Frank Wright Speaks

 There I was thinking I was a Traditionalist when according to Frank Wright I am in fact a Modernist and of course a heretic.  May I state once again that I admit to being a heretic but I am not an apostate.  What he means by Traditionalism is something quite different from that which I respect rather than adhere to if one can adhere to a general theory of the source of religions. 

traditionalism 

Who is Frank Wright when he’s at home?  Enter the name in the search box of youtube and be prepared for the deluge.  His political analysis of the march of Globalism is excellent and is delivered with witty asides, memes and serious foolery.  Essentially we are living in a constructed reality aimed at dissolving nation states into cupasoup bland uniformity at the behest of ‘stakeholders’.

Does Frank believe that outside the Catholic Church there is no redemption?  Though he has never uttered that precise phrase I think that his attitude is adjacent to that old time Catholicism.  Is that a bad thing?  On the whole it is not; most people are not prepared to wait for the answer to ‘what is truth’.  They want it straight and unequivocal and they also want eschatology not ecology.  Do I agree with the moral teaching of the Catholic Church?  Yes I do.  I realize that I may be going close to the Voltairean position that religion is good for the masses in that it gives them a definite moral path they can follow.  I think he recommended it for his butler.  The populace is safer without the bewilderment of comparative religion.  Who was it said that a little comparative religion leaves you with comparatively little religion? 

I’m a heretic so what I offer is in Frank Wright’s opinion entirely useless and proves that I am foundered in Modernism.  Is religion like sums in Arithmetic where there is only one right answer.  A certain simplistic view of religious truth would hold that this is so.  Atheists and agnostics agree with this.  ‘Look’, they say, ‘they all of them claim that their truth is the only one’. ‘They can’t all be true so it is rational to decline to believe any of them until the issue is decided’.

The Traditionalist (Perennialist) would argue that the outcome of multiple truths does not end in relativism.  The absolute is incapable of being expressed in direct language.  It is apophatic.  However to put everyone under ‘the cloud of unknowing’ is to risk them being drenched by uncertainty.  One should not do anything to weaken the ‘simple’ faith of others.  Say your own prayers.------------

'Salem Chapel' by Mrs. Oliphant (pub. 1863)

 Yet another of those noticing women, Mrs. Oliphant.  The other one I was reading recently was Anita Brookner in her Booker prize winning ‘Hotel du Lac’.  Of the two the sharper is the Victorian lady  who can deal with a range of social settings and the delicate treatment of the nuances of class so much a part of English life.  That she was a Scotswoman probably helped to mould that acerbic view of the difference between the Church appointed by law and the non-conformist Chapel folk.  Though never identified as Methodist the talk of ‘our connection’ and ‘the connection’ is a Methodist way of describing the local control of the running of a chapel, the paying of a minister, selecting their own minister who might be dropped if he displeased the deacons.  This is a major theme of the novel.  Arthur Vincent though a powerful preacher seems a little too stand offish for the deacons.  He does not flatter them by attending their soirees and besides he is infatuated by Lady Western, a beautiful young dowager.  She’s church folk and that rankles.  We are never in any doubt that this attraction can come to nothing.  Her heart is given to another, the poor man who retired from the field leaving to Sir Joseph Western this peach, this nenuphar of nubility.  Sir Joe died off stage. 

Curiously the man who is wooing the sister of the minister has the same name as the unsuccessful suitor. I have already made clear that if you are bothered by coincidence do not read Victorian three volume novels.  They are a small world.

Matthew Arnold’s England was divided like Gaul in ‘partes tres’, the barbarians,the hebraic and the populace who are keen on doing what they like.  Lady Alice is not a barbarian aristocratic type, huntin, shootin, fishin.  She is too nice to the young minister simply out of patrician good manners.  Another woman of that class is Mrs. Hillyard who being poor, though gently born, has to make her living at piece work sewing.  She is a well drawn sharp observer of the milieu into which she has descended.  She now attends chapel.

Who are the dwellers of that town?  Mrs. Oliphant is able to give us the full flavour of Victorian Britain particularly the religious divisions on the Protestant side.  Within the Anglicans the main contrast is between the High Church with its ‘smells and bells’ and the Low Church’s clear lights of the unadorned.

As for Rome.  We don’t talk about Rome.  The locution ‘Romish’ is used as a pejorative.  Evangelism shuns those excesses.

Running parallel to the Vincent/Salem struggle over the social control of the minister is the fear that Susan Vincent will be ruined through her abduction by the estranged husband of Mrs Hillyard.  The author brought me at least into that sphere of Victorian mores.  This was a real fear.  Can you project yourself into that world by a species of moral time travel.  If you cannot enter into the dark mind of the patriarchy Victorian literature is not for you.  Ruined, you could always go to Australia.  

Carlingford and its novel cycle gives us a more complete picture of the life of a small town that 1000 Middlemarches.  We have the prosperous members of a rising lower middle class, the Poulterer, the Butterman.  They are confident in their own realm but insecure owing to their disabilities as Dissenters.  They want to put on a good show with packed pews, a minister capable of giving ‘coorses’ in the finer theological points of true Christian Free Worship unbeholden to the State.  Their social welfare system is organised and effective without the mummery of grey cloaked sisterhoods i.e. Anglican nuns.

The tracking of Vincent’s sister and Fordham is well done and we get the sense of the exhaustion and fear that he might be too late to prevent the ruin of his sister.  

A very complex and satisfying read.  Mrs. Oliphant is due a reappraisal.

Islam: A Higher Religion?

 Is Islam one of the higher religions?  Perhaps it is but it manifests as one that is totalising, that cannot share space with any other in its ideal form.  The tenets declare they must control all the organs of life and government.  There is nothing that is outside its writ.  Obviously this makes it very difficult for any society that has a mixture of religious affiliation.  

Their view of Western women is that they are fair game and no better than prostitutes.  Pakistani Muslim rape gangs are notorious.  Can Western democracies accept the ever-growing phenomenon of parallel societies with absolutely contrary mores.  They don’t wish to assimilate and have no respect for the host culture.  It’s a major problem and one incapable of being tackled by a liberal multicultural world view.  You can be as accepting as you like, they will never accept you.

Contra culture as the incarnation of religion as T.S. Eliot says in his ‘Notes towards the Definition of Culture’ many of the physical manifestations of Islam in music, architecture and poetry are of the highest order.  If Eliot was right its concrete incarnations ought to be derivative and repetitive.  Sufism presents a different picture despite what invidious epithets we may apply to the founder of the faith and its revelations.  Needless to say the stern upholders of orthodoxy reject the ameliorating influence of the Sufi path.  Clearly the innate reaching after the absolute transcends the overtly held doctrine with its anger and smiting.

I might be prepared to leave it there if that were the only consideration but when the masses of unreconstructed Muslims reach the shores of Europe freed from the control of the tyranny which they are accustomed to, we are confronted with tumult and disorder.  Islamic immigration must be severely restricted.

Loyalties by John Galsworthy

 (I see that this play in on an Indian curriculum.  Interesting for the Hindus who have so many markers for who’s in and who’s out and their well know admiration for the ‘pukka sahib’.)

It was Groucho Marx who famously said - “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me for a member.  Here’s De Levis who wants to belong to a club that doesn’t want him for a member.  Really he doesn’t want to be a member of that club either in the sense that he does not share the ethos of that club.  Dancy underlines this aspect of decency which De Levis does not share:

(Act III)

It was a crazy thing to do; but, damn it, I was only looting a looter. The money was as much mine as his. A decent chap would have offered me half. You didn't see the brute look at me that night at dinner as much as to say: "You blasted fool!" It made me mad. That wasn't a bad jump-twice over. Nothing in the war took quite such nerve. [Grimly] I rather enjoyed that evening.

De Levis could not resist taking a free horse and to maximise the deal ‘tried her high’ to test what quality she had.  Now the idea that Dancy thought he was getting rid of a ‘weed’ that he had not the keep of is specious rationalisation.  Dancy is described in the play directions as a ‘riding man’ friend of the landed gentleman Winsor and in a cavalry regiment.  That he would not be aware that a filly had potential is nonsense.  So he knew De Levis would grab the chance and had the money to keep her in his stable.  True. but the bitter remark ‘he would’ shows that DeL. against all the ethos of respect for the noble animal, the horse, was prepared to risk ruining her by hard training.  Again ‘not decent’.  … a decent house…..a decent club.  Decent is a key value in that world that De L. is trying to crash.

Winsor: He sold that weed you gave him, Dancy, to Kentman, the bookie, and these were the proceeds.

DANCY. Oh!

WINSOR. He'd tried her high, he said.

DANCY. [Grimly] He would.

Recollect also that De L. ascribes chagrin to Dancy on account of this parting with an excellent filly which won two races and was sold to a bookmaker for £1000 (£73,000 in todays money) a far from negligible sum but for a very wealthy man,  not an amount that would cause him to impugn the name of a ‘decent house’ as being the sort of place that you might have money stolen in.  

CANYNGE. Without any proof. This is very ugly, De Levis. I must tell WINSOR.

DE LEVIS. [Angrily] Tell the whole blooming lot. You think I've no feelers, but I've felt the atmosphere here, I can tell you, General. If I were in Dancy's shoes and he in mine, your tone to me would be very different.

CANYNGE. [Suavely frigid] I'm not aware of using any tone, as you call it. But this is a private house, Mr De Levis, and something is due to our host and to the esprit de corps that exists among gentlemen.

When the so called weed that De L. sells then goes on to win the Classic race ‘The Cambridgeshire’ his fury at missing that coup causes him to blurt out the tale of his stolen money to the club at large - a decent quiet club.  

COLFORD. It makes no odds, General. Four of us in there heard him. He's saying it was Ronald Dancy robbed him down at WINSOR's. The fellow's mad over losing the price of that filly now she's won the Cambridgeshire.

Any critique of his attitude is met with the accusation that it arises from antiSemitism.  There’s a clash of values certainly but unless you espouse the ethos of the club why attempt to join it.  Doing so makes you a bounder, a pushy, flashy sort of fellow.  A man like that is not clubable.  The conventional view that this play is about antiSemitism does not hold water.  As St Erth puts it:

DE LEVIS. Well, I shall tell people that you and Lord St Erth backed me up for one Club, and asked me to resign from another.

CANYNGE. It's a matter of indifference to me, sir, what you tell people.

ST ERTH. [Drily] You seem a venomous young man.

DE LEVIS. I'll tell you what seems to me venomous, my lord—chasing a man like a pack of hounds because he isn't your breed.

CANYNGE. You appear to have your breed on the brain, sir. Nobody else does, so far as I know.

DE LEVIS. Suppose I had robbed Dancy, would you chase him out for complaining of it?

Indeed. What of Dancy, if he gotten away with the repatriation of his money as he saw it?  If someone from the same class as the country house set had so far forgotten himself as to steal that money would the theft have been pursued by legal means or would they have gone a different way about it.  The important thing is not to make a fuss, a damnable scene.  That would have been to no one’s benefit.  Without accusing anyone, using some formula derived from public school practice, the money would find its way back to its owner.  No more need be said and the whole thing would be forgotten.  No scandal would be attached to the house.  Nevertheless some association with ‘Dancy’ would be generally known and the chill of decent society would be felt.  A previous case:

MARGARET. Do you remember St Offert—cards? No, you wouldn't—you were in high frocks. Well, St Offert got damages, but he also got the hoof, underneath. He lives in Ireland. There isn't the slightest connection, so far as I can see, Mabel, between innocence and reputation. Look at me!

What would Rabbi Bonder in his disquisition on wealth ‘The Kabbalah of Money’ have to say?  De Levis had to an extent taken advantage of the impecunious Dancy.  He might have balanced the scales of the universe by doing the ‘decent’ thing. 

‘Listen old chap, that filly you gave me.  I know you were stuck then.  I sold her on and got the price she was really worth.  I’d like to split the difference with you.  It would be on my conscience if I didn’t.’

A brilliant play one that ran for a year when it was first put on.  

Nisargadatta on Ajativada

 Questioner: Repeatedly you have been saying that events are causeless, a thing just happens and no cause can be assigned to it. Surely everything has a cause, or several causes. How am I to understand the causelessness of things? 

Maharaj: From the highest point of view the world has no cause. 

Q: But what is your own experience? 

M: Everything is uncaused. The world has no cause.

(All quotes from 'I AM THAT' by Nisargadatta Maharaj : sect/appearance and reality) 

Nisargadatta is not making some sort of Human point. He appears (good word that) to be holding the rather rigorous view called ‘ajativada’. Ajati meaning ‘not born’. What is unreal can have no origin. The cosmos is an appearance - ‘vivarta’. Vivartavada holds that the cosmos is not a freestanding or independent entity. It never emerges from the Absolute but remains within it. There is thus no causal chain in the sense of A causing B and B causing C or a train of distinct events. None of this happens according to the ajativada doctrine.  

This line of thinking has Buddhist overtones. In the Sunyavada view: ‘Emptiness is form, form is emptiness’ .(Sunya - empty)

The world does not have a cause says Maharaj. ‘That all depends on what you mean by cause's says Cyril Joad. One might see a certain similarity to scholastic thinking re contingency and causality in which the cosmos is retained within the will of the Absolute in a current way and not just prior to the ‘big bang's. The whole enchilada is kept in existence now.

Nisargadatta next moves to the material analogy. There are all kinds of vessels made of clay, all kinds of jewellery made of gold but in the final analysis there is only clay and gold in different forms.

M: Of course, everything is inter-linked. And therefore every- thing has numberless causes. The entire universe contributes to the least thing. A thing is as it is, because the world is as it is. You see, you deal in gold ornaments and I — in gold. Between the different ornaments there is no causal relation. When you re-melt an ornament to make another, there is no causal relation between the two. The common factor is the gold. But you cannot say gold is the cause. It cannot be called a cause, for it causes nothing by itself. It is reflected in the mind as ‘I am’, as the or- nament’s particular name and shape. Yet all is only gold. In the same way reality makes everything possible and yet nothing that makes a thing what it is, its name and form, comes from reality.

But why worry so much about causation? What do causes matter, when things themselves are transient? Let come what comes and let go what goes — why catch hold of things and enquire about their causes?

This is offered as a solution to the appearance of multiplicity. Vivarta (appearance) is a consistent doctrine in Vedanta. You only seem to see variety. There is only unity.

The questioner gets annoyed at this escalation up the metaphysical ladder. Actually one can sympathise at this noetic evasiveness.  

Q: Words like God, universe, the total, absolute, supreme are just noises in the air, because no action can be taken on them. M: You are bringing up questions which you alone can answer. Q: Don’t brush me off like this! You are so quick to speak for the totality, the universe and such imaginary things! They cannot come and forbid you to talk on their behalf. I hate those irres- ponsible generalizations! And you are so prone to personalize them. Without causality there will be no order; nor purposeful action will be possible.

The Questioner has a valid point. God is not a bystander. This existence has a divine purpose. Q wants to align himself with it, just that, and let what comes by grace happen in its own time.

Q: My own feeling is that my spiritual development is not in my hands. Making one’s own plans and carrying them out leads nowhere. I just run in circles round myself. When God considers the fruit to be ripe, He will pluck it and eat it. Whichever fruit seems green to Him will remain on the world’s tree for another day.

What is Philosophy

 Philosophy is a disquisition on the obvious. Staring at the everyday until it becomes uncanny. How does consciousness stick to itself? I don’t have to pay any attention to it. There it is self shining, enveloping every moment as I-I. There is no need to fix your attention on it. It is simply there. Samadhi must be where consciousness becomes self fascinated but without a definite content. It somehow locks on to itself and rests. The cache is cleared. It’s the final rinse.

A.N. Whitehead on Disorder and Order in societies (from Process and Reality)

 But there is not any perfect attainment of an ideal order whereby the indefinite endurance of a society is secured. A society arises from disorder, where ‘disorder’ is defined by reference to the ideal for that society, the favourable background of a larger environment either itself decays, or ceases to favour the persistence of the society after some stage of growth: the society then ceases to reproduce its members, and finally after a stage of decay passes out of existence. Thus a system of ‘laws’ determining reproduction in some portion of the universe gradually rises into dominance; it has its stage of endurance, and passes out of existence with the decay of the society from which it emanates. (pg.91:’Corrected Edn. of Process and Reality’ eds Griffin and Sherburne)

I had to type out that paragraph in order to better get at the intricate meanings implicated in each other that have to be painstakingly unfolded and balanced against each other. It is a matter of subtraction and re-inserting. It seems to me that as he writes, the new ideas that occur are spliced in and do not fit neatly. He is not natively lucid.

His observations cover everything from the macro to the micro, from this ‘cosmic epoch’ to the adventures of protons. The same process is at work throughout though with the added boon of rationality in the human. There is an implication for political life there also. With mass migration you may have an element enter into national life that is antithetical to the culture, to what Whitehead terms its ‘satisfaction’. We may expect change towards adaptation or a mixed reception tending towards deterioration in the long run. When the majority of the receiving society has lost its sense of identity and the confusion that occurs with too rapid social change all kinds of demented adaptations will ensue. (Cf. Mattias Desmet ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ also ‘The Pursuit of the Millenium’ by Norman Cohn)

Hundreds of years may pass before the culture stabilises into partial fusion or in the worst case, the domination of one sector over the others.