The Emperor – Finley Quaye. Thoughts on Leadership & Disempowerment

There is a huge variety in the ways that LEADERSHIP shows up in societies.

The danger today is that there are many cultural views of leadership that have internalized the stresses, violence, and abuses of larger or larger populations needing to be CONTROLLED.

In smaller communities, carried often by many of the indigenous peoples today in some manifestations, wisdom was an important factor and necessary for leadership.  Today, who even understands the term ‘wisdom?’

Colonization, carrying some of the aspects of imperialism in its nation-state making, has globalized certain forms of coercion and its maintenance.  Elitism has replaced leadership, masquerading as such.

As a knee-jerk reaction, especially in the global north, there has been a tendency to supposedly create the opposite.  So we have many leaders who sound ‘nice’ and ‘good’ and harmless and talk in a certain tone with certain very familiar expressions and use very rational modes in order to get their ideas across.  In other words, it is a reaction, but there has been no change.  Many of the nicest-sounding leaders can be just as abusive.  But they would have no power unless they knew how the population they want to influence, could be controlled.  CONTROL is a major factor.  We fool ourselves with this.

In the United States, there is the tradition of anti-authoritarianism.  This means that all authority needs to be opposed.  Supposedly, this will lead to independence and freedom.  Instead, as we can see in the United States, there are increasingly more and more people who cannot think, who cannot create anything new, and who think in terms that come through the advertising and media institutions.  What they may create are new forms of those ideas, not something radically different, that may change society to another course.

Then, as we see the picture, there are power struggles and an urgency of the many powers vying for control over the peoples all over the world.  They may be the best and instigating through fear, or they may be people who have the gift of tapping into people who may not want to think, but want to follow.  Increasingly in a stressed world of business, work, running here and there entertaining ourselves and getting ahead, or just lounging around in leisure to get away from it, there is the need to follow something ‘cool’ and ‘good’ and popular.  The need to really reflect on what is necessary is being sucked out of life.

In the global north, since forgetting is an important piece to citizenship, and information and facts are controlled by our nation-states and corporations, there is less and less effort to understand the construction of our nations and communities and consequently–our own identities.  Yes, we have a hand in it ourselves.  But we are also formed by the societies we live in.  So in the political history of the United States, for instance, we think of ‘the communists’ and ‘the Nazis’ as bad, as fascist.  However, we must remember that even nowadays, many United States citizens are recognizing some interesting parallels between our current government and corporate enterprises, and fascist elements in how they are operating.  Others agree with what is going on.  Arizona’s laws in the May-June-July 2010….yes so many think it’s a good idea.  It’s not bounded by Arizona’s borders.  It linked with people in person and online in California, Nevada, New York, Florida about the Arizona policies currently pushing for anti-immigrant policies and anti-ethnic studies in universities, etc., forming considerable strength.  Naive people who think that all is good until proven, they only find out about how prevalent deep roots of this complexity much later than wished.   The actions that the state shows, confirms their own value-system and thinking. There are those who disagree and therefore on these sides of a seemingly polar opposite, people feel more empowered and legitimized as they gain in numbers.  There is no thought or reflection or willingness to negotiate or to think in complex ways.  So what I am pointing to is not that there are fascists and non-fascists.  No one would say they are fascist, like no one would say they are ‘against’ human rights.  We think about looking at particular elements and trains of thought, as opposed to identities and things.  Instead, the battle becomes fought on two polar opposite grounds or along complex issues.  It becomes a battle with its leaders addressing the issues in certain ways.  The ‘battle’ becomes fought in pre-determined ways.  Instead of battling, perhaps there can be different ways of negotiating the struggles and to want ways in which all sides are given what they can handle, given the complexity, and for all to concede some things.  Until our communities become smaller and self-sustaining, our issues are bound with one another.

Some people are more prone to totalitarian, universalized thoughts, but those same people may have some astounding democratic principles in other ways.  The point is to deconstruct how we ourselves, and others, breakdown/form walls/form legitimate affirmations towards violence and subjugating the other.  Oppression happens in small spaces.  How could we arrive at such a point?  People say it is too idealistic.  Usually it is because we EXPECT these things to go the way we want, when we want, to convince others.  However, some people are not interested in changing their way.  It is paramount for them to be ‘right’ and/or superior.  In this case, what imagination can enter for us to change directions so that we can live and they can live?  What do we need for self-protection?  Are all groups opposed to our ideas enemies?  What and how do we construct ‘the enemy?‘

The governance of societies have changed drastically over time, but there are complex arrangements that move according to what is happening.  Those groups of people who control more resources, have the power to influence and create technologies, the majority of them unknown to masses. Since World War I, there has been a concerted effort on the part of the international banking cartels, coupled with their centuries old versions of controlling populations and creating a self-made world, that are totalitarian in many ways and there is more realization of this.  This would also mean that we must watch this IN OURSELVES.  We are part of this system.  If we assume that the evil is always over there, and not a fabric of our own lives, then it will continue.  This continuity would mean perpetual wars.

The evil that we may have internalized, is usually not recognized as evil.  This makes the healing and deconstruction of this precarious but interesting.  This would be a struggle.  Within AND Without.  Not one place or the other.  We are citizens of a nation, a culture.  The market capitalist system is in every corner of every continent.  Thus, we must struggle with each other, ally with each other, and have goals to eradicate oppression.  But if we just do it in ‘other’ — i.e. the government, the corporation, etc, and not struggle with our own demons that repeat some of this, then it’s futile.  We will invite enemies.

In this excavation towards liberation, we will meet many who aren’t interested at all in liberation.  They just want to ‘be right’ and have control.  So this is the struggle.  People are not ‘evil’ or ‘good’ to me.  People are sometimes one or the other, or both simultaneously.  If you think deeply, you know what I mean right?  Some are more of one thing.  Some people say they are ‘independent and free thinkers.’  I always respond with:  Did you make your own clothes, your own car? Your own house?  Did you choose your land, your government and what is allowable in your community with your community?  Probably not.  So what do you mean by ‘independent’ and ‘free?”  What parameters have been set up for us to allow certain freedoms but within the confines of what has been created FOR us.  So we can say somethings and have alot of diverse restaurants to go to…..is this ‘freedom?’  They are forms of freedom, certainly.  But……

Also, most people who are doing ‘evil’ are intending to do good.  They are doing it to ‘save’ humanity, to make a pure something.  So they destroy.  They think they know everything.  This is a problem.  Their philosophies and ideas may be incredibly powerful and beautiful.  But it is also a seduction.  I do not pretend that this will be easy or pretty.  What I am saying is that we are each responsible for what has been happening.  It’s not all ‘out there.’  It has been happening for a long time and still happening.  How will we, then, resist?  Will you disempower others while you think only of people that think like you?

The fear of being ‘evil’  (because it is undesirable) and the fear of being ‘good’ (because it takes alot of responsibility to be good), creates many problems.  Denial, unthinking, self-hatred, delusions, etc.   These help the elites who want more control, to control things.  Again, fear is being prioritized.  The polar opposite, a common reaction (as opposed to a thoughtful response), would be a blind courage.  We need difference in order to think in more complex ways.  This take community.  Today, as more and more people become more alike, and there is less diversity in the world, there is more danger.

Finley Quaye, in this beautiful song, speaks of mankind’s holding this power.  The emperor.  WHO is the EMPEROR?

The Emperor

Followers of evil things
Worshippers of idols
What they know they have corrupted
What they do know they’ve devoured
Love love today
Well well

Somebody changed the order
20000 dying
Unnecessarily dying
Mankind got a hold of power
Then he rebuilt Babel’s tower
Until the stench of wickedness rise up to jah jah’s nostrils
I will bawl out
Who stole the order
Who stopped a cloud
Over my head
Gone a little bit too far
Who stole the order now

All I know is that they are lovers of evil things
Worshippers of idols
What they know they have corrupted
What they do know they’ve devoured

Fear, Maintenance and Deconstruction #1

For those of you who’ve been following much of my blog and actually reading (as opposed to just watching the videos), the following are tidbits of thoughts to chew on.

Faith has become the opposite of Reason in western cultural forms.  This has not been too much the case in most non-Christianized cultures and indigenous cultures, as well as some minoritized cultures everywhere (I only speak of dominant Christian ideas, not all Christian ideas).  Aspects of it are apparent in many places/cultures and how we show up in the world.  This has spread to due the expansion of market capitalism, neo-colonial aspects of expansion which are residual systems from colonization that exist in globalization and creation of nation-states.  Colonization included the spread of liberal Christian concepts in the policies and procedures within nation-state-making, but always in complex relations with the local cultures.  Faith and reason are related to each other, a sort of couple, and made oppositional to each other in many cultures and systems due to that battle being set-up while science and some dominant Christian churches sought to dominate their local populations through superiority.  But we fail to realize that many scientists were Christian/many Christians were scientists.  Chasing God was an aspect for many Christians.

If we are to understand that this ‘division’ was created in historical circumstances, through many repetitions, through many crisis and wars and power struggles between religious institutions vying for power over the people, and the sciences that prioritize rationality over other things, then we see that this division exists, but is not universal, not the entire story, nor oppositional nor are they compulsory. But in today’s reality, they can be.  This is a battle and division many people have inherited and have internalized as their own truth.   There are different ways of approaching how we live in the world, how we perceive events, and the most important point I want to make here in this post, for now:  the ways in which we conceptualize and respond to change and maintaining certain things about our emotions and thoughts.  If we read how power struggles form our institutions, then we can understand that we take on a few things without question, which may contain those power struggles–either as a dominance without question, or on the receiving end of oppression, for instance as one example.  This, then, leads to how we act in the world, how we are, and not the least–what we commmit to or not, what we put out into the world with others.  Often, it is the invisible as well, things that we are NOT paying attention to.  The effects of our thoughts on the world, something many of us have no clue about in the modern world.

We cling to things as a matter of faith and rationality.  But if we examine, perhaps there is not much difference between the two.  For me, there are other ways to approach the world, hence this entire blog.  This is not just a matter of ‘choice’ but a matter of looking at oppressive forms that we carry around in social relations and institutions.

What matters to me is that if you label yourself a person of ‘faith’ – what does this mean?

If you consider yourself  a ‘rational being’ – what does this mean?

And whatever way you may define it, why do you do this in the world as ‘yourself’ and what effects does it have in the world?

Much of either may have to do with the twins of fear and maintenance.  In fact, in much of dominant Christian thought, to have faith means you are unswerving.  If we are unswerving, then how does this link to liberation?

I, personally prioritize liberation–not as an escape but an entrance into ethics, communication, justice, loyalty, and the formation of questions and creativity to reach it through the increase of time and space toward negotiation.  Sometimes negotiations do not turn out well, but this is not the point.  There is no endpoint through which liberation can pre-determine an outcome.  In short, liberation-actions are always experiments.  Ethics also plays a large role.

So liberation is at odds with maintenance.

Maintence, however, cannot be confused with honoring heritages and pasts, legacies and traditions.

Questioning the heritages, pasts, legacies, and traditions, must be done for liberation.

Questioning does NOT mean disavowing, disapproving, criticizing.

Critique is to DECONSTRUCT.  Deconstruction points to how something may have been constructed.

In honoring a tradition or legacy or heritage or culture, which includes a belief, a mindset, and sets of actions by us or someone or institution…….we can say okay to them, but to perhaps question some of its actions and to change them.   In deconstructing, we see where some things can be held and CHANGED in some of its actions.

EFFECTS of how things are in the world, what happens when things are put out into the diverse world, is also an aspect of liberation processes.

In deconstruction, we see how and why fear and maintenance show up, perhaps alleviating fears.  Most fear the disappearance and disintegration of themselves and their cherished beliefs and actions.  Perhaps there is a sense of being ‘wrong’ or being called a ‘nobody’ or a ‘liar’ or ‘fool’ or even worse–to be condemned to torture or death, humiliation and exclusion.  So there is a tighter clinging.

On the other end of the spectrum are people who use non-commitment and non-identity as a way of moving in the world.  This may also be a tactic of evading what I said above.  Life is EASIER when there’s less commitment.  It is also very individualistic and self-centered.  In the end it is very very lonely, alienated, and non-life-giving.  But we all have our paths.

For someone to kill someone, as Judith Butler mentions in her videos in the previous post, for the view that a difference poses a THREAT or a LEGITIMACY to kill, is a question for our times.  This threat, this legitimacy, is an aspect of uneven power-relations.  In some places, those killings are not seen as tragic, and even be seen as NECESSARY.  If we are to apply this not only to gender and sexuality, but to other things such as beliefs, ways of living, etc. that always include gender anyway, as well as nation, class, race and ethnicity, etc., then we can see that they are aspects of power relations and a struggle between fear, maintenance, and liberation.  ESCAPE is a tool for maintaining the status quo, as nothing changes from escaping, although we may reduce the result of violence from escaping.

What must we maintain?  What are the effects of maintaining something?  Can it be maintained DIFFERENTLY instead of wholly packaged in a certain way?  Which things should be maintained?  Which aspects should be transformed?  What are the criteria for this?

If we are to take our everyday maintenances of whatever we may choose to reflect upon and deconstruct, what possibilities are there for a more liberatory, relation-oriented formation of ourselves as individuals, communities, nations, races, religions, etc.?

What are the effects of our decisions and non-decisions?

So, as I have been putting forth in this, deconstruction is not the disintegration of a self or thing or system, necessarily.  If we see, in this process of deconstruction, that something is superfluous and fiction, it is okay.  For me, what matters is that if it is DESTRUCTIVE to yourself or community, or to OTHERS, then perhaps there are other ways this can be done, and not totally given up, necessarily–just because it is deemed a fiction.  And how do we make decisions?  If our decisions are insular/interior –meaning if we make decisions that effect others solely by ourselves within, and not concerning or negotiating with the parties whom we affect, then our decisions will perhaps not work anyway.  At this juncture, our decisions effecting others must be negotiated.  This would be a step, although I would argue that this is not always possible with everything and everyone right now.  It would depend on a lot of work on our relational skills.

If we look at our world, nations and cultures and individuals and communities are in a struggle to defend or dominate, or survive or expand or all of the above and more.  I put forth that these are learned modes of behavior, and yes some of it is necessary.  But most of it can be different simply by reflection time being built in, and to change much of the way we live and to ask different questions other than ‘is this THE TRUTH?’ or “Am I RIGHT or WRONG?” and other such very limited questions that create the same results over and over again.

What are the effects of our truths in the lived world?  Not to ourselves alone but in the world?  They will have multiple effects.  How, in knowing this, could we not think about being perfect or good, but to work together for new possibilities?

I do not think for a moment, that this can be a widespread way of working now.  But certainly in some walks of life, we can increase this possibility and not to expect it.  Just asking questions and being strong enough for the responses, and to commit to asking questions for liberation’s possibility……..is it worth it?  Or shall we just continue the way we are……maintaining….and seeing the world in our truths that have largely been taken from the cultures in which we have traversed, without questioning……?  Our violent world has been inherited.  We have been born into this violence.  We have been told that largely it is ‘natural.’  I would say that ‘natural’ can be created differently, as diversity and nature are constantly changing.

Fear?  Maintenance?  Toward what?

Judith Butler: Giving Identity its troubles=liberations

Judith Butler, Maxine Elliott professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the most well-known post-structural feminist thinkers in our present.  Her focus concerns the construction of normalized notions of body, sex, and gender as identity constructions.  She also speaks to Jewish intellectuals in the historical present, the legacies of violence and the necessities for mourning, and other topics which would ask us to think of a different society through historical/political and social contexts.

Her most well-known works at present, are:  Undoing Gender ; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ ; Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ;  Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence ; and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable, among others.

In the first three works mentioned above, Butler takes the reader into the questions of identity construction.  She questions the notion of two-gender norms, which are based on the natural science’s notion of a biological duality of male and female.  She further lays out the meaning of the compulsory and mandatory aspects of our social selves as we adhere to the idea of two genders and analyzes the ambivalence of gender that precedes our own internalized norms toward becoming these two genders.  She states that we perform gender, and also we police each other and ourselves on gender.  Furthermore, gender is looked at as something different from sexual orientation, for instance, making it more complex and shifting the historically dominant notions of two gender realities.  She does not do this in order to be complex.  The complexities form the centerpieces for her points on how these gender normalizations create the anxieties and therefore violences that are acted out socially, politically, structurally.  Her work is ultimately liberating.

Her work is very original, and carries the legacy of earlier works such as that of the great Michel Foucault, who has left humanity a serious legacy on which to ponder the meaning of violence and subjugation in our lives through post-structural analyses which shift the normal foundations of thinking.  This has been done by Michel Foucault and other post-structural thinkers, through looking at history and how things are created to become dominant in societies.  His three-volume work: The History of Sexuality, as well as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison; Birth of a Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception , and Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, present an oevre that unpacks and destabilizes the dominant notions of our institutions and what we have internalized as human, as ‘me’ and ‘us’ and as reality itself.  The goal is for emancipation in thinking, a  freedom beyond our mainstream understandings of freedom.

Butler has carried much of this legacy to focus on gender and sexuality, and bringing these issues into the realm of questioning militarism and emotions, the body and perception and their connections to holding patriarchal violences in society in place.  Butler also writes and thinks of her Jewish heritage, Judaism and its impact in the social life of our present, its exclusions and future/present possibilities.  As you may or may not know, Judaism approaches this world as the world in which heaven is created, not a future time or place. This also speaks to how justice is important in life, stemming from the realities of the history of oppressions against the Jewish people.  So in this kind of perception, there is the activist element in much of Jewish intellectual writing–as concern for humanity and justice.  Butler is interested in working with this aspect.

The below are four sections of a YouTube video that is from a French documentary.  She mainly speaks English, and there are French parts and German parts where either the narrator or herself are speaking in these languages. Everything she says in all of these videos interact with each other so I hope that you will take the time to watch all of them in succession and to not skip over too much, even though you may not understand one language or the other.

Judith Butler Link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler

Michel Foucault Link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_foucault

I have copied videos #2 through #5 of the six-part documentary series.

For the ENTIRE VIDEO SERIES parts 1 through 6 on Youtube, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q50nQUGiI3s

Racism & Comedy #2

In the previous post, the video speaks of racism as something we can destroy.  Yes this is true.  However, the one thing–one MAJOR aspect of racism that cannot be ignored in order to eradicate racism, is the fact of racism within social structures.

As I had mentioned before, and I’m of course not the only one who says this, I’m just writing here…….racism has been internalized from the structures of society as well.  This is our laws and policies as well.  If we look beyond ‘hatred’ as the guiding post of racism, and look at it in many manifestations and forms and strategies, then we can see many things that oppose a whole community or group but a racist ‘word’ or gesture is never presented.  How do we ascertain racism when it’s not personal?

I feel that this is where each person needs to study, reflect, ask questions, think……respond to yourself, advocate for change.  For instance, to give you an example:

Let us say a poor urban black family, has been living as a clan with grandmothers and grandfathers and aunties and uncles and cousins taking care of each other, while perhaps the parents work three minimum wage jobs and can only sleep when they are home because they are exhausted, and the entire family must cope with perhaps the other issues in the neighborhood that make it difficult–perhaps there are drug dealers with large guns that make the youngest child more afraid to go to school, etc.  And perhaps the child is depressed from not sleeping and is punished at school for sleeping during class, etc.

One of the neighbors, during a casual conversation with a white person downtown, mentions that the mother is never home and the father is never seen.  This white person turns out to be a social worker.  He/She then visits the house and in the end, perhaps has the children taken away from that home because the parents are seen as unfit.  This, even after the entire clan is there saying that their children are fine and that the others take care of them.  This is an old and classic example that has been repeated over and over again.  The policy of nuclear family life, for instance, and the care of two parents for children, can be racist.   You might argue that this is not racism, it’s about families.  However, most of the people affected are people-of-color: Latinos, African-Americans, Southeast Asians, for instance.  While this has not happened to most of the low-income white families by-in-large.  What is the law for?   It’s not that the social worker intended it to turn out that way.  The social worker was trying to do the right thing in his/her mind.  They were not ‘evil.’  But certainly that worker is playing out the racism of the policy and the assumptions of family, life, care, and how this may look.  Individualization and nuclear families are industrialized, neo-liberal, capitalist and colonial enterprises, beginning its dominance in history during the rise of these frames of living.  Even white people themselves largely lived in large clans before the domination of our present system began during the colonial period.  Racism comes from without, through us, and we are practitioners of it.

We are all, regardless of what race/ethnicity (which are constructed terms during the same rise of colonialism, etc…as you may know), colonized mentally and emotionally, by racism and the other isms.

Let’s be willing to look at racisms working through me and you and everyone in different ways and degrees.  Just because we ignore it personally, doesn’t mean anything except that this ignoring is a condoning of the continual creative manifestations of oppressing ‘the other.’  In institutions, in our laws, in our long-held assumptions, in our ignoring, in our saying and perceiving, in our everyday, it is moving and morphing.  It has been allowed by us in varying degrees.  Some have been more victimized.  Others are privileged enough to be able to ignore, leaving others to the repetitive knife of oppression.  We have divided ourselves as individuals and as societies and cultures, into the hidden and the shown; the discarded and forgotten. Faking what we need to show, preferring to wish it would just go away. This is what is making pain in the world.  Most wars are based on racism, the preparations for war and the propaganda required, creates a society.  Afterwards, when the victor and the defeated are friends (more like having developed colonizer and colonized relations), the culture has, meanwhile, acted upon and remember the racisms that proliferated, and institutions have not changed from those times.  This makes the structures we are living in as producers of racism.  Personal change is not enough.

In a sense, we may try to reflect on that fact that we are in exile from ourselves.  We must take our power and our senses into our own hands, change its direction.  Start our way home, which is unknown at present, but infinitely more just.

Sam Cooke – “A Change ‘Gonna Come”

The legendary great Sam Cooke.

Everyone has ‘bad’ days, days of sadness.  But for some communities, groups, there has been a social oppression that brings more than most. This song is about history, the ancestors, and how it is still alive today.  It is not just ‘personal.’

Sam Cooke was killed, dead at the age of 33.  The circumstances of his death are, till this day, ‘controversial.’ A woman’s account told of Sam Cooke being the perpetrator.  The evidence suggests otherwise.

Here Sam Cooke brings us this amazing and soulful original song of survival and hope amidst unimaginable loss and grief.  It was re-done wonderfully by many artists.  Recently, I feel Seal did a great re-make.

Change, History, Spirituality and Intellect

The four words I use to describe this little sharing with you, are loaded. Every person that reads the four words, will have different interpretations and perspectives on these words. I will use them here, to get to my usual point and to grapple with it towards change and ethics.

Change for what? Some people just want more of the good life. There is nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with ‘the good life.’ But an unexamined good life, often perpetrated on others, is oppressive. Can you think of examples of this? Does ‘the good life’ always seem in the imagination as a middle-class life: the things, the vacations, the house, the nuclear family, the car, etc.? Then I ask for re-think.

History? What and whose history? Just reading one or two history books is not itself history. Questioning only your grandparents can be limited. Who wrote the history books you read? Are they written by people who fit more of the dominant categories (i.e. race, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic class, etc.)? Who educated that author? What politics inform the author we read? Just because it is considered authoritative or ‘good’ by many people, does it make it more just, compassionate, ethnical? What criteria do we use to understand ‘history?’

Who invented the word ‘spirituality?’ How is it used politically? In my own life, people who use that term and define it for others, use it to mean some kind of ‘interior’ work, some kind of work toward heaven or ‘enlightenment.’ In most indigenous cultures, where many of our modern ideas of ‘spirituality’ come from, there was no such word. In Japan, where I was born, there were many words for different forms of training and concentration and looking at thoughts or for gathering our energies toward compassion or wisdom, for instance. But ‘spirituality’ is a new concept, introduced by the westerners in Japan. And if this is the case, who has the right to tell others what ‘spirituality’ is, what it looks like, what it must do and what other people should do? What is ‘spiritual.’ I know people who are vegetarians, do yoga and other meditation practices and have lots of energy and insight. And those same people are sometimes the most ‘evil’ of people I know. What criteria am I using here to define what is happening?

Intellect is dumbed down in the United States. As I mentioned before, the US government does not rely on the foremost thinkers of ethics and cultures and difference and history, to have debates on national television during a national or international crisis. The courts do not call in experts on immigration and cultural difference when working on a case about whether a man should go to jail for something the US court or a state court deems ‘wrong.’ Hollywood stars are asked about opinions on world affairs and the youth say “wow, he or she is making a good point.” In Europe, this is not the case, nor in Japan. Top thinkers are regularly sought to work with issues. However, there is the other problem of finding ‘thinkers’ and intellectuals who tow the line of the television or radio station, or media company who has relations with certain aspects of federal or national government propaganda. But as long as people go about their own business, and don’t have the time or inclination to investigate things they hear, they may take on the information they hear and see, as ‘truth.’ It’s not even about trust, at this point.

So in a word, there are many aspects of a lack of social change in the world around us because we are not associating ourselves with social change workers. Also, change is happening all the time. But the most powerful, who govern most of the world’s resources and mind-politics of the masses, if you will, and the technologies, have inordinate amounts of resources and power to control and influence. Anti-intellectual societies are a by-product of empires on the down-swing of histories.

So let us not repeat histories as we know it. We can create new and more just and thoughtful histories in the future by doing this in the present/now. Do not be defined by the definition of the words of this title. Do not let middle-class knowledge be mistaken for re-thinking, investigating and re-introducing intellect into the work of spiritual wisdom. The normal everyday that we experience now, has been made through other peoples’ theories. Increasingly, the other people (usually rich and with tremendous powers of influence and control of the military and media and policies) control and we just react to what is here. Capitalist and communist and socialist systems are real today because of incredible amounts of thought and reflection, then putting them into play in the world. It is amazing to me that so many people detest ‘intellectuals’ and accuse people of ‘thinking too much.’

I do acknowledge how many intellectuals throughout history developed condescending attitudes and use their intellect for self gain and tenure and positions at the cost of people, students and communities.  Also, most of what I can see as far as higher education–save but a few programs here and there, are irrelevant to what is going on in the world. They are enterprises to create people who can join in the market economy, not thinkers who can benefit everyone.  They benefit the status quo, increasingly, including the so-called ‘spiritual.’  However, there are many intellectuals who serve the people and justice. But many people feel too ‘inferior’ at any show of intellect, and do not listen. If we do not look at social theories, we will not understand the coming social theories. As long as there are more than two people, there will be social theories at play. How are we making ourselves ‘losers’ by ignoring theories and intellect in favor of escape to nirvana and truth? It is easier, of course, to believe in a truth we have learned, that some other people in another time and culture has created, than to re-think, grapple with life. Theories now live in our bodies. Look around. Who is benefitting the most from how things are? In this way, the intellect becomes a flat land of imagination.

Let us resist, so that we can have ecstatic, meaningful lives, creative and full of wonder and respect, instead of what is passing for ‘happiness’ in the present world.

Angana Chatterji and the Historical Present

I have had the honor of conducting my graduate studies in the Social Cultural Anthropology program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.  There, Department head Richard Shapiro and Professor Angana Chatterji, run an intellectually/spiritually rigorous program of re-thinking our present in light of the historical past.  With this, the historical future will look differently.  Why does it need to look differently, some ask?  This, I’m afraid, is a question spoken by the privileged or the unconcerned.  Anyone who has seen that disenfranchisement, disillusionment, mass forms of escape and ignorance, despair, rage, and genocide have increased the world over.  It parallels the increase in the wealth of the few and the invisibility of the wealthy from the public in general, in most of the world.

The invisibility allows for certain mechanisms to be put into place, controlling increasingly more areas of reflection, thought, and policies.  The nation-state neo-liberal systems, which was invented in the resistance of peoples against primarily imperial rulerships based solely on single religions, has now become a ruling configuration that also detaches itself from humankind’s deepest issues, many of which come from the governance of nations and its tactics and priorities.

Angana Chatterji has dedicated her life to continual self-education, admonishing those she touches to re-think the present by including the multiple angles and hierarchically-organized perspectives that are laid into place by the dance of dominance and resistance, privilege and oppression.  The Social Cultural anthropology program (SCA) at CIIS (California Institute of Integral Studies) challenges disciples to re-introduce intellect into the psycho-spiritual domain. The intellect, especially in the United States, but in most of the first-world nations, has been relegated to something menacing and/or useless.  Today, ‘intellect’ is hardly recognized.

There is a reason for this.  The academic institutions in the United States and many of the first world nations, as mentioned earlier, is more and more unconcerned with life and the people.  It is more concerned about maintaining its institutions and formulations of power and legitimacy in their respective societies.  When this kind of way of prioritizing things is practiced over and over,  there is less and less room for adapting to things and people and situations.  When there is less adaptation, as change is constant, the institutions become more irrelevant.  What happens at this point, and has happened to a large extent in Europe, the United States, Australia, and Japan, is the amassing of wealth by these academic institutions in order to maintain its prestige.  Prestige itself, I beg of you to understand from my perspective, is not ‘evil’ or bad.  The problem is its prioritization in communities, over-taking an exacting look at the processes that create suffering and toil, vanity and genocides.

Through the work of Angana Chatterji, Richard Shapiro, and Mutombo Mpanya of the Anthropology program at CIIS, disciples (I would not say ‘students’ in the traditional sense) must grapple with re-learning, undoing, then re-thinking and learning how to think with the historical past in the now-moment.  And in addition, this ‘history’ is not the traditional and mainstream ‘history’ that is often not recognized as propaganda in some ways.  The dominant texts are written so that history  makes the dominant groups and institutions’ versions of history ‘truth.’  Being inclusive for everyone and every community, is a liberal idea that most academic institutions attempt to practice.  However, ‘including everyone’ or inclusivity, is a very tiny fraction of the issues in life.  In fact, inclusivity into a system that carries oppressive norms is assimilation, an enticement.  One just needs to look around.  Just because we have burritos and sushi in the cafe does not make the political and historical circumstances that made our identities and fractured lives happen.  Our privileges want to be maintained.  We want to ignore the pain and suffering.  So it isn’t learned.  In the mainstream academy, everything is co-opted into the ‘feel good’ place and reconciled.  Toward the neo-liberal and the maintenance of ‘good people.’  This ‘good people’ is an imagination of the moralities that propped up our histories.  ‘Good’ people were smashing soap bars down Native American throats when they spoke their native language in order to civilize them.  Civilization is ‘good.’  ‘Good’ people owned slaves yet treated everyone ‘well.’

These are crass, simplistic examples of things we need to , and can un-do as a single image in how to ‘take care of things’ in life that get in the way of our individual happiness.  The suffering of the globe in the historical present, cannot change unless we bring ourselves into the picture.  Our heritages, what has happened, what’s been done.  The complexities are immense but not unfathomable.  From these complexities we come to realize that everything has come about through each diverse community and tensions’ meetings and the series of events that play out.

In my studies with Angana Chatterji, there is tremendous transformation, a dropping-off of life-as-we-know-it, similar to some of my experiences in Zen training.  The intellect keeps many things ‘tight’ in our minds.  It is even more complex to think that in the United States, being intellectual makes us less ‘spiritual’ and ‘real’ and the intellect is relegated to something that’s ‘too much.’  Angana Chatterji and Richard Shapiro’s mission at CIIS, was to create an academy that is relevant to reality.  Skill, power, depth, complexity, and attention to our ancestors and what has happened, can be included in the story of our lives.  It deepens our lives to what it actually is and not what we blindly have let it become. Scholarship can become something that advocates for humanity and justice, not just something we do to get better jobs in the market-capitalist society or the socialist one.

Recently, Angana Chatterji, along with Parvez Imroz, Gautam Navlakha, Mihir Desai, and Khurram Parvez and others, have co-founded and convened the International Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in the Indian-administrated region of Kashmir (website:  http://kashmirprocess.org/index.html).  This has been a labor of struggle and love and commitment, attesting to Angana Chatterji’s deepest wishes in relation to her ancestors and their legacy, for an academy that works with communities and is relevant to peoples’ struggles.  In today’s world, often a community’s struggle is put into the light of some sort of competition between groups.  Supposedly we are in a game of winning and losing.  Angana and most of the people working pro-actively with struggling communities, would say that the oppression Olympics and its race toward individual ‘rights’ is a worldview that has developed due to how these things were taught to us.  At close examination and with tremendous commitment to its roots, we can see that some things need to be struggled for and it need not be a competition between those struggling for justice and others doing the same.  The Indian state is being asked to act as the state it promised to be.  The tribunal wishes to hold the Indian state accountable to itself and others. Co-creating the world is diversity.  Diversity is not a competition.  Diversity and its concommitant need for re-thinking, re-structuring, and creating new imagination and processes toward justice and peace, takes re-education and understanding along with action and community.  Angana Chatterji and the Peoples’ Tribunal is one of the many works that happen in the world and we need more of it.

Identity? What Identity?

It is interesting that on my earlier entry on mixed race heritage, people have written me saying that we create our own identities.  I agree but I don’t think it’s ‘natural’ or pre-determined, or ‘the way it is.’  As I had said in that article, every identity is a static ‘thing’ that is grafted onto us, into us, and through us.  With this graft, people and systems do things to us.  In this array of ‘things’ that we are considered to be, we ourselves, supposedly create a thing that we can apparently hop in and out of when it disagrees with other’s assumptions about this ‘thing’ that we call ourselves or they call us.

Whenever it is convenient for us, or for the ‘other’ who calls us or assumes us to be that ‘thing’ – whatever it is, we can say ‘no, that’s a stereotype.’   So what is this identity that is mediating mutual experiences of us, me, I?  It is a mediation, a curtain, if you will, a whole set up of configurations that depend on the textbooks we’ve read, things we’ve been told, the experiences we’ve had in relation to those things we’ve been told.  Some of those ‘things’ solidify.   Then, further, we start to make it about blood and bones.  This is, in social science language, called ‘essentializing’ and ‘essentialism.’  This is ‘who I am.’  Or more often:  ‘this is who they are.’  But we hop in and out of the particulars of that identity, don’t we?

It’s a complete waste of time!   But what is even just as dangerous, is to say  the very liberal, hippy-ish thing: ‘I‘m beyond identity, I’m not an identity.’  If we look closely at this, it is a form of resistance against being boxed into a set of categories and therefore, prejudices.  But it is just as dangerous in that people who say those things, resort (usually, not always and/or in every case– that is why I say ‘usually’) to downgrading traditions, norms, histories, cultures.  They may say things like: ‘we’re just all human.’  If we are ‘just human,’ what does that mean?  Usually, I’m very experienced at being on the receiving end of this so bare with me……. usually this means being the dominant-as-normal.  In the United States, it is whiteness or blackness or Latino-ness, or Asian-ness.  We’re back to essentialism, but this time, it is NOT MARKED but is a silent ‘normal’ that is not universal.  But it is said as universal.  I’m just human, you’re just human.

To me, this means ‘quit being so black.  Quit being so Japanese.  Quit being so Armenian.  Quit being so Polish, quit being – quit being – quit being.

Difference is silenced along with this.  Difference, in the liberal sense, is so often seen as a variation of whiteness or any other dominant; or as a hindrance to the human (i.e. – the dominant white normal)  that we supposedly all are.  Everyone has the same morals underneath it all; everyone has the same desires underneath it all; everyone wants happiness underneath it all.

Identity, as in many things in life, are contradictory.  In a certain perspective, I say that identity is a political tool.  Always.  Even if there is no one else around, if we say we are an identity, then what internal boundaries and suppositions and thoughts and modes, do we take on ourselves without thinking?  How?

Do not mistake me to say that I am preferring no-identity, which I critiqued earlier above.  What I am deconstructing are the obstructions that let us pre-determine a static notion of self and other.  We have heritages, we have commitments, we have traditions, we have ancestral histories, we have legacies of values which we determine in life to be beneficial to us or not or we endure or not or if we change them slightly.  Time moves us.  Identities are political.  The only reason someone would call themselves ‘mixed race’ or ‘Asian’ is because it is easier to do in conversation.  But they have come from the categories given to us by the larger culture, the rulers, the governments of nations.

If you go to other nations and go to rural areas, and speak with elders, they remember their earlier lives when many people were considered to be of a certain language and region, or of certain customs or spiritual practice, and most often a combination of those.  Sometimes, as in earlier British Isles, people were named by their professions in relation to the rulership (that is why some people were named Baker, Carpenter, etc.)

Kurdish identity had to come for survival.  It was being killed off by the rulers, made ugly and not compatible with the nation-states that governed the people.  But those who call themselves ‘Kurdish’ are diverse.  Most of them, when left to their own devices, call themselves by language groups and regions, not religions and ethnicities.

What I point to is the un-questioned norm and its brutality and prison-like conditions for the psyche and for efforts toward liberation and justice.  We look down or up on ourselves and others; we look with pity at others or ourselves based often on identity.  We look life and people into these identity categories.  Then we forget about them if they are identities that do not do any good for us or supposedly have nothing to do with us.  Especially if it is another nation, or a demoted and marginalized ethnic group.  For dominant groups in most countries, if one looks closely, we see that the people whom the ancestors of the dominant group committed the most viciious and homicidal crimes upon to create the nation, is the group either most often ignored and criticized, or assimilatable and romanticized.  Often both at the same time.  Identities re-create this over and over.  There is no liberation there.  Within that space where the identity that struggles for survival meets the dominant, there is a struggle that needs to be lessened when the struggling group must both save themselves from their cultural norms disappearing; and also learn the dominant modes and codes of behavior in order to survive and fight against the tide.

Identity, then, can be used strategically, but not be a controlling factor that stigmatizes the self and others.  Identity may be a mediating structure of historically made-up assumptions and definitions that we psychologically travel through unconsciously, it doesn’t have to be an iron cage or ‘real.’  It is only a political reality.  This leaves the person or group’s heritages, cultural traditions, inheritances, goals, aspirations, etc.  Not identity.

Thoughts on Zen and Intellect

In middle-class dominated thinking in the first-world nations, ‘Liberation’ is meant to mean an escape from things, people, situations.  It is a ‘transcendence’ state-of-mind-or-place.’  It is a worldview where there are the ugly world and situation, and the place beyond.  If we think about how the US worldviews are formed, and what has gone into it to form ‘freedom,’ then we must take this definition of ‘liberation’ into account.  It is, from the start, a world of two things, divided in half. One is the ugly real, the other is the ‘free-from….” state-of-mind or place or situation.  What does that liberated space look like? Sound like? Taste like?

Above :  Calligraphy character ‘Nyo’  meaning ‘suchness, likeness, things as they are.’

So escapism is thought to be ‘bad’ and ‘unrealistic.’  Yet most Americans from the United States, chase happiness and joy and fun and success.  Perhaps without even knowing what these things mean and what they do to us and each other, we continue to do them.  Maybe it’s more like mimicking, pretending, following what everyone else is doing.  So we can become a famous basketball star, or a movie star, or make oodles of cash as a lawyer or a computer software engineer.  Or perhaps we invent something.  Mimicking and going along is easier than, perhaps, thinking and reflecting on what has happened and how we have gotten to where we are.  Mimicking is also easier when there is exclusion and marginalization that goes on being that way and is supported by the way policies, laws, and money flows in support of those ideas while being different may create a loss of being supported by them.  Non-thinking, then, becomes a survival tool in a country such as the United States.  Escapism becomes easier and perhaps necessary when all the pain of covering our enlightened selves up with cultural assumptions and legacies, buries us.  Does partying, addictions, drugs, alcohol, depression, physical illness, mental illness, begin out of thin air?  Are individuals solely responsible for being this or that?  What of history?  And if we question liberation, and what this means, in this contexts of the other questions, what does liberation mean?  Are there other definitions? practices? and cultural norms related to liberation?  For instance, liberation is not a goal, but a way of life.  Am I constantly escaping?  No.  Because my thoughts of liberation are based on history, justice, and other ideals that do not match the predominant notion of liberation.  Liberation is an act that requires GOING INTO, not escaping, in my worldview.  This is decidedly Zen.  With Zen teachers, often when we have some sort of pain in mind or body that comes up, we were admonished to go there into the pain and become it.   We had to trust the Buddha’s enlightened view on the world – that is was ‘impermanent.’

Zen practice revolves around disciplined actions designed to realize the multiple ways in which we keep ourselves from understanding our enlightened state.  This ‘enlightenment’ that Zen speaks of, is often equated with ‘heaven’ in the predominantly Anglo and white-dominated countries.  There has been no deconstruction of their own histories in relation to worldview and politics, history and the creation of self.  As I have mentioned earlier, mindfulness practice needs to include historical and political study within a focus on power relations and how ideas and dominant societies have been formed.  Without this, the interior practice alone may make an interesting anomaly in identity and self, but render it ineffective for social change.  And is social change something that Zennists and Buddhists want or understand? Presently, I think Buddhism and Zen in general, suffers from the individualisms within the contexts of dominant first-world nations that make up the majority of practitioners in the Western nations.  It refuses, still, to look at its history which is largely unfathomable.   I remember Masao Abe, a pre-eminent philosopher which expounds on Zen and Western philosophy, asked his audience in a talk  some time ago, which went something like this:  “Imagine an eyeball that still works, floating in space by itself.  It sees everything.  It travels, it can see all angles unhindered by anything.  What is the one thing it cannot see?”

Seeing, really seeing, takes understanding in time, of time.  Time and space, being related, then can see different positions, actions, effects, causes and configurations, that make up any moment of the present.  This, I feel, has been in the Buddhist scriptures as an aspect of enlightenment.  But enlightenment, under the system of progress and evolution, has become a goal to reach.  In that life of reaching goals, we quickly use that as a point of domination against those that ‘haven’t gotten it yet.’  What signs do we have to tell ourselves we are closer to enlightenement?   Usually they are materialistic, or based on a metaphysical feeling, or sets of assumptions.  This too, I’m afraid, is not enlightenment at all.

But we must trust in our judgements too.  Pure spaces do not exist.  The Buddha, like other leaders, died of poisoning, according to the Buddhist records.  He did not escape being accidentally poisoned.  He lived with suffering as well.  At this juncture,  then, the intellectual aspect of our ‘knowing’ must be questioned.  Some stupid people have labelled Zen as ‘anti-intellectual.’  Nothing could be further from any truth than that.  However, since the United States is primarily an anti-intellectual country, where movie stars are asked for their opinions on world issues in favor of, or perhaps equal to a university professor who may have spent their whole lives on that subject, Zen seems to act as a further intensity towards feeding anti-intellectual energy and furthers acts of refusing to face history.  ‘History and my life must mean something else.  It can’t mean the suffering I have seen and felt so far. I need to get there without thinking about it.  I need heaven.’

Post-structural and post-colonial thought, brings complexity and ethics to the question of being in our own prisons that were made in the past.  Our assumptions of history, the human being, emotions, the body, etc. are divisions and categories that may limit creativity and keep the imagination in prisons.  New ideas are not necessarily creative.  They can be new forms of the old things.  How, then, must we read, interpret, think, feel, create?  I say, first we must grapple with that which is unknown, unfathomable, and not reach-able by the known ways.  This is what the old Zen masters meant when they retorted:  If you want to catch the Tiger’s cub, you must enter the Tiger’s cave.

The Ainu

22-minutes program on the struggle for cultural survival by the indigenous people of Japan- the Ainu.

Have we ever questioned ‘Why’ the indigenous people of the world struggle?  Is it because they’re indigenous?  Of course not.  The problem of struggle seems to be left to the indigenous people themselves, even as they face erosion.  If we are to believe in evolution and progress, then it’s all said and done and nothing can be done.  That is precisely why I think the idea of progress and evolution are political and it is particularly colonial (the rise of science) and it got it’s power largely from Christian metaphysics to begin, then left God behind and replaced science and man with the Christian God.  But what of the other religions and spiritual practices of the indigenous?  We are largely practicing for ourselves and not those that we have stolen from.

The African saying that we are standing on the backs of others if we are succeeding, is too true.  Painfully true.  But it doesn’t have to be all pain.  The Ainu, and other indigenous people need our capacities to be allies.  What does it take to be an ally?  What does it take to begin to care to be an ally?  The indigenous people don’t need people’s ‘help.’  They need allies.  Advocates.  We all need them, and most likely have them as a matter of course in our lives.  But what of others whose lives are not propped up by our own un-thinking and already-assimilated desires and impulses that could be more readily fulfilled by our socieities while indigenous peoples ‘ values do not mesh with most of our modern concerns.  But you probably know, that more and more people in the so-called modern world, are waking up to the fact that modernity does not offer what it promises.  Happiness is always a million miles away and only momentary.