To translate sentiment in real political effect, I apply a banner concept: “Improving Qualities of Living” – physical, psychological, spiritual | matched to cultural expectations and potentials | measured x place x population x area x region.
“Good feeling” may not be all about economics or materials (reference: _Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes_) or perceptions having to do with dominance, but general well being and security for most humans, from rain forest to concrete canyon, is possible and much can be done to obtain some improvements globally.
I’ve wanted to establish and elaborate on a page devoted to “Qualities of Living” but doing so has proven an expanding and unwieldy blob: cultural happiness, alas, is “complex, multidimensional” and I’ve no wish to do social science with it.
Nonetheless, places may be visited in just the manner described — x area x population x culture — and some assessment made as regard to the health of the spirit of the community. As much becomes the subject of inquiry in a blog seemingly devoted to tracking conflicts and the manner in which they live in the mind.
So I will get to work on “qualities of living” as a concept and dimension those with good will may focus on while going about more specific business within the business of making things a little bit better for others on the planet.
“O you who believe! Be upholders of justice, bearing witness for Allah alone, even against yourselves or your parents and relatives. Whether they are rich or poor, Allah is well able to look after them. Do not follow your own desires and deviate from the truth. If you twist or turn away, Allah is aware of what you do.” (Surat an-Nisa’: 135)
My response:
I always enjoy this passage on two grounds: 1) common law seems to recognize that close relations or obligated relations may not tell the truth or, just as importantly, listen fairly, so in courts, prospective witnesses and jury members may be examined for attitudinal or relationship bias in advance of trial: the upshot is it may be a little more ideal than realistic and ideal; 2) Muhammad recognized both the problem posed and power associated with dishonest or disingenuous speech. “Do not follow your own desires and deviate from the truth” slips power to the speaker, for it could have been stated, “Follow your own desires but do not deviate from the truth. Be always honest.”
The one variable to which all of the warfare and suffering we are witnessing from within the Muslim-majority states of the world troubled by violence or political unrest and scandal distills to one word: integrity.
How the use of language and the value of integrity differs from one geopolitical space to another is a large topic but one generally pitting acquisitiveness, fear, greed, and loyalty against a perhaps privileged altruistic idealism.
Am I suggesting that all that dying and suffering in Syria (and similar elsewheres) is about integrity?
Yes.
Unfair dealing would seem to characterize both opposed systems, the brutal dictatorship of Bashar Assad and the breathtaking brutality of the equally autocratic and full of itself al-Nusra and associates (elsewhere dictators in power vs. dictators challenging power).
Neither have good to offer and both approach battle mounted on lies and misdirection.
It is no wonder that the conflict in Syria (and those elsewhere) has generated a heart wrenching flight within the state and without, for no one not engaged in the purpose of battle has any life interest in it either apart from plain corporeal survival.
Nineteenth-century radicals loathed Russia above all other states because it had a quasi-religious mission to preserve autocracy at home and promote reactionary regimes abroad. To true believers, the “Third Rome” of Christian tsarism defended the divinely ordained old order against the threats of liberalism, socialism, nationalism and modernity.
After reading Nick Cohen’s relay of Pat Buchanan’s words about Vladimir Putin, it turns out that I am a part of a movement characterized as the “militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.”
* * *
Ya ha!
I have found my place.
You know my lowest common denominator standards:
— Compassion | Humility | INCLUSION | Integrity —
Buchanan, if he’s now enamored of Putinism, and Putin, who would seem by the show of affection proffered in weapons deliveries and benevolent shadowing, remains committed to Bashar (The Butcher) Assad may be counted on for the grossest callousness, pride, exclusion, and — no secret where so many secret and nepotist arrangements would seem to be involved — corruption.
The same as (gasp!) Al Qaeda.
OUR problem, me hearties, me droogies, me Facebook best buddies from Riyadh to Islamabad, is that whether having to do with Assad vs. the Islamist Edge or Putin vs. Obama, it would seem similar mentalities wish to occupy the same space or shine in the same lights — not exactly atypical of “malignant narcissists” — while driving everyone else into misery or just plain out of their mirrored spheres!
THEIR problem, Mr. Obama, Mr. Putin, may have to do with escaping their own glorious selves. Of the two, Obama, being of the Christian compassionate honest humble and generously inclusive democratic and open society west, may lay claim to having done less harm in the short term than his superpower counterweight; Putin, however, would do well to look over the Assad combat doctrine and its effects on once disinterested Syrians who have by the effects of extensive bombing and indiscriminate fire been turned out of their homes or cheated of their lives while the Al Qaeda affiliates’ advance seems to have remained out of range and sight of the same.
Post-Soviet Syria was post-Soviet Putin’s to influence and transform.
Well, some, I suppose, both milk the cow and starve it until it keels over.
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In Putin, the past fights mightily with the future.
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In my own recurring themes, Putin and I might share the appreciation of what I call “19th Century Modern”, an aristocratic and noble notion reinforced by the appearance of affluence and wealth. Living in the 19th Century with 21st Century appointments and appliances seems to me pretty cool, although I’ve had to stuff my mansion into a cabin (or cottage) based in about 1,000-sq.ft. of garden apartment walk-up, and things are not looking so good for drives in the country and claret before one or another of the ever glowing electronic hearths.
Still, the situation here is 19th Century (Modern), and it’s pretty good but for the worry.
For the narcissist, reparative or malignant (guilty, I confess, of one or the other or a bit of both), there’s much to recommend it and one may bet on the intelligentsia’s buy-in, Georgian brick, ivy, tweed, and elbow patches and all.
So is the fighting about castle and keep?
It could be so, at least symbolically.
It takes a castle, a manor, a very many of them to create and sustain a great language and culture. If perhaps in his mind, his peacock charm, ambition, dreams at night, and hail fellow well met — and now and then stabbed! — President Putin has had to step back a century, the same may serve to remind of the magic of that era as well.
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It’s almost Christmas.
Winter returns tonight to my home in western Maryland — ice and snow, wool blankets and sweaters, steaming pots of tea (someone else in the family got the samovar) — so I may offer this bit of in-solidarity to my unknown Muscovy doppelganger, reasonably appointed and of good temper: let’s enjoy the show because, sooner or later, for Christianity or fashion designers, for the Jews who work harder for humanity than anyone else, and for humanity served, we’re going to have to do something about Syria and soon, and we don’t want it to be either of the two pariahs busying themselves this evening with the other’s destruction.
That contemptuous phrase “the whims of man” applies well to autocratic societies in which, indeed, the whims of one man control a great swath of humanity, but with those, one knows the methods: to those who humiliate themselves before their regimes: bribery, nepotism, and patronage: i.e., those get fed like dogs; to those who threaten such regimes: blackmail, intimidation, murder.
In contemporary realpolitik, the path ends with the suffocation of the constituent humanity or the overthrow of the regime.
Syria’s a good case in point today: I cannot figure out on whose side God has appeared. From the survey of that unfolding tragedy, He would seem altogether absent.
One more thing: the struggle for truly just systems of law beneficial, invested in, and trusted by all has not come about through whim.
The struggle for decency in human relationships by way of ethical and moral argument that finds expression through the law has a millennial existence, one that would seem to have its roots in the depths of tragedies, small and large, attending the human experience across oceanic time.
In the arts, we may refer to a certain state in performance as contained and connected and that with God, nature, and the universe. — put together some observations in psychology — Ecstasy: a Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences (1961). I happen to think our Homo sapiens sapiens is as wild a species as any but with a large brain and a phenomenal mouth, and one has proven capable of great creativity and intuition and the other of aiding the invention of languages (of which there are more than 7,000 separable extant as I type in just one) and language culture, each of the thousands embracing and entertaining one form of divinity or another.
Mine (edited lightly).
* * *
In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to writing that was more poetic and expressive. I also wanted a more viable balance between my work with words and my work with wood, especially furniture for worship settings.
Human life (actually for those bedding down on Siberian ledges to watch the sunset, bear life too) entails, whether we or the bears like it or not, an aesthetic and spiritual emotional and emotive experience.
That’s life.
The wonder is how many approaches have been adopted, created, discovered, embraced, invented, and modified in service to those experiences.
Betwixt and between, then and now, but then I turned a first graduate degree toward facets of the experience of leisure time — boredom, ecstasy,flow, motivation, peak experiences, self-concept, self-as-entertainer, etc. — and among the predicates were youth, mountains, and music.
Not much has changed about me, but my views have been broadened, and here in the blogland of “conflict, culture, language, and psychology”, it may be worth taking a moment while fighting rages in Syria, Iran struggles to obtain The Bomb, and terror drips into everyday life somewhere in Iraq and Pakistan on a daily to weekly basis that our humanity is of just one species and that species, about 7.124 billion in number, communicates by way of more than 7,000 languages, each addressing the aesthetic and spiritual percepts of its speakers.
The urgent post-9/11 intelligence directive became: “Do more, do better, do it differently, and do it now.” In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing—a scant two months before Snowden’s first leaks—the FBI was accused of not doing enough to track suspected terrorist sympathizers (even though those suspicions had come from the Russian intelligence service formerly known as the KGB). Two events, two contradictory reactions by the American public: one demanding that the government take action to identify and defeat terrorist threats, the other wary and untrusting of that same government.
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
Those who promote fear and do so with deceit also on occasion promote the “black swan” theory, the idea that nature produces an improbable event — like life on earth, for example, or two schnooks setting off compression cooker bombs cruelly designed to cut the legs from beneath marathon runners.
The grim review of improvised explosive devices deployed to encourage the adoption of “Islamic values” — or to discourage and subjugate others in the name of Islam — suggests such events are less “black swans”, or “bolts out of the blue” — another trite analog that works — than whole flocks of malevolent black crows.
In online chatyping, the subject of secrecy in Jihad / anti-Jihad activities and other spheres has come up, and I’ve playfully suggested the obvious: change computers and location, persona and voice.
Revert thoughts and data to paper — then burn the paper and rely on memory.
Some professions, say the performing arts, place premiums on memorization as the fundamental part of the craft.
Notably, in English literary arts, a part of the graduate examinations involve questions about who you know and what you know about them, but “who” and “them” may number among the thousands of characters of historic fictions.
In Arabic literature, I am guessing, the “who” and “them” may be the souls legend from earlier generations.
Indeed, my favorite correspondent on many subtopics Islamic suggests that operational code will only drill more deeply into remote corners of Islamic scripture, commentary, and law. The scholars of interest (believing themselves ” . . . more powerful against the devil than one thousand worshipers”) would seem suspected of having their own communications, command, and control language subculture, and that in Arabic, within the depths of Arabic, and tucked away and harbored like precious and useful intellectual metal.
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Beginning with George Washington’s first State of the Union Address, in which he requested a secret fund for clandestine activities, intelligence has been an instrument to achieve the broad goals of the American people and the policies advanced by their duly elected representatives.
Put on a mask and other elements of costume; alter the walk and the talk; step out of primary character and into some other creature; and work it for a while.
Truth is hard.
One has to live with it and in the company of others who challenge and entertain about the same observations and perceptions. If, whatever it may be, proves relentlessly reliable and obstreperously valid — true! and whether we like it or not — it acquires a stability all its own and needs no help by way of arms, punishments, and threats.
The truth is not belief but a stubborn “is” and unmindful and uncaring of whatever human investment may be in it or not.
In the quotation section to the left of where you’re reading, you will find this from Maimonides:
“Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it.”
And I thought I was being original.
Be that as it may, the deceitful, I believe, persist in bending truth to will, the better to beatify and glorify themselves, to make themselves legend, eternally regarded — and that if not in greater social realities than their own heads and small and deeply isolated circles.
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In recent months also, I have read of lineage traced back to King David, an argument for the divine allocation of the right to rule over others.
No cyber or real space visit to a sanitarium was involved.
As a Jew, I have been gently but firmly reminded of God’s demands for animal sacrifice and the restoration of Judaism to literal Levitican standards.
Again, no cyber or real space visit to a sanitarium was involved.
If such beliefs, levers, and sentiments have been suspended by mind in the language cherished by some minds, in just how many heads do the same arrangements persist?
What was read?
What was heard?
What was consequently formulated (about royal bloodlines, say, or irrational obligations and rituals)?
While I believe the human capacity for language invention and the invention of language-congruent cultural behavior bounded only by the necessities of place and responses to them plus desire and its many facets, I believe also that symbolic arrangements in language may be mapped, comprehended, and remapped. When that remapping has taken place in the natural development of a culture, and, say, “twerking” makes its way from youth novelty to something boring old grandmother used to do, we note the remarkable ability and flexibility English has for adaptive evolution; when force comes to erase or overlay a culture and its language, we think of that as cultural warfare and the prize is what is prised from the possession of the minds targeted.
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In Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire, the annual budget cited for secret U.S. intelligence operations in their totality was $52 billion.
I hope there is some money in that green ocean for poets.
We may not like the cultural blender or centrifuge fashioning the humanity of humanity and coalescing most in the monotheist traditions around a monotheist humanism (the proposed universal values and virtues I apply for that are compassion, humility, inclusion, and integrity), but that may be where we’re going. The so-called “real” Islam, which carries the burden of the Banu Qurayza legend (was that a good thing or a bad thing? Was the slaughter just? Today, Aafia Siddiqui — heroine or villain?) or the “real” Christianity, which owes much of its “realness” to Constantine’s marches (that one had a colossus made of himself), or the “real” Judaism that preoccupies Kirs Joel in New York State spin out in schism, separation, and war. Those come apart and the “humanity of humanuty” recovers its main and progressing regions.
Every child born comes equipped with a legacy in culture, customs, family, language, and religion. Perhaps the greater the separation from others, say the tribe from the greater family of man — or here the person from social anchorage — the more autonomously evolving, eclectic, and narcissistic.
The narcissistic bubble, the house of mirrors, even perhaps Plato’s cave afford freedom within their interior boundary responsive entirely to its inhabitants — or inhabitant — but introduce some cultural and political commerce to that sealed environment (and should you hear in that phrase an echo of the “sealed nectar”, enjoy the faint metonymy) and something is going to change.
In what direction always — and tragically after much fighting, shouting, suffering, and dying?
Call that the “humanity of humanity”.
Analog: Lincoln’s “better angels”.
Inspiration for the thought here: my uncle’s old Haggadah in which was stated in Jewish memory of the exodus from Egypt: “With each generation, a little more freedom is won.”
As we enter an era of dangerous and delicate energy technology, i.e., more nuclear power plants, expansive solar panel arrays, their vulnerability in war and our dependence on them for living plus improving qualities of living wants the clearing away of those who trouble lands with their own romantic mythos borne of deeply evolved isolation (evolved in thought in language) and once unhindered by any consideration of others.
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Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, Monday, March 4, 1861:
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Notably, Lincoln’s message preceded the greater carnage of the Civil War.
The cynical may say he gambled.
The believing, however, may believe Lincoln knew and wrote the end of the matter at the beginning.
. . . as we are advancing towards one Global Humanity in which all religions and faith(s), irrespective need to be respected and respected with the greatest of dignity, therefore, the question of Dhimmis is over with. Islam believes in the equality of one global humanity and not to enslave humanity because of their different religious backgrounds, and faith. Islam protects the weak against the strong, who do not know how to absorb Power and to Practice Power in form of good and credible Justice to be done to humanity, irrespective of their backgrounds in religion and faith. Today’s Muslims or the so called Muslims who have taken Law into their own hands, and violate the law of ONE GOD ALL-MIGHTY of how well to treat ONE GOD’s humans on this earth, are perhaps far and very far from the Principles of Islam. Such violent Muslims, may call themselves Muslims a hundred times, makes no difference, because their hypocrisy has grown so much on them, that they cannot think aright. Their minds have been corrupted to the core and their hearts have been blackened by the demons’ spell, so how can such so called Muslims in name, be the Worshipers’ and followers’ of ONE ALL-MIGHTY GOD, Who, Loves HIS Creation, and then Humans being HIS Most Creative Creation. Islam is Peace, Love for humanity and a crave for Universal Justice among’st all humans.
The bold italics are mine.
The writer is Muslim, vigorously so.
The awesome conversation continues.
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. . . but I will suggest this much: every human has an interior life, some kind of life of the mind, and the images in that mind float around in there with language. Where there’s abundance and any ability to distribute that, fighting involves something in the head, and we can discern what that is when the head talks and out of its mouth come its attitudes and beliefs, some about the universe, and those entertain us, and some about others, and those words are the ones that may comfort or terrify everyone who hears them.
That voice is my narcissistic own.
🙂
We can experience a great many things in our own heads, but we cannot share them without the creation of sign and symbol, and we do that most often with the words we speak (this not discounting the effects of aural, culinary, and visual fine art).
What we have in our heads too may be put there by language, the “cultural tool”, a powerful one with which each generation of sufficient mien and reach must be careful with in service to themselves and others.
When a Muslim gentleman in Pakistan tells me through the awesome conversation — a term of art on this blog — that “the question of Dhimmis is over with” it is a little like hearing Spielberg’s Lincoln say, “Slavery, Mr. ____, it’s done.”
Of course, it is different when a Lincoln says it, but even from out of the sea of more than a billion voices, the one voice confirms his faith in submission to God but not through himself or others submission to himself or others.
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