Barnettization III: Christian Theology and American Empire
This is an extremely difficult topic, so any thoughts are of an exploratory nature.
There is an old saying in the tradition, that we should be in the world, but not of it. It's a fine line, one I have tried to tread in life, at times falling down to both sides--disconnected from the world or too immeshed in it.
That teaching becomes even more complicated in an evolutionary framework. And evolution itself struggles. Spirit has clearly moved into the modern-rational sphere--therefore globalization is part of a divine desire. There is plenty of evidence that can cited in its favor: absolute decreases in utter poverty in the last 20 years, decreased mortality rates, increased longevity. Plenty of negative evidence though of course: greater disparities in wealth, environmental destruction, transnational forms of violence-oppression-criminality.
The morphogenetic patterns are themselves dis-eased, particularly since the rise of the so-called orange wave of modernity and the later so-called green wave of postmodernity.
The forms of globalization argued for in a Barnett is the only viable future political vision, as I see it, and yet it itself is still caught in the dis-eased warp--referred to sometimes as Flatland/MOM (Mean Orange Meme).
An example. In Germany there are large chunks of un-incorporated (I use that word purposefully--coporate=body) Turkish populations who still practice tribal social structure. Women are furtively brought in from the Turkish countryside and forced to marry a man in their early teens. If such a girl is raped or seeks to flee this forced marriage, she faces persecution and possible death, usually from the hands of her own family, who have been "shamed"--according to their worldview--by her insubordination. Now for a long time now, the German populace has turned a blind eye to this phenomenon, mostly, it appears, out of guilt. Think when the last time the German state started ordering around non-German populace within its borders, even "enforcing" their rules upon them....hint: Treblinka. Add to that deconstructionist postmodern thought--which in Continental Europe has always (rightly) been seen as social-political and not a literary art criticism (and not philosophy) as in the US--and you have a major problem. You have a government ostensibly promoting "tolerance", which however well intentioned, is being manipulated (unconsciously in large measure) to contiue oppressive social-familil structures.
And yet on the other hand, to wholesale "enforce" secularization-modernization on a population would cause innumerable harm as well. It is violence, psychic violence pure and simple, in most cases. Again well intentioned no doubt.
That is the world we live in regarding the modern globalization project. It is so massive, so earth-shattering, so revolutionary, that it can not be cause massive chaos. It does lead to a better future, which itself has its own sicknessess. We live longer and have greater access to food, only to suffer cancer, heart disease, obseity, and diabetes in numbers unheard of in human history.
Barnett mentions towards the end of Blueprint for the Future that he was surprised how much of a response he received from clergy-theologians. In this case, then, I'm just part of that gathering. He said his parish priest, why mostly a liberal-pacifistic type could not allow himself to be morally "relative" on the question of injustice. In fact, there never is a moral neutrality. Omission and comission are sins. Neither, is there ever a perfect moral act. Acting, in any way, involves light-and-shadow, but inaction, is in many cases far more evil.
It reminded me of a similar passage in Friedman's Lexus and the Olive Tree, where after laying out his pro-globalization picture, he asks, "What room if any is left for God?" He mentions a Rabbi friend of his who said it was like the Internet. God will be involved to the degree that we bring God into the picture. Its our choice in other words.
Those are helpful but still pretty shallow, I think, takes on the subject. Friedman defines himself as a "compassionate flatist", and Barnett seems mostly the same. He is a flatist--no real transcendence there--and yet compassionate. But how many "flatists" are really going to be compassionate? What's the moral high ground to make such a claim, if the process itself is seen as so inherently flat-neutral and so forth?
Yet I can only make these musings because I'm not dying a slow gruelling life-death on a German field. Or condemned to the misery of the pueblos jovenes-favelas-shanty towns of the Global South....megalopolis of death, despair, and misery.
Even more so, the thought of contemplating such a worldview vis a vis Christianity brings up all the old ghosts of the lurid marriage of imperialism and religion. In Globalization 0.0, if you like, (Discovery of the New World), it was Catholic missionaries riding on Spanish-Portuguse man-of-wars. In Globlalization 1.0 (1870-1919, European) it involved mostly mainline Protestant missionaries, especially from Great Britain (Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, Baptists). In Globalization 3.0 and 4.0 (3.0=1989-2001, 4.0=2001+) it involves many American forms of religion: Evangelicals, Non-Denominational Megachurches, Pentecostals, Mormons, etc. Each religious form allied with the nation-state(s) setting the pace of globalization.
With China rising to a co-lead status with the US, it will be interesting to see how this plays out, given as I said, that if China were to open itself up to religious practice, more modern forms of Christianity (witness South Korea) would be in a position to sweep wildly across the country. A Neo-Protestant ethic.
The first great phase of the as-yet-to-be-modernized world involves of course The Near East/Central Asia. The second phase will involves Sub-Saharan Africa--particulary if modern economic-political structures arise in the Middle East, terrorists will be forced to wage the Global Jihad from places like Ethopia, Somalia, Sudan (for Bin laden, that is a return to those places).
All this taken into account, this flattening process is horrifically brutal. It tears up so many customs and habits that have accured over centuries, that, while in many cases corrupted, are also based on a great deal of acquired wisdom-truth. The transition process is so painful. I've seen it first hand. Of course technology is going to increase at a faster rate, but the transition is never going to be smooth.
And what of the warfare, is pre-emption ever a moral necessity? When war itself is nothing other than hell? All the soldiers who will be vicitims of post-traumatic stress unable to readjust to "normal" life. The drugs, divorces, spousal-child abuse, suicide, loneliness, and general insanity.
In integral psychology, we discuss how an individual has to temporarily regress to serve transformation-healing. Blocked out memories have to be unleashed and eventually faced for one to come to eventual healing. This vision, outlined in Barnett, is like a social version of regression in service of transcendence. It is one thing to see the chaos-pain of, say a woman, coming to admit that she was sexually abused as a child. For a society, for a nation-state to temporarily undergo the suspension of the enforcing rule-structure (repression in psychological terms) is total madness. See Iraq. People got to vote, without any serious conflict. For a day. That day was beautiful, the images haunting, but now the populace will return to be haunting only be the sound of sirens, car explosions, disappearances, gun-fire, and midnight raids.
During the Clinton years will lived in naive, splendid isolation and ignorance. The Old West (minus the US--W. Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia) still cling to the illusion that such a blissful uknowing state of self-centered irresponsiblity is possible.
Now for the US, the cloud of naivety is no longer self-centered withdraw, but excessively out of touch, imperial, unbalaced optimism. The dark sides of such zealotry and unshakeable self-belief are well known to all--except those esconsced in the bubble.
Western Christianity has dealt with this, mostly, by focusing on doctrine-individual ethics/politics, usually involving sexuality-gender. This set of foci keeps the believers disconnected from asking these larger social-political-economic questions, allowing them either to manipulate such a system, profit from it, and/or be fodder for the ever-hungry beast.
There are hopeful countermovements, especially in Evangelical circles. They are leading the fight to bring awarness in US political circles to issues of religious freedom, poverty, etc. Some of these groups, however, as I mentioned are de-legitimized by their cozy connection to US full spectrum dominance. The more liberal traditions have typically not sent out as many missionaries--they don't have the numbers, energy for one--and have lost touch with their core values, I feel, leaving a vacuum filled by others, whose motives and worldviews are not always as developed.
If we cast a long term view, there is an arrow to the universe--technologically, biologically, culturally, politically, spiritually, psychologically--there is a direction, a purpose to the entire created/creating process. But it can only be "seen" in a 3rd person point of view, which by definition, is a non-participatory, observer, perspective. That arrow gives me hope.
Even it though is a sign of so much pain, suffering, and waste. Billions of years of evolution. Nature red in tooth and claw. Yet the beauty of the vastness of space, the solar systems, the mountains peaks of Earth, the flora and the fauna. All the endless cycle of creation and destruction. Birth and death.
The human instantiation is so much more gruesome, to watch us inflict that pain--consciously,unconsciously, semi-consciously--and to watch us flinch from the blow in terror, is the most terrifying scene of it all.
The arrow is now self-conscious and will not simply continue a pace. The beauty of the recogntiion is equally as horrible as the recognition of the responsibility and consequences involved.
There are not many asking these questions in the Churches I fear. Beyond the endless conservative-liberal non-debates. And for those with a more integral pull, the integral vision is so far ahead now of our time, that its translation downward is becoming weaker and weaker by the day. More and more, I think, relegated to academic circles and 1-2-3 easy step-by-step light spirituality.
Because for those of us who have truly let the integral paradigm sink in, it reveals a worldspace that has no room to speak anywhere in our sad broken worlds. It only increases the beauty-pain of seeing more yet being able to do less than what one sees is possible. And I mostly feel guilt for the few who seek a guide, a deeper reading, I feel like telling them to run, to forget any of these notions. They are going down a rabbit hole, and it will be excrutiatingly full of pain and peace, suffering and beauty, empowering and disabling, ever after.
And there is no real support system when you enter this world. You will be incomprehensible to friends, family, yourselves. The world becomes liquid, cascading into percentages of solidity before your eyes, mindspaces thrust outward, coagulated into existence. But no words will come out your mouth as this display displays before you. As you. Through you.
In the subtle we experience a profound embrace from the Divine. In the Causal, the peace of the Great Beyond. But beyond all those relativities, what is left? What is left when you realize even the peace is relative and no more absolutely better/worse than the chaos? When the feelign of love and being accepted by God, amazingly profound, is itself still a bit too serious? Too needy, too affirming, too boxed in, conditioned, and patterned? What then? What therapy is there for that?
What if the realization of Godhead is itself the source of my sickness? What then? What if I can't forget? And what if could, temporarily, but its even worse than living in remembrance?
And this question of the globalization ethic fades into near nothingness. I haven't answered the question I set out to explore. Its simply dissovling like all else in this nameless expanse. The expanse who sometimes leads me to laugh at other times to a state beyond boredom (I can't even name it let alone describe it), but lately leaves me more stunned, incapacitated, shrugging my shoulders, wanting simply to sleep a long sleep, to simply have it all go away without yet coondemning it or finding myself superior (Gnostic-like). Just feeling like I've already done everything I came to do, questioning whether I've renigged on my Vow, and having only a Heart that opens up, without any real sense that it means anything to anyone.
There is an old saying in the tradition, that we should be in the world, but not of it. It's a fine line, one I have tried to tread in life, at times falling down to both sides--disconnected from the world or too immeshed in it.
That teaching becomes even more complicated in an evolutionary framework. And evolution itself struggles. Spirit has clearly moved into the modern-rational sphere--therefore globalization is part of a divine desire. There is plenty of evidence that can cited in its favor: absolute decreases in utter poverty in the last 20 years, decreased mortality rates, increased longevity. Plenty of negative evidence though of course: greater disparities in wealth, environmental destruction, transnational forms of violence-oppression-criminality.
The morphogenetic patterns are themselves dis-eased, particularly since the rise of the so-called orange wave of modernity and the later so-called green wave of postmodernity.
The forms of globalization argued for in a Barnett is the only viable future political vision, as I see it, and yet it itself is still caught in the dis-eased warp--referred to sometimes as Flatland/MOM (Mean Orange Meme).
An example. In Germany there are large chunks of un-incorporated (I use that word purposefully--coporate=body) Turkish populations who still practice tribal social structure. Women are furtively brought in from the Turkish countryside and forced to marry a man in their early teens. If such a girl is raped or seeks to flee this forced marriage, she faces persecution and possible death, usually from the hands of her own family, who have been "shamed"--according to their worldview--by her insubordination. Now for a long time now, the German populace has turned a blind eye to this phenomenon, mostly, it appears, out of guilt. Think when the last time the German state started ordering around non-German populace within its borders, even "enforcing" their rules upon them....hint: Treblinka. Add to that deconstructionist postmodern thought--which in Continental Europe has always (rightly) been seen as social-political and not a literary art criticism (and not philosophy) as in the US--and you have a major problem. You have a government ostensibly promoting "tolerance", which however well intentioned, is being manipulated (unconsciously in large measure) to contiue oppressive social-familil structures.
And yet on the other hand, to wholesale "enforce" secularization-modernization on a population would cause innumerable harm as well. It is violence, psychic violence pure and simple, in most cases. Again well intentioned no doubt.
That is the world we live in regarding the modern globalization project. It is so massive, so earth-shattering, so revolutionary, that it can not be cause massive chaos. It does lead to a better future, which itself has its own sicknessess. We live longer and have greater access to food, only to suffer cancer, heart disease, obseity, and diabetes in numbers unheard of in human history.
Barnett mentions towards the end of Blueprint for the Future that he was surprised how much of a response he received from clergy-theologians. In this case, then, I'm just part of that gathering. He said his parish priest, why mostly a liberal-pacifistic type could not allow himself to be morally "relative" on the question of injustice. In fact, there never is a moral neutrality. Omission and comission are sins. Neither, is there ever a perfect moral act. Acting, in any way, involves light-and-shadow, but inaction, is in many cases far more evil.
It reminded me of a similar passage in Friedman's Lexus and the Olive Tree, where after laying out his pro-globalization picture, he asks, "What room if any is left for God?" He mentions a Rabbi friend of his who said it was like the Internet. God will be involved to the degree that we bring God into the picture. Its our choice in other words.
Those are helpful but still pretty shallow, I think, takes on the subject. Friedman defines himself as a "compassionate flatist", and Barnett seems mostly the same. He is a flatist--no real transcendence there--and yet compassionate. But how many "flatists" are really going to be compassionate? What's the moral high ground to make such a claim, if the process itself is seen as so inherently flat-neutral and so forth?
Yet I can only make these musings because I'm not dying a slow gruelling life-death on a German field. Or condemned to the misery of the pueblos jovenes-favelas-shanty towns of the Global South....megalopolis of death, despair, and misery.
Even more so, the thought of contemplating such a worldview vis a vis Christianity brings up all the old ghosts of the lurid marriage of imperialism and religion. In Globalization 0.0, if you like, (Discovery of the New World), it was Catholic missionaries riding on Spanish-Portuguse man-of-wars. In Globlalization 1.0 (1870-1919, European) it involved mostly mainline Protestant missionaries, especially from Great Britain (Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, Baptists). In Globalization 3.0 and 4.0 (3.0=1989-2001, 4.0=2001+) it involves many American forms of religion: Evangelicals, Non-Denominational Megachurches, Pentecostals, Mormons, etc. Each religious form allied with the nation-state(s) setting the pace of globalization.
With China rising to a co-lead status with the US, it will be interesting to see how this plays out, given as I said, that if China were to open itself up to religious practice, more modern forms of Christianity (witness South Korea) would be in a position to sweep wildly across the country. A Neo-Protestant ethic.
The first great phase of the as-yet-to-be-modernized world involves of course The Near East/Central Asia. The second phase will involves Sub-Saharan Africa--particulary if modern economic-political structures arise in the Middle East, terrorists will be forced to wage the Global Jihad from places like Ethopia, Somalia, Sudan (for Bin laden, that is a return to those places).
All this taken into account, this flattening process is horrifically brutal. It tears up so many customs and habits that have accured over centuries, that, while in many cases corrupted, are also based on a great deal of acquired wisdom-truth. The transition process is so painful. I've seen it first hand. Of course technology is going to increase at a faster rate, but the transition is never going to be smooth.
And what of the warfare, is pre-emption ever a moral necessity? When war itself is nothing other than hell? All the soldiers who will be vicitims of post-traumatic stress unable to readjust to "normal" life. The drugs, divorces, spousal-child abuse, suicide, loneliness, and general insanity.
In integral psychology, we discuss how an individual has to temporarily regress to serve transformation-healing. Blocked out memories have to be unleashed and eventually faced for one to come to eventual healing. This vision, outlined in Barnett, is like a social version of regression in service of transcendence. It is one thing to see the chaos-pain of, say a woman, coming to admit that she was sexually abused as a child. For a society, for a nation-state to temporarily undergo the suspension of the enforcing rule-structure (repression in psychological terms) is total madness. See Iraq. People got to vote, without any serious conflict. For a day. That day was beautiful, the images haunting, but now the populace will return to be haunting only be the sound of sirens, car explosions, disappearances, gun-fire, and midnight raids.
During the Clinton years will lived in naive, splendid isolation and ignorance. The Old West (minus the US--W. Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia) still cling to the illusion that such a blissful uknowing state of self-centered irresponsiblity is possible.
Now for the US, the cloud of naivety is no longer self-centered withdraw, but excessively out of touch, imperial, unbalaced optimism. The dark sides of such zealotry and unshakeable self-belief are well known to all--except those esconsced in the bubble.
Western Christianity has dealt with this, mostly, by focusing on doctrine-individual ethics/politics, usually involving sexuality-gender. This set of foci keeps the believers disconnected from asking these larger social-political-economic questions, allowing them either to manipulate such a system, profit from it, and/or be fodder for the ever-hungry beast.
There are hopeful countermovements, especially in Evangelical circles. They are leading the fight to bring awarness in US political circles to issues of religious freedom, poverty, etc. Some of these groups, however, as I mentioned are de-legitimized by their cozy connection to US full spectrum dominance. The more liberal traditions have typically not sent out as many missionaries--they don't have the numbers, energy for one--and have lost touch with their core values, I feel, leaving a vacuum filled by others, whose motives and worldviews are not always as developed.
If we cast a long term view, there is an arrow to the universe--technologically, biologically, culturally, politically, spiritually, psychologically--there is a direction, a purpose to the entire created/creating process. But it can only be "seen" in a 3rd person point of view, which by definition, is a non-participatory, observer, perspective. That arrow gives me hope.
Even it though is a sign of so much pain, suffering, and waste. Billions of years of evolution. Nature red in tooth and claw. Yet the beauty of the vastness of space, the solar systems, the mountains peaks of Earth, the flora and the fauna. All the endless cycle of creation and destruction. Birth and death.
The human instantiation is so much more gruesome, to watch us inflict that pain--consciously,unconsciously, semi-consciously--and to watch us flinch from the blow in terror, is the most terrifying scene of it all.
The arrow is now self-conscious and will not simply continue a pace. The beauty of the recogntiion is equally as horrible as the recognition of the responsibility and consequences involved.
There are not many asking these questions in the Churches I fear. Beyond the endless conservative-liberal non-debates. And for those with a more integral pull, the integral vision is so far ahead now of our time, that its translation downward is becoming weaker and weaker by the day. More and more, I think, relegated to academic circles and 1-2-3 easy step-by-step light spirituality.
Because for those of us who have truly let the integral paradigm sink in, it reveals a worldspace that has no room to speak anywhere in our sad broken worlds. It only increases the beauty-pain of seeing more yet being able to do less than what one sees is possible. And I mostly feel guilt for the few who seek a guide, a deeper reading, I feel like telling them to run, to forget any of these notions. They are going down a rabbit hole, and it will be excrutiatingly full of pain and peace, suffering and beauty, empowering and disabling, ever after.
And there is no real support system when you enter this world. You will be incomprehensible to friends, family, yourselves. The world becomes liquid, cascading into percentages of solidity before your eyes, mindspaces thrust outward, coagulated into existence. But no words will come out your mouth as this display displays before you. As you. Through you.
In the subtle we experience a profound embrace from the Divine. In the Causal, the peace of the Great Beyond. But beyond all those relativities, what is left? What is left when you realize even the peace is relative and no more absolutely better/worse than the chaos? When the feelign of love and being accepted by God, amazingly profound, is itself still a bit too serious? Too needy, too affirming, too boxed in, conditioned, and patterned? What then? What therapy is there for that?
What if the realization of Godhead is itself the source of my sickness? What then? What if I can't forget? And what if could, temporarily, but its even worse than living in remembrance?
And this question of the globalization ethic fades into near nothingness. I haven't answered the question I set out to explore. Its simply dissovling like all else in this nameless expanse. The expanse who sometimes leads me to laugh at other times to a state beyond boredom (I can't even name it let alone describe it), but lately leaves me more stunned, incapacitated, shrugging my shoulders, wanting simply to sleep a long sleep, to simply have it all go away without yet coondemning it or finding myself superior (Gnostic-like). Just feeling like I've already done everything I came to do, questioning whether I've renigged on my Vow, and having only a Heart that opens up, without any real sense that it means anything to anyone.
posted by CJ Smith @ 6:32 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I think other ideas that came from a step up in stages -- like say the abolition of slavery or universal sufferage -- started out as the fevered dreams of a few and then spread.
So maybe there is hope.
A question, re the large unintegrated populations within Europe (turks in Germany, others elsewhere). Do you think that this is partly caused by the rise of the European superstate and the post-nation state idendity ("European" rather than German), coupled with largely permeable borders, has made the question of "assimilating" or integrating immigrant populations less of a nationalistic issue (as compared to say, the US and Australia), and this , coupled with the socio-political ramifications of pluralism, has somewhat led to the actions of the German government? (perhaps with a parallel to Holland, before the murder of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh)
Tuff G,
Good question bro. A huge part of the difficulty lies on the side of pluralism-tolerance as becoming ends in themselves, and no longer means in too much of postmodernism. And of course in continental Europe, postmodernism is much more ingrained in the psyche of the population than the US. America is a deeply conservative country, but one that is extremely unique in its conservatism. European conservatism is marked by deference to traditions--the Papacy, the monarchy, state-church marriage--in a way that US conservatism is not. So the postmodernism drag is not much of an issue here. America, internally, is a deeply optimistic country.
Europe is mostly burned out culturally, so why bother trying to integrate other groups into this culture, when the individuals involved don't believe in it largely anymore?
I would make a distinction between a cultural-social sense of being European (trans-national) versus a political one. The young generation, it is true, generally view themselves as European not Swiss, French, German, Dutch, whatever. But that has not yet translated into strong political sense of the EU. Election after election shows that the EU political sense is profoundly weak.
The other side of the equation is of course the non-integrating groups themselves. If the change needed is not forced externality (by European govt's), then it must come internally. While there are obvious noble exceptions, the outlook so far is not so hot.
One thing Europe suffers from that we do not is simply geographic. This country is huge and if you don't like somebody you just move down the road and stake your claim somewhere else. It helps decrease possible volatility between ethnic groups as each groups starts the process towards integration-melting pot consensus.
Europe of course has no melting pot metaphor--they may have white Europeans thinking of themselves as European versus national identities, but there historical-cultural sense is locked much more into social-cultural-religious-historical terms than ours is. Ours is typically more based around ideas and the pursuit of freedom-progress.
Without a driving metaphor, what is it that you seek to bring others into?
In W. Europe physically you can't get away from people you don't get along with. Hence the move to ghettoization--on both sides, self-inflicted and imposed from without. England is a classic example of that.
Tolerance-PC injunctions, as I see it, only drive racial tension underground, and that seems to be no more the case than in W. Europe.
I think ultimately the existence of groups like the Turkish-descended Germans, forces Europeans to face some deeply troubling issues of their own future and identity. The "Turks" in this case symbolize their own foggy shadows, and therefore are the objects of scapegoating and victimization.
These groups are extremely young--Europe ageing far too rapidly. They are steeped in traditions, which this generation of Europeans is not. I mean, they (and us to a degree) are the first generation in human history not to be raised with traditional values--Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Confucian, whatever. An interesting experiment in many ways, but certainly deeply ambiguous.
So they look across at each other and what is there to bridge the gap? I honestly don't have an answer to that.
I think that links up with your question of nationalism. Clearly Continental European nationalism had some profound dark sides. Only the Anglo-American tradition has managed to fall neither into far right or far left governments.
The question then would be how to continue to gain a wider sense of responsibility for the European continent, while simultaneously strengthening (healthy) local-national drives and seeking to impart and share the great gifts of the European heritage while being willing to merge certain deep structural strains of that morphogenetic groove with some of the more Arab, Middle Eastern, Islamic traditional patterning. It would have to work differently I guess than here in the US, where it is not much of an issue--everyone assimilating, with different surface features, to the constitutional-American dream vision.
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