Participatory Economics

August 25th, 2010

Edward Berge

We’ve discussed more than once whether such an animal called “integral capitalism” makes sense. I offer the following as an alternative, from an article in Z Magazine (7/10) called “Why participatory economics?” by Michael Alpert. An excerpt:

…what I want is the fourth of four currently available options.

The first, capitalism, combines private ownership, remuneration for property, power, and, to a degree, output, corporate divisions of labor, and markets in ways primarily benefiting the capitalist class.

The second and the third, centrally planned and market (20th century) socialism combine markets or central planning with public or state ownership, remuneration for power, and, to a degree, for output, and corporate divisions of labor which primarily benefit a coordinator class of planners, managers, and others similarly empowered in the economy.

The fourth, participatory economics (parecon for short) combines social ownership, self-managing workers and consumers councils, remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of work, balanced job complexes (that apportion labor so each job has roughly the same empowerment effects as all other jobs), and participatory planning where workers and consumers cooperatively negotiate economic outcomes with no class divisions.

I advocate participatory economics because it transcends capitalism and also market and centrally planned socialism by establishing core institutions that promote solidarity, equity of circumstance and income, diversity, participatory self management, classlessness, and efficiency in meeting human needs and developing human potentials.

After Finitude

July 23rd, 2010

Edward Berge

See our IPS forum discussion about this new book at this link.

Balder said:

Elsewhere on the web, Jim Chamberlain (a former IPS member) posted a link to the work of Quentin Meillassoux, an emerging new voice in Continental philosophy and a former student of Badiou. It looks interesting and worth checking out.

After Finitude

And this Amazon page has some interesting reviews.

theurj said:

Just a quick comment this morning. Rayburn’s review at Amazon said:

“Guided by Badiou’s use of set theory, Meillassoux argues that Hume’s probabilistic reasoning rests upon the dubious assumption that the set of possible outcomes of an event can be totalized. Probability as a metaphysical fact is undermined by Cantor’s discovery of “transfinites”–that is, the multiplicity of infinities that cannot be gathered into a single ‘meta-set.’”

This seems to be related to my prior critique of holarchical complexity?

BP blocked workers from wearing protective gear

July 8th, 2010

Progressive Change Campaign Committee

You won’t believe this. BP blocked workers cleaning up the oil disaster in the Gulf from wearing protective respirators.

Keith Olbermann reports that workers are breathing in toxic fumes day after day — and some have already landed in the hospital with nausea, chest pains, and headaches. Yet BP seems more worried about controlling what images the public sees than about the health of workers.

Shame on them. Watch Keith Olbermann’s report on this issue — then join us, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and others in demanding action from the White House.

Today, we’re launching a huge coalition of local and national activists — including Gulf fishermen, environmentalists, members of Congress like Alan Grayson, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Together, we’re saying that President Obama must stop BP from denying workers the protective gear they need. Obama says “the federal government has been in charge” of the clean-up efforts. Now’s his chance to prove it.

Our new coalition is already driving big headlines. But to really get President Obama’s attention, we need those media reports to show that thousands of Americans heard about this cause and joined it.

Can you add your name?

(Then, please forward this email to others.)

Thanks for being a bold progressive,

– Adam Green, Stephanie Taylor, Julia Rosen, Forrest Brown, and the rest of the PCCC team

Has Ken Wilber jumped the shark?

July 6th, 2010

Edward Berge

Wilber has recently endorsed another guru, Trivedi, including the latter’s magical powers. This blog post questions the endorsement and raises some significant points. But I especially like Julian’s comment to the post, mainly because they echo many of my own concerns in an IPS thread exploring the same: the naive acceptance of absolute enlightenment based on consciousness as primary to the universe tied to a metaphysics of transcendent spirit, all of which feed into Wilber’s delusions of grandeur. This seems rampant in so-called integral circles and is hardly “postmetaphysical.”

Lady Gaga

June 13th, 2010

Edward Berge

Here is more on Lady Gaga from our Ning IPS discussion. (See our past Gaia discussion on her here.)

theurj:

I know, there might be some controversy in putting her in this category. But I truly think she fits here and will make that case. I’ve already started in the commentary to her photo and video which I’ll copy-and-paste here. Also see our previous Gaia discussion at this link in Google docs. For me “spirituality” encompasses many things, including acceptance, love and liberation. I think she is about all three and more, and certainly in a postmodern context-media.

Also recall one of the most moving scenes from Avatar, when the tribe is gathering around the Mother Tree, singing-chanting, swaying-dancing, evoking imagery, invoking Goddess. I get this same feeling watching Gaga, the same deep connection to my primal roots, freeing me to sing and dance along, breaking the bonds of convention and being true to all my relations.

I want your ugly, I want your disease

I want your love

Love, love, love I want your love.

Reply by Balder

Yes, I think so too. I like some of her lyrics, and I appreciate her quirky “twisting” of the pop-video-diva role. But I guess I’m a bit conservative, because I don’t see much “postmetaphysical spiritual” value in her new Telephone video. I’m actually really tired of the glorification of “Red” to the exclusion of, and at the expense of, most other values and perspectives that prevails in a lot of the slickest popular media.

In popular mainstream media, if I have to choose something (I don’t listen to or view it much), I actually resonate more with something like this, believe it or not. The celebration of simple human compassion and care. The damn thing almost made me cry this morning.

Reply by theurj

I had a negative reaction to the Telephone video at first too (see link to original discussion). But this was my comment to her photo in our gallery, taken from that video:

“She’s wearing glasses made of burning cigarettes. As you might know, in prison smokes are literally capital and highly valuable. If effect this photo is a statement on how we are chained to, and see everything through, barter-colored lenses. We are prisoners to our market-created desires and our capacity to afford them.”

I’m going back to the Telephone vid with new “glasses” and things like the above are dawning on me. Such message are powerful liberators, methinks.

I also made this comment to the Bad Romance video:

“Note the one scene where she’s in stop-motion and glistening, crystal beads are all around her, like the Indra’s Net photo in the gallery.”

That particular scene really evoked Indra’s net for me. I don’t know if that was her intention but it did so nonetheless. Especially in the stop-motion, like a freeze-frame, indicating how each moment or individual is apparently on its own but really connected to each other moment or individual with continued motion or reflection in every other.

Now I realize I might be reading into what I see, adding my own meaning. Well of course, as do we all! That’s a main point of postmetaphysics, that we create the meaning and that the object or art or whatever has no given meaning, of itself, in itself, by itself. Indra personally told me so.

Reply by theurj

And then there’s the chant that start’s Bad Romance:

Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah!
Roma-Roma-ma-ah!
Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!

She is invoking Rama into herself! Holy shit! Rama, the avatar of Vishnu no less. Hmmm.

Reply by theurj

I’m also thinking that the diner scene is metaphoric. Beyonce’s lover treats her like an object, like shit so she poisons him. This could be a social commentary on abusive relationships, how they are poisonous. Same with when Gaga poisons the rest of the diner patrons. Perhaps it’s a statement on how Americans eat? How such fare as is found in diners is usually full of fat, salt and sugar and leads to obesity and diabetes? In other words, how we poison ourselves through diet?

Reply by theurj

Let’s address her bisexuality and the rumor that she is a hermaphrodite. She admits to the former and in an interview with Barbara Walters denies the latter. Of course this issue was addressed in the first minute of her latest video Telephone, where her clothing is stripped off and she gives a crotch shot to the camera in a see-through leotard. It is obvious she had no dick and one guard remarks to the other: “See, I told you she didn’t have a dick.”

The point is not so much that she is a medical hermaphrodite but that she has become a mythical or metaphorical hermaphrodite. The term comes from the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite, Hermaphroditis. The latter is turned into a bi- or intersexual when Salmacis merges with him in her pool of water. Mythologically a hermaphrodite represents the union of male and female within any individual, mystically referred to as “the marriage of heaven and earth.” This also refers to the mystical marriage between an individual with God or deity. Some might contend that the former requires the latter, that we must balance the sexes within ourselves in preparation for the greater marriage of this balanced self with the divine. In modern mythology this story is played out in Peter Pan.

On a mundane level Gaga’s admitted bisexuality is an exemplar for breaking the convention of only engaging with the opposite sex. It also breaks the convention of monogamy. Granted both have significant survival and social functions in perpetuating and maintaining the species. But developmentally beyond this, when these functions have been satisfied for the species as a whole, is opening to a wider range of liberating love to more than one partner and more than one’s own sex. As we all know sexual love is quite powerful, especially when sublimated in tantric techniques beyond only physical ejaculation, to elicit higher centers of consciousness development. And within this methodology there is no restriction on polyamory or bisexuality. Liberation and unconditional love know no boundary.

So the rumor that Lady Gaga is a hermaphrodite is but an expression of the larger, cultural mythology that she is a child of the mystical marriage, a communicant and exemplar of marriage within herself and with the divine, and her message (Hermes) is love (Aphrodite).

Reply by theurj

I was watching American Idol last night and to my surprise and delight Lady Gaga performed her latest single Alejandro. Of course it’s already on YouTube so check it out. It’s actually a quite good samba and she shows off some of her piano skills, on which she is classically trained. There is a brief acoustic intro of Bad Romance as a lead-in.

Lost posts

June 13th, 2010

As some have noticed the archives are missing posts and comments from 12/07 to 11/09, which were unfortunately lost in an update to the site. Fortunately many, but not all, of them were copied-and-pasted from discussions at the old Gaia IPS pod, itself now defunct. I saved some of my preferred discussions from the old IPS pod and include links below to those discussions, which should also fill in at least a few of the gaps in the archives here:

Lady Gaga

Liberals are smarter than conservatives

Transpersonal Psychology

George Herbert Mead

Latte Party

Letting daylight into magic

John Caputo

Buddhism & Psychanalysis

Framing liberals

The shadow of the Dalai Lama

Stephen Batchelor

Spirituality without faith

RAW & E-prime

Mystery guest

Model of hierarchical complexity

Jean Gebser

Jacques Derrida

David Michael Levin

The next Buddha will be a collective

The narrative of enlightenment as consumer commodity

Transpersonal cognition

The status of states (all threads)

The end of enlightenment

Synergist spirituality

On meditation

Nondual or performative contradiction

Myth of the given

Integral capitalism

Gregory Desilet responds to Balder

Daily tarot card meditation game (all threads)

Authentic enlightenment

WC lattice & the pre-trans fallacy

Different kind of love

Goddess

Modern day outlaw

Aestheticized Buddhism

Meditation & neuroscience

On gurus and stage-based models

June 5th, 2010

The following is an excerpt from Mark Edwards’ 6/2/10 blog:

“I don’t see Wilber’s AQAL as an integral model of development because it does not use these three lenses [stage, mediation, learning] but only the stage-based lens (sometimes in conjunction with other AQAL lenses).

“To unwrap this a little let’s take the student-teacher relationship as an example. From the stage-based view the teacher is at a higher level and the student is at a lower level. The relationship is one of expert to apprentice. There is a qualitative difference in their identities such that the student does not understand what the teacher is taking about until some dramatic mysterious transformation occurs. We see this, for example, in stage-based model of spiritual development where we have the wise guru teaching and assisting the development of the devoted student or disciple. This is an ancient model that goes back thousands of years and is the prevailing model of the he student-teacher relationship used in the AQAL-informed writings and research.

“The weakness in the stage-based view is that the teacher can all too easily become the master and the student becomes the servant or slave. This relationship can obviously go very astray very easily and, by itself, this lens is an inadequate model to use for the development process in contemporary society. In my opinion, there is far too much reliance on this model for explaining the he student-teacher relationship in AQAL-informed circles. Particularly when applied to the area of spirituality the stage-based model suffers from serious shortcomings. First, the use of the stage-model needs some serious updating to contemporary views about stage-based development. Gurus and teachers who support evolutionary and stage-based view of development are very prone to overestimating the importance of the guru-devotee model and the qualitative differences that they assume exist between teacher and student. When practices within insular settings and non-traditional environments, these kinds of gurus often fall into all the traps of abusive power that many of us are aware of.

“My view is that the archaic view of the teacher-guru and student-disciple has done its dash and can only be defended by those who are so immersed in stage-based development that they see no other meta-level possibilities for articulating growth (this is one of the many forms of altitude sickness that I wrote about in my last blog). I see development and learning relationships moving way beyond these limiting views of guru and student and engaging much more with the language of relationality, situational choice, shared play, communal learning, distributed intelligence, collective wisdom, reflexive learning, and action inquiry. The defence of the ancient models of student-teacher relationship, particularly where development is focused on the stage-based lens, seems to me to be a sign of regression rather than evolution.”

Stephen Batchelor

May 30th, 2010

Edward Berge

In my quest to go postmetaphysical a few of my several concerns follow: 1) How to interpret states and stages of consciousness; 2) How to practice secular meditation free from metaphysical baggage; and 3) How to share the former in a contemporary, western community with a focus on some form of liberation, or at least alleviation, of human suffering. Stephen Batchelor has been invaluable in this quest. (See our prior discussion of him here.) One of his essays is instructive along these lines, “The agnostic Buddhist: a secular vision of dharma practice.” Here are a few select excerpts:

It is important to distinguish between those questions that are addressed by the core teachings of the Buddha, and those which are not really of central concern. I was listening on the radio not long ago in England to a discussion about religious belief. All of the participants were engaged in a heated discussion about the possibility of miracles. It is generally assumed that being a religious person entails believing certain things about the nature of oneself and reality in general that are beyond the reach of reason and empirical verification. What happened before birth, what will happen after death, the nature of the soul and its relation to the body: these are first and foremost religious questions. And the Buddha was not interested in them. But if we look at Buddhism historically, we’ll see that it has continuously tended to lose this agnostic dimension through becoming institutionalised as a religion, with all of the usual dogmatic belief systems that religions tend to have. So, ironically, if you were to go to many Asian countries today, you would find that the monks and priests who control the institutional bodies of Buddhism would have quite clear views on whether the world is eternal or not, what happens to the Buddha after death, the status of the mind in relation to the body, and so on.

So, what would an agnostic Buddhist be like today? How would we even start to think about such a stance? Firstly, I would suggest that an agnostic Buddhist would not regard the Dharma or the teachings of the Buddha as a source which would provide answers to questions of where we are going, where we are coming from, what is the nature of the universe, and so on. In this sense, an agnostic Buddhist would not be a believer with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena and in this sense would not be religious. I’ve recently started saying to myself: “I’m not a religious person,” and finding that to be strangely liberating. You don’t have to be a religious [or spiritual] person in order to practice the Dharma.

Secondly, an agnostic Buddhist would not look to the Dharma for metaphors of consolation. This is another great trait of religions: they provide consolation in the face of birth and death; they offer images of a better afterlife; they offer the kind of security that can be achieved through an act of faith. I’m not interested in that. The Buddha’s teachings are confrontative; they’re about truth-telling, not about painting some pretty picture of life elsewhere. They’re saying: “Look, existence is painful.” This is what is distinctive about the Buddhist attitude: it starts not from the promise of salvation, but from valuing that sense of existential anguish we tend either to ignore, deny or avoid through distractions.

“Emptiness” is a singularly unappetising term. I don’t think it was ever meant to be attractive. Herbert Guenther once translated it as “the open dimension of being,” which sounds a lot more appealing than “emptiness.” “Transparency” was a term I played with for a while, which also makes emptiness sound more palatable. Yet we have to remember that even two thousand years ago Nagarjuna was having to defend himself against the nihilistic implications of emptiness. Many of the chapters in his philosophical works start with someone objecting: “This emptiness is a terrible idea. It undermines all grounds for morality. It undermines everything the Buddha was speaking about.” Clearly the word did not have a positive ring back then either. I suspect that it might have been used quite consciously as an unappealing term, which cuts through the whole fantasy of consolation that one might expect a religion to provide. Perhaps we need to recover this cutting-edge of emptiness, its unappealing aspect.

I like to think of the Buddha’s awakening under the Bodhi tree not as some kind of transcendental absorption, but as a moment of total shock. Neils Bohr once said about quantum mechanics: “If you’re not shocked by quantum theory, then you don’t understand it.” I think we could say the same about emptiness: If you’re not shocked by emptiness, then you haven’t understood it.

Now, whether we follow the Indo-Tibetan analytical approach or the Zen approach of asking a koan like “What is this?,” such meditative inquiry leads to a mind that becomes more still and clear. But paradoxically this does not mean that things then become more clear-cut, that you reach some final understanding of who you are or of what makes the universe tick. Because, at the same time as such things become more vivid and clear, they also become more baffling. One encounters, as it were, the sheer mystery of things. A deep agnosticism would be one founded on this kind of unknowing: the acknowledgement that, in terms of what life really is, I really do not know. And in that unknowing there is already a quality of questioning, of perplexity. And as that perplexity becomes stabilised through meditation, one enters increasingly into a world that is mysterious, magical in a sense, and not containable by narrow ideas and concepts.

But this is not where the practice ends. This is only half the project. What we also discover in this open space, in this mysterious experience of non-self, are the wellsprings of creativity and imagination…. The process of articulating the Dharma goes on and on according to the needs of the different historical situations that it encounters. We could read the whole history of Buddhism, from the moment of the Buddha’s awakening until now, as a process of seeking to imagine a way to respond both wisely and compassionately to the situation at hand.

All of us have experiences of what it means to imagine and create something. It struck me very forcibly one day…that preparing myself to put into words what had not yet been put into words was to enter a very similar frame of mind to that of sitting on a cushion in a zendo, asking: “What is this?” The creative process seemed very comparable to the meditative process. Awakening is only complete — in the same way that a work of art is only complete — when it finds an expression, a form, that translates that experience in a way that makes it accessible to others. That again is the balance between wisdom and compassion. The creative process of expressing the Dharma is not just a question of duplicating in words something etched somewhere in the privacy of my soul. The living process of understanding is formed through the encounter with another person, with the world. You’ve probably all had the experience of someone coming to you in a state of distress and blurting out their problems, and you suddenly find yourself saying things that you were quite unaware you knew. The process of awakening is one of valuing and connecting with that capacity to respond in authentic ways to the suffering of others. The imagination is the bridge between contemplative experience and the anguish of the world. By valuing imagination, we value the capacity of each person, each community, to imagine and create themselves anew.

In the contemporary world Buddhism encounters a culture that places a positive value on the power of each individual’s creativity and imagination. It’s interesting that in most Buddhist traditions these things are not strongly encouraged, or, if they are, it’s usually only within highly formalised settings. I like to think of Dharma practice today as venturing into a world of imagination, one in which each individual, each community, seeks to express and to articulate their vision in terms of the particular needs of their own situation. Buddhism would then become less and less the preserve of an institution, and more and more an experience that is owned by ordinary people in ordinary communities.

Of course, there are dangers here. But these are hardly new. Historically, Buddhism has always had to find ways of responding effectively to the danger of becoming too acculturated, of becoming too absorbed into the assumptions of the host culture. Certainly such a danger exists here in the West: Buddhism might, for example, tend to become a kind of souped-up psychotherapy. But there’s the equal danger of Buddhism holding on too fiercely to its Asian identity and remaining a marginal interest amongst a few eccentrics. Somehow we have to find a middle way between these two poles, and this is a challenge which is not going to be worked out by academics or Buddhist scholars; it’s a challenge that each of us is asked to meet in our own practice from day to day.

[As usual much more in comments.]

Ladder, climber, view & transitional structures

May 24th, 2010

Edward Berge

We started a discussion on this topic at IPS. Here are the first few posts:

Theurj (me) said:

”This is a key issue: What is transcended and included and what is transcended and replaced? I discussed this in the “capitalism” thread. According to Wilber, and with which I agree, worldviews are replaced, not included. (See footnote 7 here for example). So to me an integral worldview would not include bit and pieces of different views in some kind of synthesis-integration-inclusion but replace them altogether into creative novelty. Hence my dissatisfaction with the promotion of integral or conscious capitalism. And things like the latter tend toward a more conservative worldview, just dressed up in new clothing-jingo.”

Mary W said:

“It’s possible that I don’t fully understand what is meant by ‘worldview.’ But it seems to me that one could find some value in elements of a worldview that one no longer holds. I see the integral perspective as including not just random bits and pieces of amber/orange/green in a kind of synthetic hodgepodge — but recognizing what is of value in them and allowing that to fuel a transformative process.

“For example: in healthy development one is said to move from ‘egocentric’ to “ethnocentric” to ‘worldcentric’ to ‘cosmocentric’ — the spheres of love/concern become more widely embracing. The limitations of each of these levels are transcended as one develops, but the element of love/concern is retained. While worldcentric could be said to be a replacement (and a rejection, even) of ethnocentric, it retains the bit of gold that existed at the previous level.”

Theurj said:

“Wilber differentiates basic and transitional structures, the former being included while the latter are transcended. So it is a question of what is defined as each kind of strucutre. Here’s an excerpt from ‘Ladder, climber, view’ by Ingersoll and Cook-Greuter:

‘As the self develops (climbs the ladder and increases its altitude), each rung reveals a broader, deeper view or perspective that replaces previous views or perspectives…. In one sense, these views are permanent for the period that the self is on a given rung. In another sense, the views are transitional in that once the self moves from a given rung to the next rung on the ladder, the previous view is replaced by a new, expanded view.’

“Wilber references his own article ‘ladder, climber, view’ on p. 66 of Integral Spirituality but says he won’t discuss it in the book. He says one can find it at his site (www.kenwilber.com) but when I searched for it I could not find it. Does anyone have its specific web address?

“Also see Integral Psychology (Shambhala, 2000), p. 221, footnote 7:

‘Enduring structures are ones that, once they emerge, remain in existence, fully functioning, but subsumed in higher structures (cognitive structures are mostly of this type.) Transitional structures, on the other hand, tend to be replaced by their subsequent stages (e.g., ego stages and moral stages). The basic structures are mostly enduring structures; and the developmental lines consist mostly of transitional structures.’

“The emphasis was in the text, so perhaps he is leaving wiggle room as to what exactly constitutes mostly. Although worldviews were not included above they were in footnote 7 to the Collected Works reference. And worldviews are the ‘view’ in ‘ladder, climber, view’ that are replaced at each stage, often referred to as magic, mythic, rational etc.

“It also becomes a question of what is an integral worldview (IW). It seems that one way of describing it is that it no longer replaces prior worldviews because it is “second-tier” and the earlier transcend and replace was so first-tier. Hence we get some confusion because the IW is capable for the first time in human history of being aware of all previous worldviews and is not exclusionary like they were. It can take a so-called aperspectival non-view on all of them, itself not being a worldview?”

See more in comments.

Rand Paul reveals capitalism’s agenda

May 20th, 2010

I’m sure you’ve heard Rand Paul’s statements about the Civil Rights Act? Rand Paul, the Rep. candidate for Senate in KY, confirmed his long-held views that private business should not be regulated to prevent discrimination, that the rights of private property and capital are supreme. Even to the point that business should not be required to accommodate people with disabilities. Here you go, Ayn Rand-style laissez-faire capitalism at its best.

All of which supports the basic tenet of capitalism, private ownership and operation of business. Which of course works magically for the benefit of everyone because everyone has equal opportunity to enter into the business relationship, to say no. Yep, a business person can say “no” to serve you if you are black, and the black can go shop somewhere else and everyone will be the better for it. Never mind that the black had to shop at places with higher prices because all the white-only businesses had all the capital investment to buy in such bulk to set lower prices with which smaller, black-owned businesses could not compete. Yep, that’s the mutual benefit of all from those “conscious” decisions of the hoarders of private capital.

Paul’s faux pas was more that he openly admitted it, not that he held such views. Most conservatives have exactly the same view but cannot publicly admit it. It’s the strong undercurrent of corporate capitalism, what makes for such astounding profits for the capitalists while the workers get nothing by comparison. And the latter are made to eat the slop they are given and be grateful for it. Yes, Paul only brought to light what conservatives and capitalists have always supported, and it makes them look like the vultures and sharks that they are. And they know it. That’s why they are running from Paul’s statements, not because they disagree with them.

And this is what the likes of some integralites promote with their support of capitalism. Like it or not, THEY are capitalists. I am not.

More in comments.