On 2008-Dec-22, at 10:03, Chris Gehlker wrote: > I don't pretend to understand Rowan Williams. Here his argument, or > rather his assertion, seems to be that any attempt to understand the > world rationally is evil. He's like an Alisa Rosenbaum parody of a > liberal intellectual.
It echoes a sentiment I've seen in any little Zen group. People will say, "you do Zen but then you need to act! We need right action!" And they'll talk about the importance of feeling compassion. Compassion for your neighbor, for your colleagues, for Iraq, for the world... Feel compassion and act! And because I like ideas, I stick my nose in and say, great, and we also need to be thinking about things so that we understand what actions to take. And then something odd happens; they look at me like I just don't get it. Zen people aren't particularly different to New Age yoga types who've been off to India to do salutes to the sun on the beach. You will hear them ask, "what does the world need?" (The correct answer is "love"). I hate to hark back to old Ken, but his critique about this sort of stuff includes a few soundbyte points: - the stupidest idea of the last 50 years has been that "thinking is wrong" and that "feeling" is somehow better - cognitive psychology shows that before you can feel it, you have to be able to see it, which is to say, your feelings don't give you direct access to the feelings of another person, rather, your cognition imagines the world from their point of view, in their shoes, and in constructing that perspective, you can then inform your feelings OK, that last one was not-so-soundbyte, but I don't remember the exact quote. The point is, in spiritual circles, and I guess the Archbishop there knows a few spiritual people, the fashion is to feeeeel, because, don't ya know, modern rationality really fucked up and so we don't want none of that any more. Rational men with rational schemes produced charts and numbers showing that it was better to kill 10 000 than let 1 000 000 die. And how cold and unfeeling that was. How horrific. How inhuman. Anyway, "feeeel" is trendy in Western spiritual circles. Meanwhile Aurobindo (1872-1950), Indian nationalist, political activist, philosopher, spiritual teacher, wrote that, whilst solving the world's problems requires a whole new level of consciousness and cognition to arise, (essentially a spiritual cognition), in the meantime, "the world must be governed by reason." That's why people like him call themselves "integral". Stefano _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
