Please allow me to be frank at the outset: I get it. I realize that your bread is pretty much buttered entirely by representatives or interests otherwise linked to the financial institutions that rule this nation. And I realize that “social injustice” is, for you, an abstraction at best. That there may be a connection between rising street crime and the fallout of actions taken by the monied interests you ultimately serve has probably not entered into your thinking. You have a job to do, for which you are paid and average of 64k a year, roughly $9500 dollars more than the median income for a family living in Oakland. This is because you police one of the most violent cities in America, and it is hard to begrudge you your combat pay. And, so long as the ruling class sees fit to continue its rapaciousness, that violent crime is likely to increase, which translates as a steady (and steadily increasing) paycheck for you.

So, sure, I can see why you would go along with an order to disperse a crowd of protesters. It’s not as if they can make an offer that will stand up against the compensation you receive for doing little odd jobs like that. Not to mention the overtime. Besides, it gives you a chance to pull out all those cool, paramilitary toys you’ve been making us pay for.

However, I would urge you to consider two things. First, you seem to have mistaken the Occupy Wall Street movement for another configuration of the same college students and itinerant activists that are the routine attendees at most direct actions. This is not the case. A significant percentage of the people involved in various Occupations are “normal,” middle class individuals. Some, like Scott Olsen, whose skull you fractured Tuesday night, are veterans of wars in which the enemy often shoots back, with roughly equal firepower and numbers. They have spent their lives, and risked their lives, trying to build and defend a better world for the next generation.

Because of your confusion, you have elected to employ tactics more aggressive than even those used to subdue over 40,000 protesters at the Seattle WTO convention in 1999. Tear gas and flash grenades tossed at veterans and women in wheelchairs doesn’t just make you look like a bunch of lowlife, dirty, motherfucking pigs. It makes you look like incompetent and clinically insane lowlife, dirty, motherfucking pigs. Honestly, you surveyed and allegedly checked the sanitation conditions in that encampment for over a week. Didn’t you notice the rather less crunchy than average composition of the crowd? Did anything you saw seriously merit expending more resources than you probably will all year on, say, sex trafficking?

Second, your job is secure now. Guess what, Wakenhut has guys who can do your job, and make money for the “%1” while doing it. Do you think being a bigger asshole will win you points at a negotiations table when the question boils down to their CEO’s bottom line? You are not exempt from trends of the world around you. One day, it will be your job that is downsized. One day, it will be you who loses his pension to corporate malfeasance. One day, your child will be denied access to education because your credit got destroyed by the bursting of some speculative bubble.

You are not part of the ruling class, as much as they may require your services right now. When it becomes in their best interest to eliminate your career, cut your benefits, or foreclose on your home, they will. And when that day comes, you will understand what all those people you tear gassed were on about.

Or maybe it won’t take that sort of clue by four. Maybe you’ll think about it, and realize where your best interests are, and at the very least stand down if not make plans to arrest every bank CEO in the immediate area.

And maybe pigs can fly, even lowlife, dirty, clinically insane and incompetent motherfucking pigs.

Sincerely,
James French

It is difficult to face this feeling. Most people just shunt it to the side and take comfort in whatever soothing sophistries their given adult authorities provide, or simply acquiesce to the present charade until they too buy into the mythos held dear by their particular tribe. These latter are marked by a bitterness that the innocent submissives do not share. For theirs is the mind turned upon itself, and they will defend their delusions more vigorously the louder the cognitive dissonance.

I will state unequivocally that I believe every such claim of deceit, no matter what the mythos, to be true. Unless ones parents are particularly brilliant and self aware, they are unlikely to have thoroughly examined their assumptions about reality to the degree that they could defend it against rigorous examination. For most, the thought of doing so never enters their minds. It is too close to their heart, too self evident. We cannot blame our early providers and teachers for selling us a half-baked narrative. They were sold on it themselves, and have little else to pass on to us.

For instance, I was raised with a Conspiracy Theory, masquerading as a religion. This Conspiracy was of a Cosmic scale, and featured no one less malignant that the Archenemy of God Himself. Satan was the great tempter and deceiver. It was His desire to turn us all away from the Love of God in order to get back Him for being tossed out of Heaven for asking a few inconvenient questions and starting a war when He didn’t like the answers. The Devil’s tricks were legion, and He had corrupted both a multitude of competing churches as well as the music industry and Proctor and Gamble. His most clever deception, it was said, was making people believe He didn’t exist.

Imagine this mindfuck, if you can. You’re faced with a wholly fantastic narrative that sounds like a comic book or a dark fantasy novel. It posits the existence of an Absolute Evil, intent on turning every living soul away from Good. It requires you to avoid two thirds of ordinary interactions with other human beings as “sinful.” For a person who has looked at their own foibles and seen how unlikely it is that any group of individuals wold be infallible conduits for Truth, regardless of the antiquity of their assertions, the story seems too clean, too easy. Just give your life to this Jesus character and you can be rewarded when all the sinners are smitten with the Sword of Heaven. They call this the Sin of Pride, which was the Devil’s sin, if you think about it. And then they hit you with the idea that not believing in the Devil is the same thing as following Him wholeheartedly. The final message is “think for yourself and you are damned.”

Clearly, all of this is a lie. There is no Final Judgement awaiting us, and there is no Devil. This is a story that people made up to make sense of a chaotic universe and a society that never stops changing, never stops reinventing Truth. That explanation probably needs an essay of its own, but that will have to do.

Because realizing you’ve been lied to isn’t enough. In fact, in terms of soul and intellect, you’re in more danger than you were when you believed in the lie. For starters, the specific details of the lie may have fallen to the sword of criticism, but the pattern is still there. I spent years cathecting various “revolutionary” political positions, groping for a replacement apocalypse in which the Devil Capitalists would fall in a Final Battle with the Workers and Freethinkers of the World. You have to be smarter than the reaction patterns you were raised with. Otherwise, you just end up hitting on something that recapitulates those patterns in a new form.

“Thinking for yourself” is a dangerous and difficult enterprise. Quite often, the very act is filtered through layers of unconscious assumptions gleaned from the worldview that was the problem in the first place. “Liking” an idea or ideology is actually a danger signal. It means that it confirms your basic assumptions, nothing more. Be suspicious of it.

I think there is a fairly clear conclusion that one will arrive at after looking at enough philosophies, ideologies, belief systems, cults, or other mental constructs. This is that no set of ideas conceived by individuals with a necessarily partial understanding of the Universe can ever be all inclusive or Absolute. But neither can it be utterly bereft of merit. It is highly unlikely that even some hideously stupid notion arose in someone’s mind without some insight. What happened in between that insight and the final draft is another matter.

We live in an era when cynicism and hostile dismissal of ideas is a kind of default position. “Thinking for yourself” and “subvert the dominant paradigm” have gone from stimulating ideas to suffocating injunctions that ignore the difficulties of both, especially when the general approach is to try to find a new paradigm to follow, usually one that someone else came up with first. “The dominant paradigm” changes depending on whom you speak to, and always seems to exclude the speaker.

In other words, we seem to live in a meme-sphere in which being an “outsider” is taken to be a normative injunction, regardless of any material facts which might make such a claim ridiculous. One can claim to be a “maverick” even if they are promoting the most blatantly reactionary ideology imaginable.

It would appear that what is needed is not “rebellion” but simply learning to actually think again. This requires real effort, however, and is thus unlikely to catch on unless someone can find a way to do it that allows you simultaneously vedge out in front of “Survivor.”

The Awesomeness Industry starts with the basic premise that being a successful, Type A, upper middle class individual is the goal to which all history and personal spiritual development are directed, and anyone who isn’t all of these things needs “coaching.” The coaching is done by people who, by their own assertion, wear the crown of Awesomeness. Some have an Awesome Lineage, having been “coached” by one of the Elders of their particular School of Awesomeness. Others are merely charismatic and need only speak the right Words to convince those predisposed to listen to them that they are Awesome. Some, we must add, even simply (gasp!) make up some Weighty and Impressive Origin for their Awesomeness.

Individuals are attracted to the Awesome because the particular Guru says something they “like,” which is absolutely the worst way to choose a spiritual teacher. “Liking” something either means “it confirms my prejudices” or “I’m projecting some idealized version of myself onto this person.” What the Awesome Guru is really saying is that “the world would be so much more Awesome if everyone were like me.” They then proceed to provide detailed semantic maps as to just how their personal assumptions, prejudices, and pet peeves, are in fact the Highest Law of the Universe.

After encountering more than three or four of these people (assuming you don’t get stuck in their Awesome Vortex, in which case you are probably fucked) I think it natural that one begins to ask the question “who the fuck are you and why do I care what you think?” No, seriously. You don’t really know this person. You’ve probably never even had coffee with them. In fact, the only place you’re likely to relate to your Awesome Guru is in public workshops, trying to be one of the lucky individuals who gets to ask them a question and receive a suitably vague, qualitative exhortation in return.

Spiritual authority is an ephemeral thing to begin with. Most of the time the justification for it is entirely self-referencial within a given system. From the Vatican to the Manson Family, we see people turning over the care of their souls to individuals they have never really met and who they trust because they tell you they are Awesome in some way. The Pope is Awesome because he is the successor of Saint Peter (who may or may not have been an historical individual empowered by an equally equivocal Messiah). Charles Manson was Awesome because he was the Messiah of questionable historicity. The Awesomeness Industry is usually a good deal more benign than this, but the overall behavior brings up a final question: from whence does spiritual authority derive.

For all the reasons given above, I think it fair to say that spiritual authority is something akin to Emperor Norton’s crowning of himself as “Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.” He said it, and to an extent, people went along with it. The main difference between Norton and most “leaders,” especially “spiritual leaders” is the fact that he didn’t rely on a heaping pile of bullshit to justify himself. Unlike today’s Awesomeness Gurus, he did not require a steady stream of spiritual pornography to get his followers off with so that he could keep them coming to his workshops. He just said he was the Emperor, and it was so. In some sense.

From all this, I conclude that spiritual authority is something we all have, and that projecting it outward toward some Awesome Personage is detrimental to our own growth. No one has any position from which to tell you how to think, act, or relate to the world around you. They may be able to give you a few helpful tools, but once they start trying to turn you into a carbon copy of themselves, the appropriate action, it seems to me, is to leave and never come back.

But then, who the fuck am I, and why do you care what I think?

What I have in mind could be called a “psychological” view of history, if that word were granted the divorce she so richly deserves from her abusive husband “merely.” It could also be termed “esoteric,” as it deals with forces that are hidden in the sense that they are covered by the manifest content of events in time. But that is confusing, as “esoteric history” tends to either imply a study of the various schools which have existed over time, or to outright conspiracy theory. Thus I have called this perspective “Inner History,” echoing the notion of the “Inner Planes” which many of us visit on a regular basis.

The basic contours of the idea are this: beneath the events of history are various forces meeting in different ways and producing new combinations. This is not Hegelian, nor some other Utopian teleology. I do not find in these conflicts and cominglings any direction or plan, any more than I would consider a landslide caused by the slow movement of water over time to be a directed phenomenon. It is predictable, certainly, in that you can say that gravity and pressure will produce x-result given time, but those forces have no reason for being other than existing in their own right.

I feel it important to mention this distinction, as it would be tempting to see all these interactions as leading up to some great unfolding of universal enlightenment and freedom. In fact, they are as likely to produce profoundly dystopic results as a new order of universal justice. It all depends on what forces meet and when.

So what is a “force?” In my view, it is both an archetypal “drive” and the clothing that drive wears. We can meaningfully distinguish these only to a certain degree. Take, for instance, the Martial drive. Calling it “Martial,” conditions our understanding of it, but also indicates it more concisely and with less limitation than “the impulse to engage in conflict.” The benefit of inner or twilight language is that it speaks to levels of our psyche that are not bound by words at all. Speak of “Mars,” and the inner understanding hears echoes that the mundane apperatus of eardrum and semantic circuitry cannot.

I think of these forces as the most abstract we can get and still be talking about something. Beyond that, we reach the point where the illusion that anything is actually a thing breaks down. For all practical purposes, we are left at the threshold of the noetic. I am not a mathmetician, or I would write this all out in equations.

What is important here is not the metaphysics. I make no claims to have any Final Knowledge about the contours of existence, and have only the testimony of wiser (or at least more experienced) individuals concerning its laws. The important idea here is a view that sees the manifest events of history as a kind of shadow play that both illuminates and obscures the real forces being expressed behind it.

Think of a war, or a riot, or the discovery of some new medicine, as the “manifest content,” as one would when interpreting a dream. These are the fragments we retain from moment to moment as we wake up to each new instance of ourselves. The memory of the past is already clouded by the headache we have two minutes later, or the fact that when such and such upheaval was happening, we were in love, or falling out of love, or burying our lover in the dust. True, such fragments are still sharp, and painful to grasp. How often have the events of a dream truly frightened us, even if we know that a dream is a message from some deeper strata of our being.

Forces, after all, interact with forms, thus continually creating existence. Some of those interactions are going to hurt. That hurt becomes some new trauma when it reaches our gross awareness. Call this the “original trauma” that rips our experience apart, further obscuring the forces that are the real cause.

We do not live in a world of objective perceptions. There are no such things. There are only perceptions that are slightly less obscured, better tested by more people. When dealing with history, these are mostly absent. The voices of clan and country drown out the sober assessment of any fact that may dwell beyond the shouting. In history, we dwell in dream and trauma, groping not for truth, but for stability of narrative.

Our groping, searching through signs and artifacts in a desperate need to validate “Our Story” or find “The Story,” creates a feedback loop. For we know, somewhere deep in ourselves, that we are hunting shadows and reflections. Our frustration is the food of Oraboras.

Cryptic though this may seem, it is now so different from intuitions that have existed throughout history. The axiom that “history is written by the victors” is a dim echo of what I am hinting at. It would be more accurate to say that history is experienced by the victors and endured by the victims. The winners of wars can shape whatever prism they will, and partake of historical agency in a complete way that those who must bow to their new masters’ whip cannot. Their history will be one of pain, trauma and nightmare haunting even their tales of liberation.

But even Kronos had to vomit up His Children. Eventually the Story conflicts so much with the manifest content, and the expressed intentions of the dreamer, that she must wake up or be lost forever in madness, or hacked to bits by her own weapons of rulership.

All of which is to say that there is no final end to this process. No “end of history.” Like the alchemical serpent, it circles in on itself, its own energy providing the fire and the water that keep the entire machine going. Yes, there are Grand Conflagrations when multiple forces form two opposites and thus a third thing. But these are neither as important nor as rare as the typical dialectic would have us believe. Life itself is permeated by such meetings, and all of them tend toward higher unities.

Viewing history in this way is only strange because we have been trained to see ourselves as inhabitants of a field of being in which different objects bounce into one another. We have, in other words, been told that the manifest content is the only thing that exists. Which is true, because there is no true division between the manifest content and the forces behind it. But it is also false, because these forces do not interact against a background. It would be more accurate to call the manifest content the waves in a larger ocean, which give appearance and partake of the deep blue ocean but are also different from it in quality.

If I seem to be speaking more in riddles and metaphor than in concrete concepts, it is because that is the language of the reality I am considering. The Grand View is precarious, and the less easily grasped it is, the more prepared I am to obscure my meaning even to myself, the less apt I am to fall into the errors of reification. That ocean is barren, having neither living water nor vital creature. I seek instead the deep blue, and the azure sky which cools it from above.

My initial comment, which actually made it to the site, was:

“When Wall Street runs your government, and corporations effectively control the discourse about government (the language you speak of here appears pervasive in nearly every mainstream media conversation I’ve had the misfortune to be subject…ed to for the past 15 years) then people will tend to relate to it as another “company” offering a “service” that has to adhere to a bottom line. This distorting factor is one of the reasons I think that Capitalism is ultimately detrimental to democracy. And it’s hitting the skids about as hard as the old “Communist” systems did, it just does a better job of covering it up. “

To which John responded:

“I think is both deeper and maybe, in a way, less dire than that. Firstly, I don’t think this tendency to think of freedom, government, etc. in economic terms, or using economic metaphors, is simply a result of corporate influence. It is something with a much longer history than that, and that I think has to do with this connection between limited government as defense against abuse and limited government as a way of achieving economic efficiency. (Abe, you should chime in here).

Secondly, I do not agree that “corporations effectively control the discourse about government.” To support that claim, I feel I require no more evidence that both you and Sarah Palin can use the term “mainstream media” in a disparaging way, but have entirely different notions of what’s wrong.

Moreover, if the way that people think about government IS determined entirely by the way things are presented in the media, then the problem is NOT the way the media present things, but the fact that people are not critical of those presentations. And THAT is not the fault of corporations; that is all of us. “

Below is the response I intended to post:

“Firstly, I don’t think this tendency to think of freedom, government, etc. in economic terms, or using economic metaphors, is simply a result of corporate influence. It is something with a much longer history than that, and that I think has to do with this connection between limited government as defense against abuse and limited government as a way of achieving economic efficiency.”

I think the concept of “corporate influence” is less reductionistic than the above implies. When most people with jobs work for a corporation, exchange the payment derived from that labor for goods and services provided by corporations, and entertain themselves with media created by corporations, that is going to have an effect on the way they think. It’s not just a matter of getting information from a biased source. What I’m talking about is the mental habits ingrained through the constant activity of economic exchange. Essentially, I think that we are living in a society permeated with commodity fetishism, in which social interactions are not just distorted by the imposition of economic frames, but that the distortion is so complete that there is no functional difference. I don’t want to imply that I think this is some sort of “evil” that must be corrected or purged. I see it as an aspect of reality in this time and place. It has its good points and its bad, but I do think it needs to be realistically addressed in order to achieve the best possible outcome for the most people.

As to the specific question, I think it’s basically a territorial issue. I would wager that very few people are actually concerned with economic efficiency in the abstract. To begin with, the system itself requires infinite growth on a planet with finite resources, and is thus by definition inefficient and unsustainable by any rational standard. What most people care about is being able to “enjoy” themselves (usually through various forms of self-numbing and ego gratification) and only think about the “big picture” when the monkey they identify with grunts and identifies an “intruder” upon their psychic turf. This turf emphatically includes their money.

In this case, I think the appeal of “small government” stems from the transition from rural to industrial economies (which even in some parts of the U.S. has never been total) and the attendant dispersal and erosion of previously firm social bonds. “The government” was a convenient target for people’s frustrations, and we are still experiencing the fallout from that set of tensions. But in my opinion that’s just the basic impulse or “original trauma” that the corporate interests are exploiting. It wouldn’t work if there weren’t some deeply embedded historical sentiment behind it.

“Secondly, I do not agree that “corporations effectively control the discourse about government.””

To more accurately express what I mean, I would replace “mainstream” with “corporate” and probably put “discourse” in quotes. There is no “discourse,” only a pantomime between payed “experts.” I’m actually referring mainly to this exchange. That is what is presented as supposedly “ideology free” as opposed to the speeches of politicos, which most people are conditioned to instinctively mistrust. I have yet to see such an exchange that did not assume that the government should be run primarily as a business, with the provision of services determined by supposedly neutral economic considerations.

“To support that claim, I feel I require no more evidence that both you and Sarah Palin can use the term “mainstream media” in a disparaging way, but have entirely different notions of what’s wrong.”

I would distinguish between the sort of rhetoric used by politicians and the “discourse”, however shallow, of paid experts. Rhetoric is used to make the monkeys dance. “Discourse” makes them think they are “informed” when they do it.

The use of “outsider” language by privileged reactionaries is a study all its own. It’s a problematic way of referring to various phenomena whatever the context, as it can be read as an exclusionary device rather than something meaningful. I’m fairly confident that reactionaries such as Palin use it with the intent of implying that they and by extension those who follow them are “hip” to some sort of secret that no one else knows.

I think it’s a mistake to think of Palin, or even “corporations” as part of some sort of ideologically coherent structure. The corporations are looking after their need to expand and make profit. The Tea Party and allied folks seem mainly interested in maintaining parochial boundaries and middle class privilege. These two interests overlap in the area of economics.

“Moreover, if the way that people think about government IS determined entirely by the way things are presented in the media, then the problem is NOT the way the media present things, but the fact that people are not critical of those presentations. And THAT is not the fault of corporations; that is all of us.”

I hope I’ve made it clear that I meant something quite different than simply media manipulation. It would be nice to think that there is a “target” that we can somehow eliminate or manage in such a way that we will have a better world. I’m less interesting in finding someone to blame than I am in assessing where the leverage points for effective action might be.

I have noted that domesticated primates, Pagans included, employ a great deal of what I think of as “patterned thinking.” What I mean by this is the habit of responding to every discussion which falls into a certain class (“prosperity” or “politics” or “truth” etc.) with a set of pre-fabricated tropes. “Of course Pagans can do prosperity rituals. We believe that matter is sacred, not something to be transcended.” “That’s all well and good, but what about the children working in sweatshops to produce your wealth?” It’s intellectual laziness rather than deficiency.

One instance of this is the notion that a diversity of opinion naturally means that all opinions are equally valid. At a certain level, it makes sense to be flexible. “You’re either with us or against us,” is hardly either spiritually or intellectually satisfactory. But to admit and even give space for the expression of views that fly in the face of ones own values seems a bit self defeating. Especially if those views, if followed to their logical conclusion, would lead to exclusion of all perspectives other than that being advocated. One should never let oneself get tossed out of ones home by the guests.

In the instance of politics, we are dealing with two basic elements, values and truth claims. Values are generally dependent on truth claims, since ones view of the nature of things generally determines for them what is valuable. If a group of people think that the truth has been spelled out for all time in a book written by hundreds of people over the course of thousands of years, this will dictate a different value system than one born of the findings of modern science. These are just two opposing views. Obviously there are nuanced positions that have nothing to do with either of these.

Politics is really about power, and power is mostly a matter of agency. To what extent can an individual expect to have her values protected or projected by society? In our society, it tends to be the people with the greatest command of material resources that can expect their value system to be enacted by the lawmakers. The extent to which the very affluent (people who will always have a family fortune to fall back on) allow the rest of us to attach our own hopes and dreams to their wagon depends largely on how much they feel it will further their own ends.

Which is why I am somewhat skeptical about giving space to more right leaning Pagans in the interests of “diversity.” Quite frankly, if anyone adheres to an ideology promoted by a major political party or offshoot thereof, I tend to think they’re basically puppets. It is not so much that right wing ideas are wrong (I could make a good argument for this, but don’t think it worth the trouble). It’s that what comes from the mainstream of politics isn’t “diverse” in the first place. It’s the “Coke or Pepsi” that the ruling class serves us in place of real discussion, real thinking, and real power.

If we’re going to talk about diverse views within the Pagan community, I am all for it. But I think these should be real discussions of underlying values and assumptions about the truth, rather than simply allowing Pepsi to advertise on Coke’s website.

Regular readers of this blog (all ten of them) have probably noticed that I regularly use a couple of phrases. One is “to an extent” (and variants thereof) and the other is “in a sense.” This is not because I am lazy. Well, not entirely. Nor are these phrases intended to be meaningless “bridges.” In fact, they express what I consider a key component of my own philosophy: that any statement of “truth” is only such in a particular sense and to a certain degree.

“In a particular sense,” is probably the primary element, epistemologically speaking. The first and only thing an individual can be sure of is the perspective they are looking at something from. (Of course, the degree to which a person understands their own perspective is always uncertain.) This is the “sense” in which something under discussion is being looked at. The phrase can be a good deal more mercurial than this, of course. Generally, however, the intent is to say “if you look at it this way…”

This is not to say that I see all “senses” as equally important in all cases. There are some perspectives which are irrelevant to the subject matter, though it can sometimes be hilarious to consider, say, “furries” from the perspective suggest by Thus Spake Zarathustra, for instance. And there are some ideas or points of view that I simply think are incorrect in either a significant or almost total degree.

“To an extent,” “To a degree,” and similar phrases, suggest a way of evaluating ideas that appears to be disappearing from the wasteland of discourse, particularly the internet. It seems that, as the technical ability to convey ideas has grown, the ability to see shades of meaning within those ideas has shrunk. In a certain sense and to a great degree, we have become colorblind when it comes to seeing the distance between extremes. Recent years have seen an increased blunting of our mental knives, until it seems that be shatter all subjects into supposed diametric opposites of strange and ragged cleavage.

For those of us mad enough to still credit the Hermetic mysteries that (if you study history) actually form much of the background for our modern civilization, “opposites” exist as part of an overall unity. Indeed, almost any opposition can be seen as a point arbitrarily designated along an infinite scale, defined only by another point. But practically speaking, there is only so far one way or the other that something can travel before it becomes something else entirely. No longer opposite, but meaningless in the context in question. In most situations, we can identify two distinct opposite extremes (very hot and very cold for instance).

The way in which ideas are received today seems to me the equivalent of saying that one is either on fire or encased in unbreachable walls of ice. “There is no way to be totally certain of anything” thus gets read as a call to abandon any hope of finding any notion even remotely secure in truth value. “Totally certain,” however, is a definable point along a continuum. “Nothing is even remotely worthy of confidence” is another, distinct point. Between them there may be countless other degrees of certitude and ambiguity. There is a hierarchy of knowledge that determines this. It begins with how sure one can be of their own senses, and descends to how well they can evaluate their ideas in relation to what their senses tell them. An individual with no musical experience does not know what note they are looking at on a page. A person with basic understanding can look at a note on a scale and tell you what it is. A more advanced musician can tell you when that note is played without looking at the instrument or the staff. The fact that the “note” itself is actually a point along a continuum of vibration and can only be said to be that note and not another by relation, and that given the conditions in which that note is produced it may or may not be exactly the same point along that continuum for every single person is kind of irrelevant. For all practical purposes, two individuals with a slightly different apprehension of a given note will be able to play together.

All of this is to say that I think we need to refine our understanding of the gradations between extremes. This would be particularly true when we are looking at something that is the apparent opposite of the pole to which we are naturally attracted. Could a person who thinks it should be okay to pray out loud in public schools possibly not be a fascist theocrat bent on replacing evolution with cartoons of primitive humans living with dinosaurs? It is quite within the realm of possibility, I think, although I would caution that person to consider the current advocates of prayer in school before going along with part of their agenda.

The problem is that we are psychically balkanized. Our society has fragmented into so many narratives, most of them claiming to be the exclusive and absolute truth, that our conversations with those unlike us tend to be either very brief and superficial or very heated. This is not what I think a pluralistic society should look like.

We seem to be in a double bind. On the one hand, our mainstream narratives are limited and manipulated by various interests, mostly commercial. On the other, our “radical” narratives contain within them an almost Manachean aspect. “Radical” is almost always defined as being on one end or the other of an historically determined axis of opposition. Both polarities apparently see the other as dominant, with varying degrees of validity, and thus represent the social order as something that must be overturned.

This will undoubtedly happen, but not in the way that the extreme parties might wish. One or another side may gain power over the institutions of society, or even manage to destroy the old ones and create something that looks to them like a “successful revolution.” But what they have in fact done is perpetuate the primary error of all dualistic sects: impose an imbalanced abstraction upon an organic whole. This will create new forms of oppression, leading to further shifts later on down the line. One day, the “illuminates” in power will become the evil overlords.

None of what I have said should be construed as a call to be “moderate.” The horizontal axis of opposition that determines the degree to which something tends toward one pole or another is offset by the vertical axis of how “high” ones capacity of perception has managed to reach. It is theoretically possible in my view to occupy a very high point on the vertical axis while also dwelling on the fringes of either point along the horizontal. But the higher the state of awareness, the more the horizontal oppositions appear less severe. If you see a long road from a very high mountain, it will seem to be a rather short trip. From that vantage, it could be that a little nudge in one direction or another is part of a process of getting somewhere that the traveller actually needs to be in order to reach something higher than where they are. There may even be a bend in the road that those below aren’t aware of that will cause them to double back.

What I am really saying is that extreme oppositions are something the ego constructs so that it can build defenses against the onslaught of contradictory information. On a long journey, our ego often becomes an armored tank, its driver ever vigilant to shoot perceived enemies from the tiny slit it has to look out at what is coming. From a point of view higher than the ego, such behavior looks like a child playing army. Humorous until someone loses an eye.

The world is bigger than the oppositions we create within its unity. As a defense against the spell of absolutism, I therefore fully intend to keep invoking my much worn mantras of “in a sense,” and “to an extent.”

The salient points of my political orientation are as follows:

1. Anti-Capitalism. Capitalism has failed to create a just, enlightened society. It has had more that enough time to do this, if that were even its goal. There are people who still starve and live in the gutter when there is no need for them to be there. We still fight wars we do not need to fight. Capitalism has done little for the human race but provide a comfortable form of indentured servitude (euphemistically called “credit”) to the middle class, and a huge mass of poor people around the world fighting over the scraps and growing increasingly hostile about it.

Having said that, this “anti” position on my part comes with the full awareness that “Capitalism” is an abstraction that refers to a cluster of activities. Some of these activities on their own are perfectly benign. Even the harmful ones could potentially be turned against the interests of the ruling class. “The System” is really just a set of game rules that everyone follows. A change in any one of the significant rules could precipitate a major shift in power from one entity to another.

2. Anarchism. This is a form of socialist thought that sees the modern nation state as the instrument of capital, and thus inherently opposed to human freedom and autonomy. Generally, it harbors great antipathy toward authority qua authority, since most forms of authority are derived from violence. The State is merely the gang of pirates that managed to emerge victorious and create veils of mystification around its abuses.

3. Mutualism. This is a form of anarchist thought that sees cooperative organization of alternatives as the best way to implement a classless, stateless society. It eschews direct confrontation with the state or the corporations served by the state as ineffective and even counterproductive. No one in a high corner office cares about a group of angry kids three hundred feet below. Any uprising can be put down and turned into a riot in the news. It is better to be a termite than a pitbull if one wishes to bring down a mansion.

Those are the big three. It may seem at times that I advocate for modern liberal democracy. This is not to be considered an enthusiastic endorsement. It is simply that this configuration gives more “wiggle room” for building alternatives free from harassment than an open dicatorship of theocracy. In the end, I don’t think it matters much who gets elected. The orders will still come from Wall Street, for good or ill. Mostly ill.

The extent to which these views will directly impact what I write in this blog is uncertain. My intention here is really to bring a generalized “critical theory” approach to thinking about Modern Paganism. Very, very generalized. I have no intention of invoking the names of Foucault or Zizek unless I think something specific from them, or another theorist, brings something illuminating to the discussion. In that case, the post would probably spend most of its time explaining the concept, rather than assuming that the reader is familiar with it.

This is as deeply as I care to delve into the topic of my political orientation. Any more detail would divert what is intended to be a summary into very complicated waters.

It is interesting in this context to consider the “anti-fluffy” meme and its assault on, say, Murray-derived Craft narratives. For while historical accuracy has its place, the follow through on the manifest implications of that history needs to be a priority. If we recognize the authority of current scholarship, scant as it may be, the idea of Modern Paganism being an ancient survival is highly questionable. We actually know the real names of the founders of The Golden Dawn, Thelema, and their offspring, Wicca. And we know the sorts of people they were. I feel safe in saying that none of these people had the degree of wisdom and foresight that I would need to see exhibited on their part before I would accept their authority as anything close to final or definitive.
This is one of the problems with being a New Religious Movement. We’re simply too close to the original sources to romanticize them and follow them to the letter. If you live five hundred years after Saint Peter, you can see him as the Rock upon which the Church is built. It your grandfather was the fellow who had to block his naked ass from view of the road while he took a shit, this wounds stupid. Of course, there are Wiccans who will tell you that heteronormative initiations are the only way to be “Wicca” and not “neo-Wicca,” but I suspect they know somewhere that this is a questionable position. Or, as so many Thelemites effectively worship Crowley, they may have elevated Gerald Gardner (of all people!) to the status of infallibility. One hopes not.

A tradition like Christianity, having been around long enough to have established patterns of practice and theological discourse, resist one of the more controversial aspects of Modern Paganism: constant proliferation of multiple definitions, many of which contradict one another. It should be pointed out, before going further, that it does so only to an extent. There is a Christian “Tradition” in the sense that there is a “Tradition” of music known as Classical. Out of that Tradition come numerous Christianities that have a common source book (or two, really, the Old and New Testaments) but vary widely in terms of how they relate to that book.

I don’t think multiplicity, in itself, is all that unique or problematic. But Modern Paganism has developed what I consider a great deal of “static on the line” when it comes to thinking about what, in general, it means to “be Pagan.” It is possible to so loosely define it that it becomes meaningless as anything other than a collection of specific techniques for mental masturbation, and so narrowly that it excludes everything but a specific institutional lineage. I don’t think either of these is desirable. There are reasonable ways to indicate boundaries without creating absolute dogmas.

One of the ways to do this is to consider a religious movement as a reflection of the needs and desires of individuals in a given social context. In this, I think needs should come first. That is, I think the objective socioeconomic context needs to be clearly and accurately understood. Otherwise, the tendency will be to drift off into fantasies that are either so divorced from reality that their impact on society at large is minimal, or so rooted in divisive garbage that they lend support to regressive or even fascistic cultural forces.

This would help us resolve a number of “issues,” such as the current tedium surrounding the question of whether or not Paganism is an “Earth” or “Nature” based belief system. We live in an age of vast ecological crisis. This is fairly well established, arguments to the contrary being largely the product of PR campaigns originating with polluting business interests. Seriously, follow the money and you will find the interest being served. Given this, I would assert that any emerging religious movement that does not, at the very least, recognize the need to live in actual balance with the planet, is irresponsible. You simply cannot ignore a pressing reality of the magnitude of our current environmental problems and expect to be considered anything other than a joke.

Also, the notion of anything in Modern Paganism being “indigenous” should be abandoned, simply because it is not true. There may be surviving pre-Christian cultures that fit this category, but they are not the same as Modern Paganism. This is a very specific religious movement with contemporary origins. The degree to which any one element may be traced back to previous existing religions is beside the point. The superstructure and the motifs of the movement are the product of Late Capitalist society, with known origins in Western Hermetic practices dating from the Romantic period and later.

This gives us lines along which meaningful definitions can be drawn. It is not so much to exclude, but to focus. A belief system that cannot decide on what it is will not survive. There is no way to pass down a collection of half-understood homilies and strange practices. Over time, they will simply become mangled and become absorbed into whatever the next version of the New Age is.

Modern Paganism, considered in terms of an objective social phenomenon, is a new religion. There are echoes of the past, but the main voice is that of the Late Capitalist West, with all of the baggage and opportunity that brings with it. It is my opinion that, if its various strains do not come to terms with this, it will vanish at the first sign of a shift in society, or morph into something ugly that serves the powers of social regression.

Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.
Otto von Bismarck
German Prussian politician (1815 – 1898)

Most discussions about the intersection between politics and spirituality focus primarily on one thing: whether or not the two should have any institutional relationship with one another. The liberal tradition takes the position that they should not. The conservative tradition views religion as a key component of society and thus sees any attempt to divorce politics from a spiritual viewpoint as tantamount to a species of nihilism. In the United States, we have a situation where the liberal perspective won in terms of the law, but a large portion of the population, if not the majority, tends toward varying shades of conservatism.

(The terminology “liberal” and “conservative” should be understood in their historical sense, relative to the Enlightenment, rather than as the somewhat misleading ideological labels of contemporary Spectacular politics.)

Present day “discourse” on the subject tends to revolve around attempting to either defend the liberal tradition as nearly every document of the Enlightenment period clearly indicates was the intention of those theorists, and trying to re-write history in defense of theocracy. Such “debate” never leaves the realm of civics behind to look at the underlying tensions between a spiritual view of the world and the demands of real politik. It is as if the only relevant discussion is over what sort of laws we should have, rather than the implications of a particular spiritual perspective when it encounters that milieu.

It is important to remember that the liberal antipathy toward religion in general was the result of a long series of historical conditions. Voltaire lived within sniffing distance of the Inquisition’s fires. The ideological architects of the United States were only a generation or two away from the age in which the divine right of kings was taken seriously, and remembered how it had been abused. Added to this was the memory of the first European settlers in America, who came to escape religious persecution and managed to set up their own version of it. The First Amendment was not written for idle purposes, nor would the reason for it have been at all unclear to the citizens who demanded it. The intent was to protect both the State from the Church and the Church from the State.

Recognizing this, human beings are still human beings, and our thoughts, feelings, and desires are not as compartmentalized as the Enlightenment theorists might have imagined. Religion in that era was, mostly, viewed as a kind of comforting form of social cohesion at best. Taking it seriously would have put you outside the circle of what was considered “intelligent company” at that time.

This, in general terms, is what is meant by the phrase “liberal secular humanism” when used as a political referent. It is a vague term that sounds specific. More often than not, the intent of its usage is pejorative rather than descriptive. But what it amounts to is a view that sees this world and the humans in it as the primary arena of concern. It makes perfect sense to most “normal” people, because it has not only been a sort of default social perspective amongst educated Westerners for the past couple of centuries, but because it also happens to deal with the concrete implications of particular actions as we experience them in the here and now. As far as that goes, and I want to make it clear that I think it goes quite a long way, it is probably one of the better world views that the human race has put together over its incredibly checkered intellectual history.

Having said that, the “here and now” is a very slippery place, transient and still apt to be misinterpreted if the facts of experience aren’t put together properly. The feeling often arises that something more than empirical data are needed. There must be a higher level of meaning, even if the world wasn’t created by a large man with a beard belching out Hebrew letters.

In our time, the search for that higher order of reality has tended to take a more eclectic and individualized approach. This reflects an age in which people exist as effectively autonomous entities and have access to the entire surviving spiritual, philosophical, and intellectual heritage of the human race. When you can find information on literally almost any existing or defunct set of ideas, curiosity alone is going to encourage one to at least dip their toe in some exotic seas, if for just a moment. Unless, of course, the individual has some limiting set of notions concerning what is “proper” in the area of religious expression.

And therein lies part of the rub. All of this eclectic spirituality can look, to more traditional eyes, like nihilism. For most of our civilization’s history, “God” meant a totally transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, being who created the world and gave us the laws by which we should live. “Theocracy” would have been a nonsense term up until the end of the 17th Century, in the same way “sexism” would have. Before then, the king was the regent of God (as defined above), and women were chattel. Period. What little existed in the way of challenging this was shunted into obscurity and in extreme cases punished with death.

Hence, in our time, we have two extremes. On the one hand a traditional view of religion as an adherence to a set of doctrines taken, in some fashion, to be the work of the sole creator of the universe. On the other, a rather more nebulous, individualized kind of experience of what becomes referred to vaguely as “the Source” or “the Sacred.”

Both of these extremes have drawbacks. Traditional Christian theology has the notable impairment of being demonstrably false if taken literally. Science has been rather handily demonstrating this for the past couple of centuries. Christian theologians have been adapting to this, with differing degrees of success, for some time now. Most attempts involve abstracting upwards to something, well, more nebulous and less anthropomorphic.

The demerits of the eclectic approach have been thoroughly cataloged as well. One of the more salient criticisms vis a vis the current topic as that it focuses on the individual to the extent that “who the person is” becomes more important than what the person does. It is a sentimental approach, in which the good intentions of a person somehow make up for any inconsistent behaviors. Like New Age “Buddhists” who build bombs for a living, in direct contradiction with everything Buddha taught about Right Livelihood.

Herein lies a problem. The traditional viewpoint leads, logically, to a very rigid set of ethical expectations. Once one has committed to one of the many interpretations of the Bible, they are more or less obligated to behave in a way consonant with that perspective. The degree to which this can be adjusted for the real world depends on how much latitude the chosen theological school imparts upon a believer.

In contrast, the view that a person’s “essential being” or some such is what matters, means that any behavior which is not actually criminal is acceptable. In most cases, I for one don’t really have any issues with that. Apart from diluting long established traditions in a way that totally abrogates the main thrust of their teachings (see above example), there is very little I consider improper per se.

It becomes a real problem, though, when this openness is extended to viewpoints that are so aggressively rigid that they tend to not only restrict the masochists who hold to them, but intend to make said masochism the standard by which we all live. This defeats the purpose entirely. It is akin to allowing the guy with the troubling habit of shooting the guests attend your party in the interests of not making anyone feel left out.

This, again, is the result of history. The human organism appears to operate by a system of associations. Rules in religion and spirituality, because of the primary historical trauma of the stake and the thumbscrew, of dour Puritans and fanatic homophobes, tend to be associated with “revealed” religions of grave severity. So we have an aversion to them, especially if we went through less overt versions of the Inquisition in our own childhoods. There are very good, rational motivations for this as well, lest anyone think I am calling this aversion “merely psychological” (as if having a crack in the foundation of your psyche was a trivial concern).

And there is the another aspect of this. From most spiritual perspectives, of any stripe, politics is a fairly low level sort of game. It is by nature divisive, and often ugly and depressing. It is understandable that we would want to create a space where political views don’t really matter. And, up to a point, I think this is a good thing. We are, after all, still searching for a higher order of meaning, and finding it reasonably qualifies as a birthright.

But, at some point, we are going to have to face the fact that the ideas in a person’s head, if they actually have any commitment regarding them, will translate into manifest behavior or manifest psychosis. You cannot act in a way that contradicts your deepest convictions without eventually experiencing some degree of dissociation.

So we are left with a problem not easily solved. Even openness must have a boundary somewhere. There are ideas which, if acted on, will lead to the egregious, objective suffering of a significant number of human beings. It is not enough in these cases to say “well, that doesn’t work for me, but whatever gets you through the night, man.” To allow such perspectives equal time, to treat them as being just as valid as any other, is tantamount to blessing their logical conclusion.

It is in such cases that compassion would dictate saying no. It may even entail exclusion and ostracizing.

Bringing this back to the idea we started with, focusing on a question of law in terms of the relationship between spirituality and politics misses the point entirely. Institutional separation between Church and State is an absolute necessity for a free society. This is supported by the long, dark history of brutality that attended their union. But, on a personal level, if we do not bring an awareness of the implications of our spirituality to politics, then I question the point of having a spiritual belief at all. It degrades spiritual practice into a kind of comforting mental masturbation.

This is not what I want out of my practice, and I suspect it is not what most others on the more “open” side of the spectrum want. If we are to have an effect on the world at large, rather than simply make ourselves feel good, we have no choice but to commit to a course of action that suits our values. What that course of action may be is, or course, up to the individual.

Within reasonable limits.