I support the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Whatever happened to pluralism?

Even if we take his comments at face value, as a progressive stance on intercultural and inter-faith understanding, there’s so much more to this than a criticism of Sharia Law. How about, say, immigration? Cultural intolerance and prejudice? Christian absolutism? Rule of Law and cultural self-determination?

Ultimately, what makes the mark of a good society is that the majority of people that are happy, with a minimal sacrifice from the minority. We need to realize that through all of this, it is not necessary to maintain the status quo nor, more specifically, is it necessary to maintain the current status quo so that the future doesn’t hold any other party’s values in the norm.

Perhaps an organic view of human society.

i will accept no truth nor authority without qualification.

what it is that governs my principles, governs my functions.

Lessons from Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning (Part 2)

The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, then his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honourable way – in such a position man can through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.

“The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

– Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, on Love (pg 57)

 

* * * * *

Contemplation, then, must be different from engagement. How, then, is it to be in love while engaged in it? There must be a significance in the difference the two experiences to the human soul, in archetypal terms?

Social “development.” In context?

I had a long lunch with Marcia today. Marcia is in the 2-year law degree, from a Politics backround in the University of Minnesota.

She is also the big sister in ideological discussions. Over lunch today we reviewed each of our CVs. Somewhere in between it all, we started talking about working for the United Nations. (“Someday, someday…”)

I have to say that from the work done at the Exeter Model UN Society, working politics for the sake of politics has no appeal for me. Delegates speak for the sake of other delegates. Out of fear for hidden oppositional agendas, out of fear of the seething electorate, out of fear for a career discarded by reassignment or poverty or otherwise ideological elimination, by gulag or inconsequence.

The middling, centrist impractical garbage on official stationery and starched collared shirts, off-the-rack Brooks Brothers lounge wear outside the 9 to 5. Without regard for any other country’s interests, without regard for any fundamental common ground between human beings when it is economically inconvenient. Note the word petit-bourgoise floats on the tip of my tongue, but I will not allow that enough weight here to bias or distract.

Without an absolute frame of reference, a systemized, comprehensible scale by which to understand what is right and wrong, I can’t go on my day to day without faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature.

Even a concession, working for the UNDP or UNHCR, for development and justice, I doubt very much. Bureaucracy I can deal with, pushing through a resolution for what is right, I can handle. But when political agendas are used under the pretense of justice, or administrtion of humanitarian, the playing field is no longer even. Bureaucracy is no longer passive, no longer a benevolent check against irresponsibility. Red tape becomes obstacles in the path of rediscovering what is justice, what is fairness and natural law.

Where sociological development is concerned, Marcia pointed me in the direction of Hegel’s A History of Philosophy, conveniently found online here.

I can’t pretend to have read it, though surprisingly my mentor had recommended this same book to me last year.

Marcia’s summary: Hegel asserts that capitalist socioeconomic development is the single standard by which human society is evaluated. Hegel compares modern-day nations as exemplars of this continuum, from Greece to America.

But what of the rest of the world? There is no explanation of the state of industrialisation in Africa, in Asia.

In many ways, the Western world has been built by Colonial superpowers, on the backs of slaves and natives in overseas territories. Clearly, postcolonialism significantly confounds such a simplistic view. The “liberation” of slave populations if not the colonies themselves from imperialism resulted in rampant poverty, both at the demographic and national levels. Without any fixed market for customary exports and the professional oppression that maintained the Colonial status quo, the West Indies (as an example) had no organized way to turn towards self-sufficiency. Diaspora resulted from economic duress. Diaspora from governance under authorities whose legitimacy is questioned by not only neighbouring states, but more importantly its own peoples. Diaspora from petty tribal rivalries granted submachine guns and empowerd with ideological sabotage

Let’s not mistake this for an educated perspective, but isn’t it enough to start questioning? “Responsibility” for the developing world, in the arena of the global superpowers, is only a pitying trophy horse to justify political agendas. Why do politicians speak? Why words, when facts will count? Because the numbers, if they are ever publicized, can only be twisted so much to hide that true international aid for the benefit of the peoples is incidental.

damn this post modern world.

details to follow.

For all the Christian undertones, learning about Fair Trade this week showed me a picture of the EU in its dealings with developing countries that I simply cannot agree with. Capitalist economics are not justifiable when implemented on a multinational scale, forcing neighbouring countries to, literally, compete for survival.

Not hard to apply these to our own borders, isn’t it?

Peace, not pieces.

Now that the G8 Conference has finished, I’m seeing that the ball is most definitely in our court. Our Western, ‘civilized’ nations have grown so complacent within the comfort of military and economic hegemony that we see the world through an unalienable right to conquest. Manifest destiny, anyone?

Yes, Putin is laying it thick on the issue of missile defence, but then let’s examine who raised the issue to begin with? The nuclear card is a particularly effective tool, but the calculating game we’re starting on again polarized the world, and our mutual Game Theorists are telling us the only consequence can be total annihiliation.

While his cutbacks of social liberties does seem alarming, I wouldn’t be so quick to villainize Putin’s government. To a certain extent, Russian and other eastern cultures have known stability only under singular authority. That, being a fine line between tyranny and good governance in a position of tremendous power.

It’s time we showed we are better than this. We are the threat. Let’s start by realizing it.

Remember.

Tien’an men Square: April 15 – June 4, 1989.

Today is not a day for justification, or judgment; contrivance or shame.

All politics aside, the very least I have done is remember that so many made a stand for what they believed in. That desperation rang from both sides of the barricades, and that at the end of it all the world, in a testament of the human will, decided to munch through the 6 o’clock news.
I would appreciate if everybody else can imagine what it feels like to have your own blood on your hands. We’re lucky enough that most of us won’t need to find out how it matches up to the real thing.

We can’t ever forget how lucky we are for this much.

This is war.

It’s finally on. Buckle down, it’s going to be a rough ride. I know exactly what I need to do, and I know exactly what it will cost me.

I am at the stage where I need to throw up my hands and shrug. There is a storm brewing, and this is to counting the last moments of objectivity before we fully realize that after two decades of ‘maturing,’ we are not beyond squabbling like little children. I have never been the one to instigate tactical maneuverings in office politics. I will never start a fight. But I know I will always finish it, in the most absolute sense.

Machiavelli, here I come.

“I am bigger than you.”

A scene from the office today.