some reason an Internet provider thought this direct mail offer would be just what I needed.


Music can be violent too, have fun with The Killers.


Or if The Killers aren't enough, try TeamKilling.


And in Brussels in the weeks and months when Iraq is still being torn apart you could enjoy violently explosive bottled water.



Old wars can be such fun as well! Video game advertised on the London Underground.


A weeks long advertising campaign in Belgium for the local lottery took the form of a naval battle (here and below).


Translation: In Sea battle! the only winner is you!
WIN EUR40,000 BY SINKING SHIPS
As of November 3, thanks to Sea Battle you will scratch, bombard and explode everything! Aim: sink all the ships, reap in a maximum of Euros.
So, throw yourself in the water and scratch a Sea Battle!


Of course people do get hurt in naval battles but it's still such fun to win them isn't it?


Summer 2005 saw shedloads of people, royalty included, having fun celebrating the deaths of over 4000 sailors in a reenactment of the Battle of Trafalgar.


Why limit our fun to sea battles? Let's have Total War.


Enhance the fun of the computer games violence, run these games on a weaponised PC.


As the headline admits, cultures of domination legitimize violence and hide the damage, distress and traumatization that it entails. Either, as in video  games, by creating virtual worlds, or though splitting/dissociation, becoming entranced, so that the consequences of our actions drop out of awareness.

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The 'warrior', pinnacle of (prepsychological) manhood.


The 'warrior' again, have  fun 'killing people and breaking things', as a marine in Iraq described his work .



More warriors as heroic entertainment.


Still more warriors, note the touching body language.

 
More warriors, they also have God on their side.


In this picture from the Abu Ghraib series, note the man with his underpants pulled down, for reasons of 'abuse' of course, not 'torture', and the green gloves on the standing soldier, could they be...? No, surely not... the green hulk gloves you saw earlier?


A female Abu Ghraib warrior entertaining herself with a corpse


Another warrior ready and willing to show that, through video executions and suicide bombings, he too will stop at nothing to demonstrate that he and his allies have the will and the means to match US efforts to dominate the world.


Go to Iraq. Kill. Break things. Have fun with the locals.
"Lcpl Boudreaux killed my dad and he knocked up my sister"
Evidence that photo is not a fake


Heroic Triumphalism as the US exits Falluja after the failed first siege.


Oppositional Defiant Disorder Iraq-style 


Delivering 'freedom' and 'democracy'. This, I seem to recall, is an image of the US military visiting the Falluja hospital in the early days of the second attack on that city.


Abu Ghraib: The US press and administration calls this 'abuse' to hide the pain, suffering and subsequent traumatization that calling it 'torture' would bring into the daylight.


God's army at work in Iraq.



God's army works in the music industry too. Christianity under threat? Or christianity will blow you away?


God's army at work in the press. The Sword and the Cross. Conquer the heathen... Repel the infidel! This UK newspaper has had a crusader on its masthead for as long as I can remember.


Video game: have fun killing Islamists!


Cinema: spirituality crusader style


Jesus Saves! Join this crusade to discover the perfect fit between the Jesus message and an attacking eagle!


Think again it says. Yes, some animals are natural born killers but why, during a failing attack on Iraq by the overwhelming military resources of the US, should we be so so interested in predation?


Curious.This violent predatory animal has a strongly middle eastern flavour.


Find another violent predator... show that you can overcome its resistance and impose your will on it... demonstrate  your dominance.


Buy a horse, take out a subscription for some hounds. Hunt and kill a violent predator... show that you can impose your will on it... demonstrate  your dominance, reinforce the naturalness of it with archaic dressing up.

 
Another man riding high on a horse. One of the classic hypnotic images that entrance us into the belief that dominance is natural and inevitable. Few European cities are without several examples. This one is in Venice.


In this 2004 presidential election photo opportunity, John Kerry proves that he too subscribes to core American family values... he too enjoys killing for fun.


More core American family values...  This Texas shop stocks camouflage hunting clothes for children (picture courtesy of IB)


'Don't wait to introduce your favorite baby to the great outdoors! This adorable little romper will be a hit with friends and family', from a women hunters web catalog


Oh yes, and  genocide can be fun too.


Appropriate an icon of leadership, the Native American Chieftain, delete the pain and suffering that the genocidal destruction of his culture entailed and use it to promote your West London restaurant.


Appropriate 'Cherokee Nations' as an icon, delete the pain and suffering that the genocidal destruction of their culture entailed and use it to promote your SUV.
What next? The 'Auschwitz Special Edition' from Mercedes?

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Complete and absolute control... especially over bodies.



With complete and absolute control even the damage and pain of surgery can be entertaining fun.


Buy yourself another face, Michael Jackson did.


Have fun mutilating yourself, this woman does


If we had total control... of what happens in the brain.... then maybe we could be permanently happy. Until then domination and abuse of animals will have to do.


And the total control of grinding out the same tune day after day is made attractive by having a fragment of 'nature' on a chain, or in a flowerpot.


Total control used to mean swaddling babies so that they could be hung up on a wall, or on the back of a door, out of the way of grown ups.


Total control used to mean that infanticide and abandonment were commonplace. Until 1875, the hospital in Florence that owns this picture had a public window through which you could post your unwanted baby.


Total control used to mean beating and  tormenting babies and young children to break their will, and to expel the sinfulness of their disobedience.


Two children under the age of 15 die from abuse in the UK each week.


Loving care for children is historically quite recent. Extremes of violence were commonplace in schools, workplaces and homes until the middle of the 20th century, and still are in some cultures.


In Japan some people believe that distressed children grow up to be big and strong. This baby is in a competition for the loudest crying baby.

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The illusion that humankind can own and thus control the whole world, if only we could get a sufficient grip on it, isn't a new notion. As witness this art atop of the Berlin Post Office c1875



Keeping an eye on the whole world.


Unfortunately, what has been described as the the ultimate smart weapon, suicide bombing, seems to have got under the radar of the DARPA agency

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Cultures of domination mass-manufacture victimhood


Ad in US magazine c1970


Street poster in Brussels


Ad in Belgian supermarket magazine


Jeans ad in Brussels


Ad in Brussels Midi metro station


Ad in Venice shop window


Ad outside government offices in Brussels.
Many women don't need to be reminded of the cultures of domination that seek, literally and metaphorically, to shape them and their preferences,. Many more seem only too willing to buy into the notion of becoming some form of sexual commodity.


And, if even Emotion can become a commodity, what is ruled out?

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I've never been able to make sense of this statue at a tram stop in Brussels' Avenue Louise. A terrified, manacled negroid boy and a manacled non-negroid man being eaten by two lions.  Victims of Belgian care for the Congo?


I've never been able to make much sense of this Brussels car ad either. Doesn't look much like love to me.

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This French ad is from a time when petrol companies still thought ever expanding markets were good business.


Another example of how cultures of domination legitimize violence. Making a disconnect, as in this UK high street product, between images of harm and the felt experience of having your fingers amputated.


Here is another example of disconnect. Hands torn from an unknown person  coupled to a smile of pleasure.


Yet another disconnect. The necklace being admired in this Belgian ad is described as a 'Créateur d'émotion'. What kind of emotion do you think the dog trapped outside the lift is going to feel?


It takes a disconnect  to enable, or bystand, this Israeli destruction in the Gaza refugee camp of Rafah. The same disconnect sustains ignorance of the probability that the traumatization of such children will still be shaping their values and motivations for generations.

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Honour the birthday of Jesus, get a gun for Xmas


'High octane', 'explosions', 'blow away the competition'. Damage-free warfare talk.


Free post card from a local café


Free post card from a local café


Free post card from a local café



Disconnect the damage and pain from violence and what are you left with? Mr and Mrs Average?



This is the last frame of a TV promotion run in the summer 2005 by the BBC's Channel 3 that consisted of scenes of people killing or being killed.


'Powerful stylish', 'a shot in the arm',  'gripping'. 'You get only one shot at life'. More damage-free warfare-talk.


More 'spectacular', 'stylish', and 'provocative' guns at the heart of musical entertainment


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 train.


Notice in London's Notting Hill Gate underground station.

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posted at: 07:08 | permanent link to this entry

The Texas Ayatollah

This inquiry is about the extent to which we (and nations) can be entranced by a belief in the inevitability of our righteousness, of our dominion, of our superiority. Once such trances are broken then the world looks a different place. That was certainly true for me following yesterday's US Presidential Inauguration.

Forty years ago I was highly entranced by America, by its creativity, its music, its culture, its vigor As an art student in London I couldn't wait to get to the US. Visiting and living in the New York of Thelonius Monk, and Gil Evans was to be the cream in the coffee. And I drank so much coffee that I started a heart arrhythmia!

Returning to the US in the mid sixties, I made a film for the BBC about MIT  an organization which, when I worked there, had seemed to epitomize the intelligence and vitality of America. Called How to be First, it was filmed in the years before the moonshots, the inertial guidance systems for which were being made at MIT. This was why, we supposed, our filming merited the distant but persistent attentions of the FBI.

I saw this film again recently and was astonished to see how, naive as I was politically; I had picked up the deepening American domination trance. A trance kept glued in place as I saw it then, and even more now, by the military industrial complex (ably assisted by US network TV). I dubbed the music of Dukas Sorcerer's Apprentice over pictures of the hi-tech denizens of Cambridge's Route 128, Raytheon et. al., and over pictures of the cadet parades at MIT (many students were on military scholarships) and raised the question of whether a line had not been crossed between education and militarism. The film, a mix of wonder, awe and shock is a good match for my experience of MIT.  Perhaps not surprisingly MIT tried and failed to stop it being shown in the US.

Almost two decades later, when the insanities of Mutually Assured Destruction were casting a notably more threatening trance, I had the opportunity, along with a long term Action Research group to make a film about it called The Nuclear State.  In search of material  that would ground the group's unraveling of the spellbinding nuclear threat, I travelled again to the US. After being certified by an official at the Pentagon as no, or low threat, I trawled the vast film archives of the US Air Force, later calling on a selection of the main military industrial contractors eg Boeing, Grumman, McDonnel Douglas. The trance-breaking, dissenting posture of the finished film was underlined by its being seen as trash by the channel who had commissioned it, and it took a public fight to get it transmitted.

But back to my theme, traveling the US for this film, visiting military industrial contractors, being in touch with the sheer scale of the military industrial complex, further deflated the spell which the US cast and which I had happily bought into. I came upon a whole town making ammunition that described itself as 'munition-minded'; I realized how deeply embedded military technology was, how many mortgages were paid by people going to work every day making nuclear-ready bombers, or packing cluster bombs that scattered plastic shrapnel which didn't show up on x rays. As I arrived at Boeing, the bus paused while a cruise missile was moved from one shed to another. Reality sank in. I became increasingly convinced that the US was a prisoner of the military industrial business, its science and technology and as it seemed, its vitality, were being corrupted by the huge scale (and the secrecy and unaccountability) of military agendas and spending.

And yesterday's inauguration of President Bush, to the accompaniment of tears of fury and disappointment on my part, demolished any further remnants of the trance I might have been under regarding the US of A. Heralded by a band playing The Saints Go Marching In, and preceded by Bush speech in which he declared that 'we have a calling from... (slight hesitation) beyond the stars', the sheer scale of the false front that the Inauguration presented seemed beyond comprehension. Bush's blatantly trance-inducing repetition of 'freedom', the mismatch between it and US actions on the ground, not just this year but in preceding decades, seemed an invitation to the whole world to shout 'liar'. 

As though the context of the word 'freedom' always meant freedom from...  and had never been used by US interests in the sense of freedom to... control, dominate and exploit. And yet around half of those Americans watching this farrago I suppose were asleep to the second of these usages, or are busy profiting from it.

I often think that a helpful guideline about subliminal marketing techniques of the kind that the Bush and other administrations deploy, is to assume that if there are a lot of assertions about 'strength' or 'security', to presume this compensates for, or denies weakness. The incessant repetition of the word freedom in Bush's inaugural speech raises the question of where, how and for whom, is freedom about to be restricted.

A recycled cliché
So why did I find yesterday's Presidential Inauguration so shocking? It was as though a well-known person, a beloved friend, someone who had been a source of delight and inspiration, showed up one day at a public event stark naked and appeared entirely unaware of their nudity. Yes I know it is a well-worn cliché but this emperor really doesn't have any clothes and he doesn't know, doesn't apparently want to know.
President Bush is a person who has no time for reflexivity. He has 'faith', he believes, i.e. is entranced by christianity

What ultimately got to me, what I felt as the deepest and most profoundly hypocritical and thus shocking aspect of the Inauguration, was that we seemed to be witnessing the swearing in of a theocracy. Christian Americana oozed from every pore. The 'god beyond the stars' seemed to be in every second sentence and in most of the music, Bless This House...  sung by Susan Graham.

The Cheney women held the family bible while The Vice President was sworn in then Denyce Groves sang The American Anthem, a dreary patriotic song composed by outgoing Attorney General Ashcroft. President Bush swore his oath and made his Inaugural speech. This was followed by several military bands and choirs singing and playing God of our Fathers.
As I have observed here before, lots of god and not enough love. There was more to come in the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell's Benediction


Why do I include so much of this stuff? Partly because it epitomizes trance induction but mostly because of the disconnect it entails, even celebrates. Sitting behind Kirbyjon Caldwell as he delivered his Benediction were rows of people who have either endorsed, or are prepared to bystand, the legitimizing of torture, imprisonment without trial or access to lawyers, and the indiscriminate bombing and shelling of women, children and non-combatants.

The whole ceremony recycled the pre-psychological trance of christianity, telling us that god was the ultimate authority, it not us that's doing this, its not us that are in power here, it is not our full spectrum dominance, our shock and awe, we are only doing god's work. This is telling the ultimate lie, the ultimate in irresponsibility, it is not me that does this, no matter how many people die, no matter how much damage and distress we cause, it is god's work. As though the Jesus story of humility and gentleness and caring didn't exist.

It is perhaps only personal but the single image that I most tripped over was this young soldier, (and that it was a soldier), who was put up to lead the singing of the wall-to-wall warfare-talk of the American national anthem.

The military rigidity of his posture, the high peaked hat and badge—the serried ranks of the faithful singing along—the mix of blind faith and militarism—while during these very moments US military might was 'killing people and breaking things' in the name of freedom in Iraq and elsewhere in the world—hadn't I seen this somewhere before? In Nazi Germany?

Very unpalatable, but I realize that increasingly what I feel about the US is what I suspect many people in Germany in the 30's must have felt as the Nazi craziness grew and spread and its ambitions of world domination were being implemented—alarmed, endangered and helpless. Yes, lets go on with this, unpalatable or not, Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, 'concentration camps' under development? And the pending installation as US Attorney General of the man who wrote the legal advice to the President that has legitimized torture by the US military; adding the Geneva conventions on warfare to the list of international agreements in which the US unilaterally declines to participate. A sad day. I hope I'm wrong.

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posted at: 10:53 | permanent link to this entry

Values and framing

George Lakoff says that in contradicting and interrupting political attitudes and tendencies it is vital to get your values straight. And to use them in framing how we speak about what matters to us. So I thought I'd dig around and see if I could sharpen up what I reckon to be my 'values'. I mean an intelligent person would know what their values are, would have them on the tips of their tongues, wouldn't they? So here goes.

As a therapist it seems to me insufficient to have only an adequate body of knowledge and practice. I feel that it is essential to also have a meta model of what life is about, or to put it more accurately, what is ultimately of value, what is sacred? For me what is ultimately sacred is life itself. Being alive is so astonishly improbable, so remarkable, that as a human value, certainly my human value, it gets a triple underline. What immediately follows from this is that honouring life in all its forms means putting a very high value on the sacred, or as some people would call it spirituality. See 'When to kill an old dog' for some earlier discussion of spirituality.

As I shuffled the pack of thoughts and images that coalesce into the list of what matters to me, what counts, what moves and touches me, next came reflexivity. Reflexivity means 'knowing that we know', it means knowing how we do ourselves, including being aware of the likely extent to which we are unconscious of ourselves. In practice it means sustaining a continuing inquiry into the hows and whys of human existence, the processes of daily life. As I see it, reflexivity is the irreducible core value of psychologizing. And so psychologizing is an intimate partner of the sacred/spirituality, with reflexivity as a bridge between them.

If, however haphazardly and intermittently I am engaged in reflexivity about myself and the world around me, then I can hardly fail to notice the extent to which power is a part of the hows and whys of daily life that I mentioned above. 'Power over', 'power with', 'power from within', to use Starhawk's definition. And so far as we are aware of how we use, abuse, or lose the power we have due to us, we will be aware of its antithesis, love—actively seeking the flourishing of others, and being open to their efforts to support our flourishing.

What does this mean on the day, in the street? Reflexivity, the sacredness of life, and love are presently my core values, the values at the head of the list. These are the values that I try to live from, that you get here if you visit, as you presently are doing, or if you work with me as a practitioner.

To madly mix metaphors, values are spectacles through which we see the world, a compass by which we orient ourselves, a sign post that reminds us of the direction we are choosing to move in, and when they are connected to feeling and emotion they tell us what matters. As an example of what I mean by reflexivity, sometime soon I intend stepping back to make a review of the whole of this inquiry, at which point I guess I'll return to these notions.

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posted at: 11:09 | permanent link to this entry

Psychohistory

One of my lines of inquiry recently has been to revisit the Psychohistory take on world events, which has shaped my approach to politics in the twenty years or so since I read Lloyd deMause's History of Childhood and Foundations of Psychohistory.

The key psychohistory notion is that the varieties and agendas of politics and wars are the transgenerational outcomes of different and especially improving styles of child-rearing. As deMause has shown, I believe very convincingly, read his History of Childood, there has been a continuing evolution in the quality of childcare that has accelerated in the last hundred years, so that, less traumatized by 'normal' childhood, there is a corresponding shift in the politics that people see as appropriate to their experience. And as is only too apparent the actual politics we have dates from a previous generation and doesn't interest significant numbers of the population. Psychohistory has greatly nourished my optimism, I have taken from it sense that even though history seems to be cyclical, it may have a benign direction, that is rooted in gradual but perceptible improvements in the quality and empathy of parenting.

I do find myself tripping over the psychoanalytical 'regimes of truth' in deMause's writing but his congruence with other people who have enquired deeply into the relations between upbringing and politics, such as George Lakoff is considerable. Lakoff's contrasts 'strict father' parenting with 'nurturant parenting' while deMause sees the mothering style as having the biggest childhood influence. Read it for yourself, several chapters from Lloyd deMause's recent book The Emotional History of Nations are available online here.

Does childcare evolve in a benign direction? Two pieces of evidence emerged recently that, however haphazardly and incrementally slowly, this is so. Following Scottish law earlier this year, and as so often, Scandinavian laws a decade or more ago, today marks the introduction of a law in the UK that bans the smacking of children. Smacking children is illegal IF it leaves marks. Well yes, lots have people have commented that this is a flawed masterpiece of legislation but to me its very existence seems a miracle. For more on this here is a BBC report and a site that will keep you up to date on opinions and progress with the day-to-day application of the law.

Alongside this towards the end of 2004 there an anti-bullying week in the UK, and anti-bullying 'strategies' are mandatory for all UK schools, which on the ground means teaching mediation skills. The government even has an anti-bullying web-site. Is all this the result of an increase in bullying? Or, as with child abuse generally, an increased awareness of how 'normal' bullying has been? The latter I guess matches my experience.

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posted at: 11:09 | permanent link to this entry

Trance again

The notion of trance has been a constant theme for me since I undertook a hypnosis training in the early 80's and then declined to use it, (I felt it gave way too much power to the practitioner).

Trance is a pedestal that raises up and legitimizes state violence, enabling it to be perceived as heroic and triumphal. A 'war' trance is generated in the first instance by rationalizations of the urgency or inevitability of the need for violence, of which the WMD fiction can hardly be bettered as an example. The trance is then sustained by the contingencies of fighting and 'security', i.e. that the zone of action is so dangerous (or so secret) that reporting from it, as is presently the case in Iraq, is minimal.  The destruction of 70% of Falluja in the name of 'democracy' and 'freedom', despite considerable evidence—very few dead insurgents—that the 'resistance' had moved elsewhere—has been a clear example another is the imbalance in the range of pictures we see coming out of Iraq, for example, more,  pictures of the dead in Falluja. By narrowing the focus of our attention, or conversely extending the compass of our inattention, trance enables administrations and organizations to push the primary agendas of a conflict, and especially the damage that it entails, out of consciousness. So that once again in my living memory, Iraqi (and Palestinian) civilian lives are seen to be 'devoid of value'. 

When, as with the Abu Ghraib pictures, the torture in Guantanamo and by the UK in the south of Iraq currently in the news, and the leakage through blogs such as this page from Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches about mysterious goings on in 'free' Fallujah, and cameramen such as Kevin Sites, the invisibility of the hidden oppression and damage is interrupted, the trance of moral superiority is broken and the psychic weakness behind the US false front of  shock and awe is revealed. Might Abu Ghraib and/or Falluja, as I fancy, amount to an inflection point? A point of no return, following which the initial intentions of the attack are seen to fail? Perhaps, though as always, withdrawal will take some time yet.

A couple of reminders were they to be needed. The UK/US media often describe what has been happening in Aghanistan, Bagram and Abu Ghraib and especially Guantanamo, as 'abuse' when 'torture' is the accurate description. Also just as important, I continue to think that the accurate way of framing the Iraq adventure is as an 'attack'. Calling it a 'war', tolerating other people calling it a 'war', is to tolerate and propagate the Bush/Blair trance induction that ending the Saddam Hussein regime at this time and in this way was a rational, logical necessity, i.e. that the US and the UK were actually in any danger whatever from the Iraqi regime. As witness the declaration this week, that the search for WMD, itself a key element of the trance induction in Iraq, had been quietly dropped.

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posted at: 11:09 | permanent link to this entry

Tsuniraqi

Recent weeks have been another period where this inquiry has felt overwhelmed by data around domination.

I was away for the end of year holiday and out of reach of TV and newspapers except in headline form. So I knew about the tsunami in Asia but as I subsequently realized, didn't see it, and so didn't experience it. This is not a compliment to the BBC's web news pages, which is all I had access to, much though I tend to generally admire them. Returning to urban civilization from the rural life of new babies, rest and recuperation, and carrying wood for the stove, I was as much shocked by the enormous flush of financial empathy for the Far East as I was by the tsunami disaster itself.

I was shocked too by the way that this wonderfully generous response to the terrible deaths of 150,000 people sat alongside the tolerance and indifference to the continuing results of the UK/US attack on Iraq. How curious that while we are powerless to prevent earthquakes, they provoke such an immediate felt response for the victims. By contrast, unless you work at it, details of the damage that has been inflicted on Iraq in the name of neo-colonial 'democracy', are mostly out of the public eye. Too dangerous/expensive to report. Too horrible to look at. And the equivalent numbers of casualties from this escapade... 10,000 soldiers injured, 1000+ soldiers dead. And Iraqi casualties? Well no, we're not counting, the US military have said. Estimates have suggested 100,000. Why don't they register like the dead from the tsunami? Because they are humanly created? Intentional? The collateral damage of our appetite for oil for energy that they have shedloads of, and we depend on? Shame for our complicity? Shame for our inability to influence, interrupt, or prevent the attack on Iraq. When I found this Terry Jones article and later this entry in Dahr Jamail's Iraq blog I was relieved to feel that I not alone in this perception of the tsunami.

Interesting too that apparently, alone of anywhere else in vicinity of the earthquake epicentre, the American military base on Diego Garcia had warning of the coming tsunami, which is perhaps why, even though it is only a few metres above the sea level, no damage seems to have been reported.

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