Liberals and Radicals

What you most loath in others is what you loath in yourself, a wise person once said. Well I loath liberals. And I loath the liberal in myself.

In the eye of the civil rights hurricane, I participated in the struggle by learning to organize in poor communities, the first one in Detroit made up of poor whites from Appalachia, Spanish speaking brown people from Puerto Rico, and black people emigrated from the South. I went on to Chicago to learn more about poverty in America just as Johnson's War of Poverty was beginning to be waged. It was at this time I learned about how people, especially housing marketeers and their financial institutional bankers, used race to make huge profits. Profits that were usually encouraged by local governments and guaranteed by federal policy.

Lula Boles was a leader of an organizing team in a large public housing complex in which I was working. She asked me to attend with her team a meeting of a black lawyers group. The room was crowded with lots of good, fiery speeches about racism in Chicago. Then one speaker got up to attack racism and saw me--the only white guy in the place. (I define white as a person of predominantly European descent, black as a person who claims their African descent.) He laid into me as representing all the sins that white people have committed on blacks. I've been attacked before and wasn't even going to acknowledge such foolishness; but I could see that our team was very uncomfortable. So, unusual for me, I spoke up. I told him that he was talking bullshit and that I refused to accept being a sacrificial victim for the sins of the white man. I said that instead of falling for the Man's ploy to pit poor whites against poor blacks, we should be out organizing against those who were wielding the power to put anyone down and leave anyone out. My team exploded with applause and so did the whole audience. I later recognized that part of the appreciation was not just the analysis I laid out. It was because I was willing to be an equal and to treat the speaker as an equal and not pander or patronize.

This is when I learned to loath liberals and began my quest to become a radical. Here is the difference for me--in black and white.

Liberals focus on culture and social attitudes. Liberals are more interested in cultural identity rights including ethnicity, race, sex, sexual orientation. White liberals are nice to and understanding with black people. Black liberals learn well how to use guilt to game white liberals and black folk. They accept their role as tokens and use that role to control the conversation and become the expert in race relations. Preachers, both white and black, are often the best at using race to keep their priveleged positions. White and black liberals talk a lot about race but don't do much to change the institutional foundations of racism.  They consider racism a matter of getting along with people. They are more into process than results. They are more into identity politics than class politics. They may speak radically about inequities in wealth and power, but do not organize with others to actually change the arrangements of wealth and power in the social order. That takes a different kind off thinking, a different kind of analysis, and a different kind of organizing. A radical one.

Radicals of every stripe and color focus on class and fight for equality and power for the poor and working class. They fight to reduce the influence of wealth in politics, for the ability of the poor and working class to have equal rights and power, to unionize and organize across ethnic and national lines, to remove the obstacles to full participation in the political economy. Radicals are color blind. They realize that cultural identity is important in human affairs, including religion, ethnicity, sex, age, and sexual orientation. But they also know that these are often screens and even distractions to get people to focus on cultural identity and human relations rather than economic justice. Radicals are more interested in the practice which is making some people more equal than others, rather than the supremacist language of the ignorant.

Presently I am working to retain diversity in the DC gentrifying neighborhood in which I work. I think a community is better when it is diverse. Some define strong community as stable, predictable, and without tension--like the small rural village in the American fantasy. I define strong community as creative, interesting, and challenging. That's what diversity in race, sex, language, sexual orientation, income and wealth, young and old, lucky and unlucky, atheist and religious, right and left bring to communities. But the way to achieve diversity is not by making everyone a cultural libertarian. It is by seeing and acknowledging what is keeping anyone from getting ahead or gaining respect: the conditions, practices, and especially the structures of society, usually not apparent, that work to profit some and rob others. How is the market now working and money now flowing to include some, but not others.

I believe that it is by organizing community groups with vision that build power to effect change in that market and the flow of money that will stop the new segregation that is now dividing America and destroying our democracy.

No one is more aware of the importance of ideas and language than I am. And I am all for changing the culture within which unjust actions spring and are rationalized. Yes, I know that race matters as do black lives. And I know that there are hateful bullies out there who stereotype and stir fear and violence.

But my own recent experiences in promoting diversity and in the recent political campaigns tell me that there are also lots of guilty liberals out there, black and white, who are well-intentioned (See these two books for and by liberals) but use their guilt to condone and conceal the cause of inequity, including racism, in institutions often being headed by nice white and black liberals. And when I do that, it makes me sick.

Why I'm not an atheist.

My belief system does not admit of supernatural entities and places. I have no gods nor causes nor places outside nature. When asked, I say I am not a religious believer. But that does not mean I am an atheist.

I understand why there are those who insist on being named atheists in order to distinguish themselves from "true believers," god-is-on-my-siders, religionists who argue from sacred scripture and divine authority for the evils of sexism, racism, white supremacy, national superiority, power by violence, and exclusion of others. Or they insist on being called atheists because they see the need for critical thinking, continuous inquiry, scientific skepticism, and openness to new ideas. Many reformers and rebels against the subjugation of the vulnerable were considered atheists. And many now accept that title and teach atheism as a belief system in solidarity with those reformers and rebels.

God, Paradise, Truth, Good, Freedom, Justice, and Beauty are concepts. Like all words, they are figures of speech, analogies, symbols. Images of our imagination. While these notions can be used to spread ignorance, to separate people, and to hold us back, they can also be used to help us grow and prosper as persons and as a people.

And that is why I will not call myself an atheist. For me to be a "real atheist" or a "true believer" is a failure of imagination. God, Paradise, Truth, Good, Freedom, Justice, and Beauty are images, but not without meaning. All are here in us as persons and as a people as we struggle together by accepting the world we have inherited with all its blemishes and acting now to leave the world for our children's children. So I can worship God, enter Paradise, find Truth, enjoy Justice, and discover Beauty best when I accept my desire to know in ignorance, express my hope for community in division, pursue my search for liberation in oppression, and my attempt to preserve our earth and embrace our universe.

Why I want Sanders to lose the election

(Note: This is a sorta rewriting of my last two entries.)

Yes, I contributed to his campaign. Yes, I will vote for him in the Maryland primary. But I want Bernie Sanders to lose the election.

Why? Because I believe in democratic republicanism over populist democracy.

Populism is focused on one issue or common enemy. It is often hooked up to electoral politics rather than building a base of autonomous power among people bringing together many issues and a more sophisticated analysis of those issues. Populists generally wind up giving away their power to demagogues who rule in their name to relieve their fears and satisfy their anger without subjecting their opinions to critique in the public space. This is why demagogues also want to suppress or control the press and put down dissent.

A republic is an organization of interacting publics. And a public consists of people acting together to shape the common good. A public is a town hall meeting, a council or conference, a settlement house or neighborhood center, a civic association or community organization. Often publics are gathered in geographic districts or connected to committees related to government. In publics, personal interests are achieved by being connected with others to create an agenda by which all can live and thrive. The republican education of critical thinking citizens occurs in public schools and through experience in civic affairs.

We've seen populist governments, left and right, recently in Russia, Latin America, and Jacksonland southern states. And we could probably point to elements of demagoguery at all levels of American government where the people elect their masters and leave the public space to them. When publics fail and people have only private opinions recorded in Gallup polls or even in mass votes, unchallenged by critical thinking or public discussion, we have the situation which rulers use to get and keep control.

We ask how did a silent majority permit the KKK lynchings of African Americans? The Know Nothing persecution of Catholic and Jewish immigrants? The concentration camp internment of Japanese Americans? The witch hunts of McCarthy? The mass incarcerations of Black Americans? 

The silent majority is silent because it is afraid. It becomes noisy when it blames "outsiders" for threatening their way of life. But silent or noisy it is a "mass"--unsullied by liberal education or community service where one touches other views and cultures and share their suffering with others not like them. Populists are not organized in publics, but in parties and special interest movements.

President Obama tried to maintain a community-based organizing process that would turn his electoral populist movement into autonomous community organizations. But that was impossible because the Organization for Action (OFA) was really an extension of his campaign. I believe the same would happen if Sanders were elected.  The popular movement might continue but the power arrangements would pretty much stay the same.

Now Sanders is no demagogue  Suppose he is not elected but continues his revolution. Say he works with a collective leadership (including perhaps the former community organizer now in the Oval Office) through experienced community organizing efforts now underway in neighborhoods, churches, worker groups, and schools, maybe we could see a real revolution. A revolution that would build local power for smart growth, living wages, preserved wilderness, water, air, and climate, universal health care and education, affordable housing for all, immigrant rights, and an equal starting point for all regardless of ethnicity, religion, culture, and sex.

For example, the Next Systems Project is trying to rethink and reframe the political-economy for the U.S. But they lack the local political organizing to make it happen.

The assumption of democratic republicanism is that most people, if educated in the skills of critical thinking and civic participation, will understand the obstacles and illusions that hold them back. And they will do the right thing. They will no longer be members of the populist silent majority or noisy mass which operates on the ignorance that promotes fear and hate of others.

Go Bernie, go!

More on Populism

Populists (see last blog) generally wind up giving away their power to demagogues who rule in their name to relieve their fears and satisfy their anger without subjecting their opinions to critique in the public space. This is why demagogues also want to suppress or control the press and put down dissent.

The Tea Party is a good example of this. Like the 19th century Know-Nothings (the American Party), they fear and oppose outsiders and blame them for their ills. Populism is focused on a single issue or enemy and is often hooked up to electoral politics rather than building a base of autonomous power among people bringing together many issues and a more sophisticated analysis of those issues.

We ask how did we permit the KKK lynchings of African Americans? The Know Nothing persecution of Catholic and Jewish immigrants? The concentration camp internment of Japanese Americans?  The witch hunts of McCarthy? How can so many now be supporting Trump and Cruz in their efforts to stop immigrants and refugees? The silent majority is silent because it is afraid. It becomes noisy when it despises "outsiders" who threaten their way of life. But silent or noisy it is a "mass"--unsullied by liberal education or community service where one touches "aliens," other views and cultures, and share their suffering with others not like them. In short they are not organized in publics but in parties and special interest movements.

Obama tried to maintain a community-based organizing process that would turn his electoral movement into autonomous community organizations. But that was impossible because the Organization for Action (OFA) was really an extension of his campaign. I believe the same would happen if Sanders were elected.  The popular movement might continue but the power arrangements would pretty much stay the same.

However, if Sanders is not elected, if he worked with a collective leadership through experienced community organizing efforts (e.g. PICO, NPA, IAF, Black Lives Matters, Occupy Wall Street, progressive unions and churches), maybe we could see a real revolution. A revolution that would build local power for smart growth, living wages, preserved wilderness, water, air, and climate, universal health care and education, affordable housing for all, immigrant rights, and an equal starting point for all regardless of ethnicity, religion, culture, and sex. The Next Systems Project is trying to rethink and reframe the political-economy for the U.S. But we still lack the local political organizing to make it happen.

The assumption of democratic republicanism is that most people, if educated in the skills of critical thinking and civic participation, will understand the obstacles and illusions that hold them back; and they will do the right thing. They will no longer be members of the populist silent majority which operates on the ignorance that promotes fear and hate of others.

I hope we can try out that assumption.

Revolt of the Elites

The 2016 campaigns are seen as a revolution against the elites. Trump and Cruz, sounding like us old 60's pinkos, are fighting the "Establishment."  And they attack liberal journalists and Ivy College experts that support that establishment. Sanders with his reviving Jacksonian democrats and Rooseveltian new dealers attacking Wall Street bankers, corporate leaders, and their legal and political enablers who give us bubbles and depressions while running off with all the loot.

Populism, left and right, this election year is certainly "in."

Chris, a young man at Montgomery Community College, is taking a philosophy course studying Plato's Republic. He discovered my bent; and, at his request, we had a good discussion on forms of government. He agreed with Plato's Socrates saying that philosophers would make the best rulers; and democracy is proving itself even now as an inferior type of government. Between asked, Chris also realized the need for accountability. But to whom?

The Founding Fathers solved this dilemma by permitting a popular vote for aristocratic electors who would then select the best man. And indeed the voting populace included only men who owned land, because women were too emotional; slaves and indentured servants weren't even citizens. Like Plato, the Fathers were disdainful of rule by the mob and by uneducated commoners which is what the Philosopher meant by democracy.

Jefferson who believed in the "People" founded schools and pushed for universal education. Following him, great educators, abolitionists, women's suffragists, and other advocates for ordinary citizens without means fought for publicly supported education for all. If you want both wise rulers and democracy, ensure that all citizens are well educated.

Philosopher John Dewey and social activist Jane Adams taught and exemplified the public education needed for citizens. Such education included both "liberal education" that taught people how to think within a broad range of knowledge and also direct experience working in public, i.e., community, service. Both Dewey and Adams might be considered elitists fighting against elitism. They were born in well-to-do families and university educated living lives advocating for those less wealthy and educated.

After all, the "elite" originally means the "chosen" or the "elect." The question is who chooses. And here it seems to me is the greatest difference between populist democracy and democratic republicanism.

A republic is an organization of interacting publics. And a public consists of people acting together to shape the common good. It is like a town hall meeting, a council or conference, a settlement house or neighborhood center, civic associations, or a community organization. Often these are gathered in geographic districts or connected to committees related to government. The education of citizens occurs through public schools and experience in civic affairs. In this education, personal interests are achieved by being connected with others to create an agenda by which all can live and thrive.

Populism however is a poll in which private individuals register their interests and their wants without being shaped in public space. Populism assumes that the People are the sum of private individuals expressing the sum of their private interests. Populism holds for common sense over critical thinking. The common interest is the silent majority interest unencumbered by expert judgments and academic studies. Education in populism is transferring traditional truths and values. Liberal or critical thinking is suspect because it undermines popular traditions and values.

Opinion, according to Plato, is a shadow on the wall seen by chained persons. With the help of philosophy, they eliminate their chains, turn around and see the Sun. They become the best, the aristoi, the chosen ones, the elite, moved by truth, not opinion. And aristocracy, he says, is better than democracy.

And so it was until the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and republican liberations. It seems that now we have a sort of mix of democratic republicanism and populist democracy. The history of the US has moments of both; and it often verges towards mob rule and plutocracy. The silent majority opposes big government, corporations, unions even to the detriment of the poor and common person. And since financial wealth is sign of success, they are easily persuaded to increase the gross national wealth which coincides with the interests of the wealthy. And when a plutocrat claims the power to rule on behalf of the masses who disdain the intelligentsia, we have the definition of the demagogue.

We've seen this form of government recently in the Soviet Union, Latin American countries, southern states, and could probably point to elements of demagoguery at all levels of American government where the people elect their masters and leave the public space or power to them. This is the situation when publics fail and people have only private opinions unchallenged by critical thinking or public discussion which rulers use to get and keep control. Or, as Hannah Arendt says, when private economic concerns dominate public action and policy.

So every generation needs to wage its own rebellion, a saying attributed to Thomas Jefferson. But that means every generation needs to develop its own publics and achieve the power to dethrone both demagoguery and aristocracy. And the new generation must connect critical thinking to universal education so that even commoners can be the elite and public space includes us all.

Resurrection

Holy Saturday 2016

We are in the center of "The Christian Mystery," the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. For those of us bred within the Catholic tradition, these are the high holy days, celebrating the foundation of existence, the core of meaning, the very reason for being.

Like most religious and cultural traditions, the foundation of faith is expressed in stories using symbolic language that arises from previous traditions. The main story is that of the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, who lived some 2000 years ago in a province of Imperial Rome, who was branded a revolutionary and sentenced to death, and whose followers developed a movement and organization in his name that took over the Empire assimilating its language and many of its institutions. The foundational belief of that movement is that Jesus lives and is the Christ: the holy one, the anointed one, the one we are awaiting for our liberation.

The story has been told in many diverse forms, each arising from different communities, having their own points to make adjusting the telling to the audience and times. But again the core is that Jesus the man who suffered and died now lives. As the chief organizer of the Jesus movement is quoted: "if Christ is not resurrected, your faith is in vain."

How can those of us who value this tradition and its stories align this core belief with our acceptance of the Enlightenment, modern science, democratic republicanism, postmodern philosophy and art, inclusive culture, new economy and technology. Today we no longer speak the language of supernatural entities and places. We have closed the Cartesian gap between body and spirit. We have rejected tribalism for a more universal culture. We have dispelled the superstitions of witches, devils, ghosts, and gods. We are confronting (but have not yet overcome) the illusions of a permanent self and an independent reality, of the uninterpreted past or utopian future, of absolutes in truth and of relativism in behavior.

In my last reflection, I tried to articulate what I believe using the language that is compatible with our postmodern times. My formulation, like all expressions, is inadequate. My faith transcends my beliefs. Yet it is through the sharing, interaction, and fusion of those beliefs that we continue to exercise our faith. We stop time to understand and express it. But time does not stop and can never be fully understandable or expressed.

Let me reappropriate the Christian story using my new language of social psychology, theoretical physics, cognitive science, and postmodern philosophy. I do not need to be superstitious or live in two worlds, one of truth, the other of fantasy, to appreciate the Christian story and the values it teaches. And I can be honest with myself and good to others without pretending in Santa or the tooth fairy or the Great Pumpkin as literal events. While at the same time I appreciate metaphor and images, even fantastic ones, to spice up life and to lift up a reality that is inaccessible by science and philosophy.

We postmoderns realize that the Resurrection of Christ is a symbol--a figure of speech, an analogy or metaphor. But that is because we recognize that all our speech and expressions are symbols. Note: we do not say "mere" symbols. Symbols are the media through which we inquire into and achieve reality. I have spend numerous pages, drawing on many scientific thinkers and writers, demonstrating the symbolic character of human existence and our world. We can conceive of our fundamental activity of being in the world through symbols as being present--to things and people, to past and future, to other persons and to our selves.

Christianity is a very personal religion: Jesus is a human person who interacted with other human persons to invite them into a community of persons who spoke of their ultimate meaning in personal terms, not just in a god, but "Abba" Father, to affirm the supreme value of all persons whatever their position or station or race or sex. What is a person? We know from social psychology that a person is not an entity inside the embrained body. The person is the style of life, the behavioral function, the character developing from the birth through death of the human body. Persona (coming from the word for the "mask" actors wore) means the habitual role of a human being in the drama of life.

There are many scholarly studies on and personal encounters with the Jesus persona. They developed in a community of those who are inspired by, taken with, and trying to share with one another that persona. I am one of those who is so inspired, taken, and who share in this style of being in the world that we call "Jesus." I have my own definition and list of categories to describe the Jesus person (published elsewhere), shaped of course by my own studies, experiences, interactions, interpretations, and intentions. When Jesus was killed by the authorities of Rome and Jerusalem, his person, his way of being in the world, his approach to others, his style of life, his way of existing was taken up by others through their memories, their stories, and especially by their way of acting.

When the body dies, the life-style or character or role, can live on in others who have adopted that style, assumed that character, and play that role. The body dies, the persona lives. As every person is presence so the person of Jesus is present. He lived, died, but is present. In other words, his consciousness is part of our universal consciousness. No need for an empty tomb--though that's a good story. No need for the appearance of a ghost. No need for some supernatural force. And no need for an individual "I" consciousness.

When the community celebrates his life and death, when they recall his way of being in the world, when they gather at the table in his name, he is present. "Really present?" you ask. Or "symbolically present?" That is a false dichotomy, I respond. Reality is always present through symbols. Yes, Jesus is really and symbolically present when people live out his way and take on his role in the world. That is the meaning of the Christian Mystery.

Jesus is a point in time that does not end. He is a special relationship to the world, to others, and to the universe. When we put ourselves in that point of time, that is, relating that point to our point in time and live out the Jesus way of being as we can best know it, we discover and create the Jesus persona in our world. We encounter and become his conscious activity towards others and towards all that there is. Our spirits are joined.

Especially important in the reliving of the story is the sharing of the passion not just of Jesus but of all humans and all living beings. For it is only by undergoing the sufferings of others and sharing in sufferings that we can experience our solidarity with them. It is only in accepting our ultimate and essential contingency, of our being-to-death, that we fully enter into the human community and live. This is the source of happiness, meaning, and universal consciousness--in the present.

My expression is not acceptable to those who think in classical terms of autonomous beings out there apart from consciousness. I think that they are caught in a passing worldview in which time is a dimension of space--i.e. space-time. But I suggest that we are passing into a worldview in which space is a dimension of time--i.e. time-space.  (See my earlier blogs on time.) But again postmodernity and all its formulas are passing as well.

Also as I believe that the Jesus consciousness or spirit or persona is very special, so I believe is the Buddha consciousness, the Dao consciousness, the Jewish consciousness, the Socrates consciousness, the revolutionary consciousness, but only insofar as these ways of acting in the world are paths to a transcending consciousness and a relational world or what Christians call "eternal life" and the "kingdom of God."

What I Believe

My sister-in-law Marcia died. The priest at the burial mass in his homily used images that I felt demonstrated a very outmoded and even bad theology. It makes religion a superstitious fairy tale totally out of sorts with not only science and common sense, but also I think with religious, including Christian, faith. But in rejecting his belief system, I am challenged to articulate my own especially when considering my death and the death of those I love.

Here is what I believe without supernatural entities and places, detachable souls, bodies as shells, corporate male dominated churches, ignorance about human symbolic communication, and the arrogance of having more truth than others.
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I believe that all persons and all things are relations to every thing and every person and to the universe as a whole.

I believe each of us is a moment in time which has no beginning and no end. And in that moment the universe becomes conscious of itself as time stretching to all that came before and all that is yet to come.

I believe that I am the culmination of all that has come before and, in specific, of everyone I have loved and who has loved me. And in this way I am in touch with universal transcending love as personal energy and relationship among us all.

I believe that I am the beginning of a new order of relationships that will extend through time unending.

I believe that I do not exist as an indidual automaton but as a relationship to all who ever were and will ever be.

I believe that I, in union with you and others, discover and create our world for good or for ill. I believe that we are responsible. Therefore I do not blame others, my ancestry, my genes, my culture, my upbringing, my nation, or any supernatural entities. For while I realize that these are influences on our behavior, I believe that I with you should take full responsibility for our behavior, for who we and our world become.

I believe that it is my vocation to be a relationship, to heal broken relationships, and thus to build a relational world. I believe that it is our common vocation to respect and transcend all cultures, religions, and beliefs by accepting our contingency while honestly seeking truth and understanding in all their limits and manifestations.

I believe in the higher power of solidarity in love and action.

Because of these beliefs, I abhor and reject violence, inequity, absolutes, arrogance, exclusion, and ignorance. I commit myself in solidarity with others to change all beliefs and institutions including my own that perpetuate violence, inequity, absolutes, arrogance, exclusion, and ignorance.
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(This is my language developed in my interaction with many fellow students and mentors. I can accept other ways of proclaiming faith as long as I interpret them in the terms of my beliefs. Since I was raised Christian Catholic, I will attempt to demonstrate this next.)

More Time

We waste, spend, give, take, save, buy, lose time like it's a commodity. Sometimes, this is our time. Sometimes we are in time and sometimes we are out of it. But the times, they are a-changing. Sometimes. So what is it? Time?

Common sense says that we are in time like in the flow of a river. Time passes and so do we as we float by markers on the bank. While time seems to slow and quicken, it goes on relentlessly like the hands of a clock.

Religious time, expressed in myth and rituals, is either cyclical (seasonal) celebrating restored life in spring, or linear with one or more culminations (kairoi) that bestow meaning on the course of time, or eschatological awaiting the end of time or timelessness. Or a combination of the three as in Christianity and other great religions.

Modern science teaches that time is an illusion. In Newtonian science, time is the arrow of entropy going from order to dissolution--winding down. Or in relativity theory time is a 4th dimension of space and therefore without independent reality. The really real is timeless. Time is not necessary to nature and its understanding. However, some scientists (Prigogine, Rovelli, Smolin), critiquing modernity, conjecture time as the fundamental reality from which space and all things emerge.

Contemporary philosophy (especially phenomenology) sees time as constitutive of human existence. In acting humanly, i.e. through imagination, we find ourselves constructing a "not-yet" which is molded out of "what-has-been." We experience our selves personally and collectively as presence, a now in-between past and future, with memory and intention, inhabiting stories that tell us who we have become and stories that tell us what we might become. Our existence is temporal. It is temporality itself bestowing and discovering temporality in nature.

O tempora! O mores!
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So what is time?  And so what?
Does it matter if we think in or out of time?
If time is an illusion, is it a useful one? And useful for what?
If time is real, does it (need to) have a beginning and/or end?
And does the gain of a totally new, mean the total loss of the old?
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Eras, ages, epochs, generations, times. The best of times, the worst of times. The spirit of the times. All fabrications of thought attempting to put meaning in history. Arbitrary cut-offs. lines of demarcation, to indicate transitions and transformations.

Acting on the side of history. Being with the times. As though history has a law and time has a trajectory. Does it? Hegel and Marx might have thought so. So did Toynbee and biblical scholars. And Adam Smith with his invisible hand. We search through the tea leaves, the entrails of pigs, the oracle of Delphi, the movement of the stars, and the study of history to discover the future--as though it already is somewhere, someplace. If so, then time is not real. Just an illusion. The past, future, and present of the universe just are--already. So chill out. It matters not.

But if we hold that time is real, incurring genuine novelty, open to a never before and never again moment, an unpredictable future that cannot be prescribed from the present, then we participate a universe evolving. The universe evolves by indeterminate natural selection of matter and energy which retain and refresh the universe. The universe is without an end that has been foretold or forecast and perhaps without a beginning or original conditions that determine its trajectory. An eternity of novel events. If time is the reality, our thoughts and actions, our thoughtful actions matter and matter greatly. They make it possible for unforeseen potential, for miracles that contradict and revise earlier laws of nature.

If time is real, the universe is an unfolding, unfinished symphony where all the players improvise while keeping and making time. If the universe is time and we are time's events, vessels of time, non-duplicable moments of time, then perhaps we do know God. God is Time.
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Wait! Time is not a succession of unique moments as Smolin seems to be saying. It is not a snapshot. Nor is it a stream of snapshots or frames that make a running film that you can stop at various points to edit along the way. Or maybe we can say that time is the Moment. Time is the Event stretching back and forth, in and out, here and there, unique and universal, prime and infinite. Time is not a reality out there in the universe. It is the universe expanding out and collapsing in on itself. Not real, not illusion.

Time is the Subjectivity of the universe--just as mystics and philosophers express that existence, intentionality, consciousness is temporality. The "within" of nature. That's why there will never be a complete, comprehensive theory of nature. David Deutsche conjectured that a complete theory of the cosmos would include epistemology or the theory of the theorizing. But of course that is quite impossible. For as soon as we land on a correct theory of knowing, we have stopped the film on a frame. When we concentrate on an event in time to understand it, we lose sight of the Event of time itself. We cannot objectify time. We can only live it. We cannot stop time. But we can live and be it as it goes.

Or, in other words, Time is forever objectifying itself, Nature engendering nature. Temporality is the act of creation of the world in us. Time is Brahma waking up. Evolution becoming conscious.

Time

I've been reading Time Reborn by physicist Lee Smolin and can't wait to finish it before commenting on it because it affects my thinking in Out of the Box. It is also a corollary to my last reflections on science and religion.

1. Relationalism. I thought I discovered relationalism, which I identified with the postmodern turn from modernity with its absolute timeless space (Newton) and its relative spacetime (Einstein). I conjectured that the new paradigm for thinking rejects both the absolute and the relative, whether in science or in ethics/politics, for the relational. The real is not made up of singular entities to which we give names, but of relationships within a dynamically changing symbolic system. No thing has reality except in relationship to other beings within a dynamically evolving universe. I knew I was following and even cited my antecedent teachers for this notion. But here is Smolin naming it. "Oh well, great minds..... "

2. Postmodernism. My approach is to accept that we are entering the postmodern world and to extol the opportunities as well as the dangers of that. However, Smolin echoes many others in making postmodernism a sort of heresy, a sort of a rejection of modernism that goes too far. So I see that there is a possibility of misunderstanding in my embrace of postmodernism that I must keep aware of. Maybe I need to add a chapter on post-postmodernism to clarify my differences from this popular dismissal of postmodernism.

3. Consciousness. Smolin treats consciousness as an afterthought. I would not expect a neuroscientist, much less a physicist, to deal with consciousness except to describe and identify the particles (cells, neurons, synapses, chemicals) that make it possible. Until, that is, they turn to philosophy, i.e. reflecting on the symbolic activity of science which comes up with its products (models, thoughts, ideas, formulas, theories). And Smolin often makes that turn to philosophy.

I have learned to distinguish the symbolic act of thinking from its products as a way of closing the separation of subjective consciousness from objective reality that characterizes modernity. Subjective consciousness cannot be caught except in the act. For as soon as you catch it, it no longer is--unless you loop back to the act of catching it. And so on to infinity. Oh, it's there alright--in the thinking act out to the world. In the human body thinking.  It is there connected to general consciousness from past to future. Call it the personal soul or collective world spirit! But consciousness will never be an object of science or any other human activity because it is the intersubjectivity that make objectivity possible.

Phenomenology is the discipline to notice and describe consciousness. Like Buddhist meditation, phenomenology attempts to see things as they are appearing, words in the act of uttering, the world as it is being created through symbols. Some have called consciousness the "mystery of existence" because of its allusiveness to categorization and objectification. It is not a problem to be solved in the world because it is what creates the world.

4. Thinking in time. Smolin shows how modern science from Galileo to Einstein removed time from nature. He shows how contemporary science is bringing it back. By making time the foundation of reality, he dispenses with immutable natural laws with their determinism in mathematical space. There is no timeless space or being. He opens science and all thinking to genuine novelty. This means the evolution of laws and an indeterminate future. He also shows that space itself emerges, that nature is not fixed in structure or content, and that the universe is the unfolding of time itself. He hopes, not in some grand theory that will last forever, to explain the universe. He sees science, and perhaps human existence, as a continuous adventure in which we never appropriate or even approximate, as Hawkins said, "the mind of God." For there is no such mind.

He shows how, by thinking in time, by getting past modernist timelessness, we can not only discover a new paradigm for science, but also for economics and politics in which are still stuck in the illusion of fixed laws. He affirms that the rebirth of time in our thinking will get us past the obstacles we have created to deal with climate change, inequity, and government.
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Heiddegar and his followers characterized human existence as temporality. In other words, we humans when we act consciously in the world bring time into the world. Since humanity is an emergent being in nature, we are both carriers of time to nature and instances of the time in nature that is already there. Thinking in time, is a new imagination, that makes possible a new science to solve some of the problems that have arisen in modern science. Thinking in time also makes possible a new theology by which we can reinterpret many of the teachings and symbols of the past to make sense in our post-postmodern world towards solving many of the problems in ecology, economy, and politics.

That we can imagine the new--and how we do so--makes all the difference in the world.