Monday, March 29, 2021

BLM´s Shift From Explicit Racist Events to Systemic "White Privilege" Devolves Into Inaccurate and Hostile Witchhunting

@Mark Re Mont note that i gave multiple chances for Joseph to clarify his point, but he refused to do so. he also claimed that the majority of hate crimes were perpetrated by Black offenders, while trotting out the 1350 talking point. the issue here isn't white privilege; the issue is white supremacist attitudes. plenty of people with white privilege feel no need to jump in and say "ACKSHUALLY no one group is innocent!" so yeah, connect the dots if you want...or don't. up to you.
Ia Da @ Mar Re Mon also, as a socialist, i am fully on board with a class analysis of marginalization. however, class reductionism is just as dangerous as class denialism. it's about being "yes, and."
@I Dav True enough, depending. So, "yes and" why are you trying to pin JB as a racist? He´s chafing under BLM´s colorcentric assumptions and the inaccuracies of its colorcentric reductionism. "Racial reductionism" and "colorcentric hate reductionism" themselves are operating from socioeconomic drivers, the more independent variable. We need to establish cause and effect operations, and we can if we are multidisciplinary. Actually, Christian integrity is ultimately a basic psychocultural resource that illuminates the roles of love and hate feelings in ideology or empirical reasoning. Besides cause and effect operations, to avoid reductionism, we need constructionism. That´s where BLM´s legitimate role operates with ALM, and addresses its own shortcomings caused by the primary role of socioeconomic inequality.
Here, You´re trying to pigeonhole a guy at a Progressive Christians website by imposing BLM´s anti-white supremacist and privilege systemic ideology, so the guy is responding to balance it. BLM´s colorcentrism is a secondary variable, with racism a category of violence caused by socioeconomic inequality. Japan never got colonized because they had the psychocultural resources to learn and develop Western University-based society. You´re pushing to interpret the guy JB as racist, but in bucking under the fallacies of BLM´s attempt to use colorcentric "anti-white supremacy and privilege" labelling systemically, he´s actually being egalitarian.
I´m not "socialist", because as you show, that´s a reductionist ideology. I´m pro-social and an interfaith UU Christian for spiritual practice not doctrine, and draw on empirical social analysis to identify socioeconomic inequality as the driving mostly independent variable of violence, all forms including domestic abuse, child abuse, mass murder (!), and more, and racism also. All that gets adjusted for psychocultural resources. Thus, one study shows that non-college whites have higher incomes than other ethnic groups, but higher suicide rates, also.
Thus, post-Reagan US Big Biz exec pro-profiteering ideology has offshored, destroyed the social safety net, wrecked unions in creating an anti-social culture. Scapegoated racist whites didn´t straighten up because say, Obama was elected. The GOP got voter suppression and tRump elected. All after GW Bush and gang had false premised Iraq (with Condi Rice and Colin Powell) with genocide and $ 2 tn.
Christianity is about "love" not because its soft, but because it´s smart and ultimately empirical. Direct hate into constructive objectives, not witchhunt reductionism of your preference. "Whites" could only be "supremacist" if they were objectively in a position of power overall. Also, it is White´s Christianity that needs be recognized for white´s having overcome their own ethnic tribal differences and accomplished a high functioning level of civilization in the US. FDR and Eleanor took a pivotal pro-social stance. Since then, It is pro-rich socioeconomic propaganda since Reagan that has been driving inequality and its consequence in violence.
Meanwhile beyond its specific case application in Civil Rights, at the systemic psychosocial level of individuals with values, colorcentrism obscures economic power factors in a wild goose chase, and is a hostile and dependent, secondary variable in which violence, including racism, is the venting of primary socioeconomic stresses. Police brutality 2/3 against blacks, 1/3 against non-blacks, isn´t random. It reflects broader dehumanization by the pro-rich business ideologues in (post-)Superpower America. Christian love, however, is a key resource, with Gandhi a valuable example, and socioeconomic activists what Occupy Wall St was missing, like Jackson Rising above, or here, Omar Freilla of Green Worker Co-ops in NYC.
BLM will find itself running into the grinding pain and maneuvers generated by the profiteering biz at the systemic level. It wasn´t just any "whites" who developed University-based society, after all, and went so far as to end absolute monarchy and end slavery. It was "whites" with Christian integrity. Then commerce, military, and political whites who were "anti-black," but pro-enrichment and power. This isn´t magic making, it´s about playing catch up. Europe has become Social Europe after FDR´s New Deal America led the WWII victory over bloody lust for power. The rich corp execs hooked up with a Rev Fifield and say Milton Friedman and led to the post- Reagan pro-rich, anti-social ideology that many Americans, black and white, have swallowed. Loving Christian integrity activists are playing catch up. Nevertheless, that is the key root of human rights, civil rights, and the meaning of BLM.

Saturday, March 20, 2021

Someone´s Review of Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield, Friend of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein

an'l Danehy-Oakes Difficult in places, but worth it / Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry Paperback – 1957/August 15, 1988 by Owen Barfield (1898-1997) Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2015 Verified Purchase Owen Barfield was, for C.S. Lewis, the "Second Friend" - "the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the antiself. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one. It is as if he spoke your language but mispronounced it. How can he be so nearly right and yet, invariably, just not right?" In _Saving the Appearances_, one can see clearly how Lewis must have felt about Barfield's opinions. To call the book heterodox would be to miss the point; certainly the influence of Steiner's anthroposophy is that, but there is so much in it that (I think) Lewis could have agreed with, were it not that he would disagree with the premises that led to the conclusions in question. Barfield's book is a dense one, perhaps even more so than the theological works of his fellow-Inkling Charles Williams. But (like Williams) it is readable, though some passages take serious rumination to even begin to understand. And, like Williams, he is an orthodox Christian but takes his orthodoxy to unusual conclusions, as if he were seeing it from another angle than most of us do. It is a history and philosophy of the nature of human consciousness, among other things. "This book is a study in idolatry, and especially that last and greatest step in idolatry which we call the scientific revolution." At the end of the Middle Ages, Barfield says, we lost the last dregs of something he calls "original participation," the unity of the perceiving subject with -- not the object, which is "the unrepresented" -- but the _phenomena_, our perceptions of the unrepresented. (Thus far, he is in agreement with Korzybski's General Semantics.) Barfield suggests that what we call "reality" is in fact our _collective_ representations of, not the unrepresented (to which we have only this mediated access) but the phenomena. If you and I can agree that my shirt is blue, then that blueness is a collective representation for us. Barfield begins by asking, of the phenomenon called the rainbow -- is it really there? Certainly there are raindrops refracting light and causing it to come to our eyes in a peculiar way: but there is no "there" there, if we try to chase the rainbow to its end, we come a cropper; there is no end and in a very real sense no bow. With this as his first cracker, he proceeds to attack the nut of phenomenology. "Original perception," Barfield suggests, was done away with in parallel by two movements in the West. The Graeco-Roman movement, which studied the phenomena as independent of ourselves (think of Plato's cave), ultimately gave rise to the scientific revolution, so breaking once and for all our unity with the phenomena. The philosophers of this movement sought (and seek) to "save the appearances" by explaining why the phenomena are as they are, in terms of the unrepresented. At roughly the same time as the Graeco-Roman movement, however, there was the Israelite movement, which sought to break our unity with the phenomena by declaring any unity with them, any numinous quality felt in them, idolatry, worship of images. This movement, of course, led ultimately to Christianity (and later to Islam). Starting from the idea that there was but one God, and not the gods worshipped by neighboring peoples, the priests and prophets of Judaism sought to separate the numinous from the phenomena completely, so that the phenomena "declare" the greatness of God, but God is not to be found _in_ them; indeed, he says, the Jews were not interested in the phenomena but in _morality_. It is in Christianity that Barfield sees the greatest possibility of our achieving "final participation." It is not surprising, he says, that we have not yet achieved the Kingdom proclaimed by Christ: after all, the two thousand years since He lived and died and was resurrected are piddling compared to the aeons that preceeded Him. (Barfield also suggests that we are radically misunderstanding when we think about the world before humans. There was no human consciousness in those days, so no phenomena, and so the world, which we build from phenomena, was something radically _other_.) Along the way I find Barfield saying things that I have struggled to say over the years; interpreting things, and especially things in Scripture, that have always been somewhat opaque to me ... and sometimes coming up with some wild ideas that strike me as utterly ridiculous. But there is more than sufficient wheat in _Saving the Appearances_ to justify sorting out the chaff.