As we saw two weeks ago, Richard Wagner’s last opera Parsifal makes use of most of the same symbols as The Ring of the Nibelung, and thus provides a mordant commentary to the theme of that vast and sprawling work. The magic treasure, the magic spear, the antagonist who wins power by a terrible renunciation of love, the ruler of gods or knights who can’t bring himself to make a permanent choice between love and power and so fails catastrophically, the hero raised in the wilderness who alone can win the treasure, the magic flying horse and its equally magic but profoundly conflicted female rider—they’re all present and accounted for. So is the passion for Germanic legend and myth that inspired so many creative minds in Wagner’s day, of course, for Parzival is as much a treasure of German medieval literature as the Nibelungenlied.
The most obvious difference between The Ring and Parsifal is that the former is set in the world of archaic German Paganism, while the latter takes place in the Christian Middle Ages, and uses a great deal of Christian symbolism and imagery. This led a great many people, Friedrich Nietzsche among them, to interpret Parsifal as a Christian opera. Nietzsche, devout atheist that he was, lambasted Wagner for this, accusing Wagner of abasing himself at the foot of the Cross. A great many other writers praised Wagner for casting off the horrid if aesthetically powerful Paganism of The Ring and affirming the established faith of nineteenth-century European society.
Nietzsche, however, was wrong. So were the critics who agreed with his interpretation while giving it the opposite spin. Parsifal deploys quite a bit of Christian imagery, rhetoric, and music—one of its core themes is the so-called Dresden Amen, a bit of melody that featured heavily as a sort of sung punctuation to the Protestant hymns of the time—but it is not a Christian opera. it would be more accurate to call it a Buddhist opera, but only in the context of the frankly weird Western reception of Buddhism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Somebody with a better mastery of European languages than I have could do much worse than to research and write a history of that reception. It’s a complicated and revealing story. It was in the early nineteenth century that Western scholars first really began to notice that Buddhism wasn’t just one more exotic flavor of Pagan idolatry for Christian missionaries to sneer at—that it was a prophetic religion comparable to theirs, with theological, philosophical, sacramental, and ethical dimensions in no way inferior to those of Christianity. What made this realization excruciatingly difficult for them was that the ethics of Buddhism are very similar to those of Christianity, but its doctrinal and philosophical underpinnings couldn’t conflict more totally with Christianity’s if someone had sat down and worked them out with that in mind.
(Prophetic religion? That’s a term for religions like Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, which were founded by an individual prophet or teacher known to history. It contrasts with natural religion, the term for religions such as Shinto and Hinduism that emerged naturally out of a culture without having a single founder or prophet. Believers in prophetic religions like to call their faiths “revealed religions” handed down directly from divine sources, and sniffily insist that natural religions are just stuff that mere humans came up with. Believers in natural religions roll their eyes and keep on practicing the teachings of their ancestors.)
It’s indicative of the difference we’re discussing that the salvation offered by Christ is confirmed to his believers by their faith that he returned from death, while the salvation offered by the Buddha is confirmed to his believers by their faith that everyone else returns from death but he did not and never will. It’s equally noteworthy that Christian teaching rests on the idea that each human being has an immortal soul that needs to be saved from damnation, while Buddhist teaching insists that the idea that any of us has an enduring self at all is the very source of our damnation. The two faiths are irreconcilable at levels deeper than most people, and even most theologians, are willing to go.
The resulting gap was made considerably harder to cross for a very long time by the lack of competent translations of Buddhist scriptures into Western languages. Buddhism has a much more enthusiastic attitude toward the production of scriptures than do prophetic religions from points further west. While Christianity and Islam established a strict canon of scripture early on and have resisted additions to it, the various denominations of Buddhism each have their own selection of scriptures to study and are generally untroubled when new ones pop up, as they do from time to time. Classical Sanskrit, in which most Buddhist scriptures are written, is by no means the easiest language to master, for that matter, and the technical terminology of Buddhism is as complex and nuanced as that of Christianity, or any other large and highly literate faith. For Western scholars, as a result, getting an adequate set of sources for Buddhist teachings was far from easy for many years.
As a result, until very recently indeed, most of the attempts made by Western scholars to interpret Buddhism set out to try to force it into the Procrustean bed of this or that Western philosophy or ideology, rather than grappling with it on its own terms—understandably, since those terms are still nearly incomprehensible to most Western thinkers. When I was coming of age in the 1970s, for example, the attempt to domesticate Zen Buddhism was still in full spate; one dismally bad book I read in those days titled The Gospel According to Zen (sic!) tried to cash in on the heavily marketed “death of God” business by turning that austere and disciplined Buddhist denomination into a sort of pop-culture existentialism decked out in gaudy trappings ripped off from the Mystic East™. That sort of schlock is still very much in evidence today, and it was also a live thing back in Wagner’s time.
It’s fair to say, in fact, that Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher whose work played a central role in Wagner’s later work, was not immune from this. As I mentioned quite a while back in this sequence of posts, Schopenhauer was one of the first (and still one of the few) Western philosophers to take Asian philosophy seriously; he had, and carefully studied, a copy of the first Western translation of the principal Upanishads, the core philosophical texts of Hinduism; and he read, and carefully studied, every scrap of Buddhist teaching available to him. He did a better job making sense of both traditions than most other thinkers of his time. Yet The World as Will and Representation remains a book of Western philosophy, dependent on concepts that make no sense at all from within a Buddhist worldview.
It was from Schopenhauer, in turn, that Wagner got his Buddhism. Wagner being Wagner, he also read as much European literature on Buddhism as he could find, but he interpreted it through a Schopenhauerian filter. His immersion in the subject was deep enough that he sketched out an opera, Der Sieger (The Victors), which would have been explicitly Buddhist—the Buddha would have been a character in the drama, along with his favorite disciple Ananda—but it would have been a thoroughly Schopenhauerian Buddhism. Genuine Buddhists, if they’d had the chance to see it, would have scratched their heads in perplexity
A glance back over Schopenhauer’s central themes is called for, then. To Schopenhauer, what we experience in ourselves as will is our one point of contact with unfiltered reality; everything else—our sense perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, the whole kit and caboodle—consists of representations of reality at second, third, or umpteenth hand. This thing we each call “I”? In his view, it’s just another representation. What’s behind all these representations is pure Will, a Will to existence pressing forever into manifestation.
This Will isn’t God in any sense Christians would recognize. It’s not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnibenevolent. In its basic form, in fact, it’s amoral, unthinking, and in constant conflict with itself. (All things are forms of the Will, after all, and we experience conflict; where else would that conflict come from?) It doesn’t even become conscious until it slams face first into obstacles—and these obstacles, of course, are yet more manifestations of the Will. Thus the Will is a will in torment, and in Schopenhauer’s view the constant frustrations, annoyances, and agonies of human life are reflections of the ultimate truth of existence.
There are, however, ways out of the trap. The most complete of them is mysticism, through which the individual expression of Will turns against the Will itself, negates itself, and is freed from existence. This is a path possible only to very few, of course. The arts provide another escape from the torment of the Will: the reader engrossed in a novel, the listener caught up in a piece of music, the viewer contemplating a painting or a play, or any other person experiencing art sets aside his or her own Will for the duration of the experience and contemplates the world from a standpoint free of the Will’s torment. This is more accessible than mysticism, but not everyone has the ability to get lost in a work of art.
The third of the ways to overcome the Will, however, is open to everyone. This is compassion. By this Schopenhauer didn’t mean the instinctive, biologically based sense of other people’s feelings that most people have hardwired into them, and autists like me have to get by without. That’s best called “empathy,” from Greek en-, “in,” and patheia, “feeling.” What we’re discussing here would better be called “sympathy,” a word which replaces en– with syn– “with.” (Interestingly, Latin and German both have exactly the same structure for their comparable words: compassio, mitleid.) It’s not something that takes place inside you automatically; it’s something that has to be learned through experience—and the opera Parsifal is the story of how the title character learns it.
Follow him across the landscape of Wagner’s music and libretto and this is easy to see. When Parsifal first appears on stage, he’s just shot one of the swans that live on the lake near the Grail castle. For him, it’s just another target for his archery skills, no different from the wild animals he’s shot in self-defense on the road from his mother’s home. Gurnemanz, who here as elsewhere in the opera functions as Parsifal’s teacher and initiator, makes him realize that the swan was a living creature like himself, as fond of its own life as Parsifal is of his. Parsifal responds in a spasm of grief and guilt by breaking the bow he’s made for himself.
This leads Gurnemanz to jump to the conclusion that Parsifal might be the one predicted by the Grail’s prophecy, the one who will heal Amfortas, the pure fool made wise through compassion. In Wagner’s German that’s more lyrical: Durch mitleid wissend, der reine Thor. (English translations inevitably turn mitleid into “pity,” which fits the meter and the music, but that’s not at all what Wagner meant; we feel pity for our inferiors, while we feel compassion for our equals.) As it turns out, Gurnemanz is right in principle but wrong about the time frame. When Parsifal witnesses the sufferings of Amfortas in the Grail ceremony, he stares without the least shred of understanding. No doubt he felt bad that the man who had to pick up the cup was having such a bad day, but that wasn’t what Gurnemanz hoped for, and the old knight sends Parsifal on his way as soon as the ceremony is over.
That’s the best thing he could have done, though he had no way of knowing it. Parsifal, who is much less of a fool than he seems, may not have understood Amfortas and his suffering but he remembers both very well. His wanderings duly bring him to the magic castle of Klingsor, where Kundry sets out to seduce him the way she seduced Amfortas. Remember the scene in The Twilight of the Gods where Hagen, using Gutrune as a lure, traps Siegfried? Replace Hagen with Klingsor and Gutrune with Kundry and the similarities are hard to miss.
This time, though, the trap fails. Instead of falling for it, Parsifal understands what happened to Amfortas, and climbs up the step at which Amfortas tripped and fell. More, it was because Amfortas failed that Parsifal could learn from his failure, and triumph. That’s one of the secrets of compassion, after all: to feel compassion for others is to define them as your equals, and that makes it possible for you to see yourself in their place and themselves in your place, and learn from their failures and their successes, their sufferings and their joys.
Lacking that, you’re stuck in the same place as Amfortas. Amfortas has pity but not compassion. He didn’t see the knights who’d fallen to Klingsor before his time as equals, so he couldn’t learn from their examples and avoid their fate; he doesn’t see the remaining knights of the Grail as equals, and so he treats his own pain as the only suffering that matters and leaves the entire Grail order to go to rack and ruin. In the usual way, his pity morphs into self-pity and devours him. Here again, though, it’s because of his failure that Parsifal can succeed, regain the holy spear that he lost, and take his place as head of the Grail knights.
That, in turn, was Wagner’s answer to the tremendous challenge he’d set out for himself in the final bars of The Twilight of the Gods. Did he think that compassion could keep the Valhalla of nineteenth-century capitalism from collapsing? That’s far from clear, since the resolution of the plot in Parsifal affects the Grail castle rather than the entire world. In a historical sense, however, the solution he proposed turned out to be astonishingly prescient.
It needs to be remembered that until well into the twentieth century, liberal politics didn’t include compassion for the downtrodden among its values. Liberals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries favored roughly the same things that conservatives favor now—that is, less political interference with the capitalist system, limited government, and whatever Christian moral crusades were popular at the time, provided that those didn’t interfere with the economy. (The crusade against slavery is a good example—the nations and states where it was embraced most enthusiastically by liberals were precisely those that didn’t have slave-dependent economies.)
Conservatives in those days had a completely different set of agendas, which mostly focused on preserving what was left of the old aristocratic system and the agrarian society that supported it. That was a losing battle all along, and finally collapsed completely with the Great Depression. It was then, at the hands of populist figures such as Franklin Roosevelt, that liberalism lurched unsteadily in the direction Wagner had predicted for it, leaving conservatism to pick up the pieces by embracing the viewpoints that had been abandoned by the liberals.
It’s fascinating, at least to me, to poke at the historical amnesia that resulted. How many people nowadays remember that William Jennings Bryan, the passionate liberal Democrat who set the agenda of the American left for most of the late nineteenth century, was also a devout fundamentalist Christian who spoke for the prosecution in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial? How many people nowadays, for that matter, remember that environmental conservation used to be one of the core planks of conservative platforms? (In the United States, the National Park system, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act all became under Republican administrations.) For that matter, plenty of Americans seem incapable of remembering that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican president and his great opponent Jefferson Davis, before he became president of the Confederacy, was a Democratic senator. Such is the weight of the learned ignorance we have to deal with these days.
Behind that dramatic shift, in turn, was the solution that Wagner foresaw and proposed. Since the revolutions championed by Marxist and pre-Marxist socialists alike either didn’t happen or failed completely to change the conditions of the poor, people of good will turned to putting pressure on the triumphant capitalist system, hoping to make it at least a little more compassionate. No, I don’t think Wagner made that happen; I think he caught what was already beginning to stir in his own time, and decided that it made more sense than any of the other options. Many other people came to the same conclusion in the century or so that followed.
Did it work? Yes and no. At their zenith of power, the gods and giants of liberal twentieth-century capitalism were a great deal less brutal toward their own Nibelung classes than their nineteenth-century equivalents had been. Women, people of color, and other categories which had labored under explicit legal inequalities were freed from some of those burdens, and social welfare programs benefited some of the poor and vulnerable. In effect, Alberich was bullied into using his whip a little less enthusiastically, and the Nibelungs had the chance to enjoy a little more of the products of their labor. The basic problem of commodification remained intact, however, and (to switch operatic metaphors) there was the further challenge that the Grail castle of the new order was always in danger of falling into the hands of an Amfortas.
Another influential nineteenth-century cultural figure, G.K. Chesterton, recognized that danger when it was still nascent. In his poem “The Secret People,” speaking for the common people of England, he wrote:
“They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.”
The load of that loveless pity has become an immense political fact in our day. Wagner’s operas offer no answers in response to it; brilliant as he was despite his flaws, he wrestled with the challenges of his own time, not those of ours. Can we expect some other wandering youth raised in the wilderness to arrive with a new answer that will meet the hard needs of our predicament, or are we just waiting for fire and flood to overwhelm the Valhallas of the modern industrial world? The curtain falls, the lights come up, and the opera is over; if there is an answer, we must find it somewhere else.
*******
I have just been reminded by one of my readers that April this year has five Wednesdays. According to a longstanding tradition on this blog, when this is the case, my readers get to nominate and vote on the topic of the fifth Wednesday post. What do you want to read about? Inquiring Druids want to know.
“The Gospel According to Zen?”
Good heavens. The mind boggles.
I’m guessing that the theology in “The Gospel According to Peanuts” was more in tune with Christian thinking and the comic strip than the Gospels and Zen could be.
JMG,
An interesting thing about the significant environmental legislation that was put in place by republican governments is that much of it has significant teeth in place prevent them being sidestepped by politicians, businessmen and government managers.
The modus operandi of the Left is to have regulations that are part virtue signaling and part load shifting to the underclass. This type of “progressive legislation” leaves the Elites and PMC free to bumble about without fear of repercussions.
In contrast the clean water act has strict permit regulations that are not politically negotiable and involve huge fines or even jail time. Each significant source of discharge to a water body must have a permit specifying exactly what can be discharged and must identify a ” jailable official”. This official ( who signature is on the permit) is on the hook if the permit is violated negligently or willfully and can be imprisoned, my wife has been such on official at many times in her career.
Imagine if most of the folks in other government agencies ( federal, state and local) could be held to such standards for failure. This lack of accountability is perhaps one of the unwanted side effects of misplaced compassion.
“She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them.”
JMG, if we feel pity for our inferiors, which of these two, Othello or Desdemona, saw the other as an inferior?
Thank you for this essay, and this series. They have been tremendously enlightening for me. I hadn’t had any reason to encounter Parsifal before in any capacity.
I don’t know how we can get out of the shadow of loveless pity and dead alien eyes without the destruction of everything. For a long time, I thought cultivating the virtues of fortitude and humility could offer an escape route – but so far it seems nobody agrees in practice, and I think I was wrong, too.
If you ever do that Sci-fi epic retelling, I hope you’ll advance the clock past Parsifal and take it to his fall, when his compassion extends so far that it mostly concerns people from outside the castle to the neglect of its inhabitants, where the knights quest long and hard to correct the errors of the world but are not themselves able to rest, where the noble forest beasts are allowed to be slain, but only for feasts given to outsiders, perhaps.
The animated show “Dragon Prince” featured a “good king” who was willing to let 500,000 of his own people starve to death to save a neighboring kingdom that had mismanaged its own resources into famine, and no, the series did not see anything wrong with that king’s actions – the villain was his court scientist/wizard who found a way to keep the people from starving. To me, that seems an excellent representation of the excesses of overly empathetic rulers.
If I figure out a solution, I’ll probably make a comic about it, but I’m no artistic or philosophical genius. I’ve been stuck on a fantasy story for years because I can’t think of a third act that doesn’t end up in effective suicidal failure for the protagonist.
I’m not sure what it says about certain iterations of Christianity that they are NOT associated with compassion. That said, the sense of the will deliberately choosing love…er, compassion, one can see how it could be construed as cutting against certain versions of “pagan” thinking.
A fitting coda to this series. One thing that seems to stand out is Wagner’s use of individual actors to represent groups, masses of people, per these interpretations. It’s as if things operated only at a macrolevel, the will of the various multitudes militating against each other, than at the level of the individual will.
As aside, brought on by that rather-emaciated image of the Buddha: one thing that’s always struck me as funny is that the Buddha, as I understand it, was a rich guy who apparently chose to vanish himself out being, whereas Christ was a poor guy who graduated to king of the universe. Go figure.
Axé
The Mahayana Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna said that ‘nirvana is samsara.’ The suffering and misery that we experience in samsara is because of our obsession with escaping to somewhere else. When we learn acceptance, samsara disappears and we realize that we were in nirvana all along. There is nowhere that we need to escape to, we are already right where we need to be. I think that this is related to the path of compassion and affirmation.
This meme kind of gets the point across as well:
https://img.ifunny.co/images/91c1e3f589b5ad78a32591c74321f16d69ae8fd427331ab556b444d7a4c7100c_1.jpg
>William Jennings Bryan, the passionate liberal Democrat who set the agenda of the American left for most of the late nineteenth century, was also a devout fundamentalist Christian
He should’ve colored his hair blue. I wonder, did he like to scream as well?
—
Do you know for sure that Wagner was using Buddhism as his template? He does seem to wear these old symbols as skinsuits, putting them on when it seems convenient and then taking them off or stretching them to fit his agendas. I get a sense of cynicism from the guy when you outline Wagner’s stories.
Chesterton nailed it with that ditty. Well except for the pity. I don’t think Hilary was expressing pity when she called us all deplorable, speaking for her class. What emotion was she expressing?
Teresa, The Gospel According to Zen had nothing to do with the Christian gospel and even less to do with Zen. It really was pretty lame.
Clay, that doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Mary, what a fine theme for meditation!
Sirustalcelion, if I ever do that science-fantasy epic, it won’t use Wagner’s political and economic concerns as its central theme. I’ll use the mythos instead to talk about technology, power, and individual liberty, which the story’s also very well suited to explore. As for your fantasy story, well, if the suicidal failure is the right ending for the story, let it happen!
Fra’ Lupo, yes, Wagner was always interested in the macro level. He wanted to talk about the destiny of whole societies, not about individuals. As for the opposing destinies of the Buddha and the Christ, that’s another good example of the difference!
Enjoyer, it wasn’t until well into the 20th century that European thinkers had the least clue about the Mahayana, and let’s not even talk about the Vajrayana/Mantrayana paths! (Manly P. Hall played an important role in the belated recognition of these — he had contacts with the Japanese Shingon sect, and was apparently initiated into it.) In Wagner’s time, half-understood takes on the Dhammapada were about the best you could find.
Other Owen, the radical left still had some traces of dignity in Bryan’s time. They didn’t throw soup on artworks, either. As for Wagner’s Buddhism, as I noted, it was Schopenhauerian philosophy in a Buddhist skinsuit anyway.
Well, this was… at once fulfilling, interestingly revealing and disappointing. Fulfilling because I was hoping for an ending of this sort, but at the same time if the solution has already been implemented, has run its course and we can catalogue the results. It is over.
I was hoping for something to be used today. But yes we face different problems just now.
I hope I am not to intrusive in pointing to the fifth Wednesday this April. My intention was to remind of the topic of Islam envy.
Best regards,
Marko
Wow…
…the whole aspect of compassion woven into the opera and your analysis, is, uh, hard hitting (ironically).
I just wrote about the “Priesthood of Prestige and the Hatred of the Uneducated” here:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/the-priesthood-of-prestige-and-the-hatred-of-the-uneducated
It seems to me compassion would be well worth cultivating by those who are afraid of a rising specter of anti-intellectualism (i.e. the intellectual class).
Ah, I wasn’t implying that Schopenhauer was aware of Nagarjuna or the deeper complexities of Buddhism in general. I was just saying that Schopenhauer and Buddhists dealt with similar problems and came upon similar conclusions.
Also here’s a relevant comic that I must drop here:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/269
“Conservatives in those days had a completely different set of agendas, which mostly focused on preserving what was left of the old aristocratic system and the agrarian society that supported it. ”
Did America even have that kind of Conservatism? It’s very familiar to me from Europe (and Russia, if not seen as part of Europe), but of course there it was connected to a formal hereditary aristocracy and monarchy (or its memory where it was overthrown). In America it must have been quite different, even if there was a de facto landowning aristocracy of sorts in the South.
And I remember that Chesterton poem well. Interesting to think of it as prescient. The new unhappy lords of his time did do some real good, as you point out. But with the change of generations, most of their initial merit ran out. I tend to think of it in terms of them abandoning the spirit of public service for increasingly unrestrained self-interest, but pity and self-pity as an agent of that change seems plausible. If you can’t help those wretches anyway and fixing the world is such a thankless task, you may as well start thinking more about your own golden treasure (which can take the form of a golden parachute, but there are others too).
“Each significant source of discharge to a water body must have a permit specifying exactly what can be discharged and must identify a ” jailable official”. ”
We called it the “designated felon.”
What a wonderful way to wrap up the discussion. I have to admit that while I enjoyed the Ring Cycle, it was Parsifal that’s had a profound effect on me. The way it reworks Arthurian legend captivates me, and seems like it’s hinting at a lot of potential that was missed by the tradition that switched to Galahad as the hero.
One thing that I wonder: is there a hint in your essay this week that maybe Wagner was right the first time, just overly dramatic? That while the introduction of compassion into political economy was overall a good thing, it is only delaying a reckoning that still remains to happen, albeit not in one apocalyptic moment as Wagner originally imagined?
To my mind, compassion is still not love, and the Parsifal at the end of the opera is still rejecting the latter almost as much as Klingsor and Amfortas, just less dysfunctionally. I’d have preferred to see him marry, as he does in the original tales, and have children where the impotent Amfortas could not.
Going back to political economy, compassion has not actually made the land whole or the fields fruitful/sustainable again. It has only given us a reprieve to the elite, and even then it depends on the continued self-sacrifice, at least in small part, of the elite, which they seem increasingly unwilling to continue doing.
JMG,
I was reading some of your comments last week about Trump and authoritarian leaders becoming more common in times of hardship, teetering on failure. It made me wonder if the same could be said of authoritarian religions, that they are formed of times when spiritually people/culture has become weak and are searching for leadership. This kind of made sense to me personally, since when I feel spiritually weak it feels comforting to think there is a Divine, Omnipotent being who is there to guide me, or discipline me as needed. It certainly helps with guilt tripping one into action as well! I’m not sure though if this idea of an authoritarian religion is accurate though…
Your explanation for how natural religions formed makes a lot of sense, and I could see those developing more in times of spiritual stability. It’s fascinating this divide between East and West, what has lingered on culturally, and how it has manifested today.
Archdruid,
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but i’ve noticed a stoking of the war between the sexes the past decade or so and it seems to be at a peak currently or peaked in early 2020. I wonder if you’ve noticed something similar yourself? Part of it seems like its being done on purpose. Perhaps a vector of population control? Would be interested in what you think, thanks!
Big changes ahead, with the Wagner series ending and the Levi series too. Following up on my postings at the tail-end of the open post, I suggest “Little, Big” as a topic for the 5th Wednesday. Perhaps it’s timely.
Marko, good heavens — you’re quite right about the fifth Wednesday, of course. I’ve added something on that to the post, and have tabulated your vote.
Justin, I’ve just added your essay to my to-read list. You’re quite correct, of course — if intellectuals don’t want to feed the risng flames of anti-intellectualism, cultivating a little more compassion and a little less snotnosed arrogance would be a very good idea.
Enjoyer, funny. I’m pretty sure that Schopenhauer was autistic — he had the hypersensitivity to noise that many of us have — and I know he didn’t practice meditation, which is the key to turning ideals like the ones he shared with the Buddha into practical action.
Daniil, you betcha. Our not-quite-titled aristocracy of planters once extended all the way up to New York State, where it took the form of the patroon class; George Washington and a great many other leading figures in the early Republic belonged to the shallow-south expression of it. By 1860, it had been overthrown everywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line, and as you may know, we had quite a robust little war between the planter aristocracy and the rising industrial entrepreneur class almost immediately thereafter. The aristocrats lost, and American conservatism thereafter had a long and difficult struggle to redefine itself.
Slithy, that’s certainly my take. Compassion certainly made the lives of a lot of Nibelungs easier, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem of commodification, and the flame and the flood are still waiting.
Prizm, yes, very much so. Any period of hardship and uncertainty tends to send people fleeing to authority figures, whether those be sacred or secular.
Mr. House, I see the gaping chasm between the sexes as the natural working out of patterns set in motion by the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s; no, I don’t think it was done on purpose, though overcrowding caused by sky-high population levels certainly helped drive it. Just as first wave feminism was followed by a swing of the pendulum in the other direction, I expect the current wave to recede in the years ahead, and in the resulting period of reassessment some of its excesses will be trimmed off and some of the tension between sexes will resolve.
Phutatorius, so noted! Your vote is tabulated.
On the topic of Nietzsche, he had a pretty damning takedown of Schopenhauer’s view on art in Twilight of the Idols, namely that it is incoherent as a method of denying the Will, and in fact is born out of the opposite impulse:
“He values it especially as redeemer from the ‘focus of the will’, from sexuality—in beauty he sees the procreative impulse *denied*… Singular saint! Someone contradicts you, and I fear it is nature. To what end is there beauty at all in the sounds, colours, odours, rhythmic movements of nature? What *makes* beauty appear?—Fortunately a philosopher also contradicts him. No less an authority than the divine Plato (—so Schopenhauer himself calls him) maintains a different thesis: that all beauty incites to procreation—that precisely is the proprium of its effect, from the most sensual regions up to the most spiritual…”
I’d like to cast my vote for Wilhelm Reich for a 5th Wed… Though I did read three of John Crowleys novels last year. I liked Little Big quite a lot, but Engine Summer: the lyrical power of the novel, its language, its striking vision of the future. That was my favorite. The Lions in Beasts could use some compassion too… Id welcome a discussion.
“Love, work, and knowledge are the wellsprings of our lives, they should also govern it.”–Wilhelm Reich
Hi JMG,
For this month’s fifth Wednesday, I’d like to learn about Neptune’s ingress into Aries and its repercussions.
I never thought of that before, but you’re right, he probably was autistic! It’s sad that Schopenhauer didn’t practice meditation, because I have high-functioning autism and meditating has been very helpful to deal with the difficulties that come with that. Been practicing meditation every day for almost 2 years now.
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May JRuss’s friend David Carruthers quickly find a job of any kind at all that allows him to avoid homelessness, first and foremost; preferably a full time job that makes at least 16 dollars an hour.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May 1 Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties, and may she quickly be able to resume a normal life.
May Ron M’s friend Paul fully recover from the debilitating illness that has rendered him bedridden as well as recover from the spiritual malaise/attack that he believes is manifesting the illness.
May Jennifer’s newborn daughter Eleanor be blessed with optimal growth and development; may her tongue tie revision surgery on Wednesday March 12th have been smooth and successful, and be followed by a full recovery.
May Mike Greco, who had a court date on the 14th of March, enjoy a prompt, just, and equitable settlement of the case.
May Cliff’s friend Jessica be blessed and soothed; may she discover the path out of her postpartum depression, and be supported in any of her efforts to progress along it; may the love between her and her child grow ever more profound, and may each day take her closer to an outlook of glad participation in the world, that she may deeply enjoy parenthood.
May Other Dave’s father Michael Orwig, who passed away on 2/24, make his transition to his soul’s next destination with comfort and grace; may his wife Allyn and the rest of his family be blessed and supported in this difficult time.
May Peter Evans in California, whose colon cancer has been responding well to treatment, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Goats and Roses’ son A, who had a serious concussion weeks ago and is still suffering from the effects, regain normal healthy brain function, and rebuild his physical strength back to normal, and regain his zest for life. And may Goats and Roses be granted strength and effectiveness in finding solutions to the medical and caregiving matters that need to be addressed, and the grief and strain of the situation.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Corey Benton, who is currently in hospital and whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer. Healing work is also welcome. [Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe]
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Jennifer and Josiah and their daughters Joanna and Eleanor be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
“Classical Sanskrit, in which most Buddhist scriptures are written…”
The major canonical collections are in Pali, Tibetan, and Chinese. (The Newars do have one written in Sanskrit, but it took some time for Buddhologists to get ’round to them, and it is still under-studied..) Monk-scholars would sometimes learn Sanskrit, and texts in that language (often inherited from no-longer-extant Buddhist schools) did circulate, much as ancient Greek texts do in universities now. I’m not sure how the sheer size of these collections compare. These days, Buddhist Studies people have to learn a couple of European languages, Sanskrit as a kind of lingua franca, and then whatever language they plan to focus on (which could be a living language like Khmer).
Fra’ Lupo: “Christ was a poor guy who graduated to king of the universe.”
Christ was always the king of the universe. “Kenosis” is Greek for “slumming”!
@ Sirustalcelion #4
If that’s the way the story wants to go, write it that way!
Thanks to the miracle of indie publishing, you can publish it as it needs to be.
Finding an audience is a whole nother issue.
We don’t seem to understand tragedy anymore and so our stories don’t reflect the fact that life can be tragic and sometimes, every choice is poor. It’s how you bear up that matters.
I’d never heard of the Dragon Prince before.
Good Lord. Talk about the cruelty inherent in sentimentality.
As for a fifth Wednesday post suggestion, I would be absolutely delighted to read anything you had to say about Manly P Hall which you have still left unsaid, whether it about his relationship with Buddhism, the secret methods he occasionally hinted at in his materials, the relationship between occultism and conservatism, or anything else at all that strikes your fancy, really, which might start with Manly P Hall’s work, teachings, or life as its jumping off point.
JMG, I think I was one of the first to request an essay elaborating your remarks about the Protestant Reformers being greatly influenced by Islam. I still do hope for such an essay for you, so that is my vote.
I believe I can see a goodly amount of Islam envy among the Christian (so-called) nationalist movement today. If the Taliban can get away with keeping women secluded and uneducated, our homegrown incels appear to think they should be able to do the same. Why any sane adult would want to share life, home and bed with a person who does not like them, never mind love, I still cannot understand.
Oh, fifth Wednesday? You’ve done posts on several modern occult figures, such as Steiner and Jung,. I would love to see others like that. As a vote-maximization strategy, I propose the following:
I nominate, and vote for, a post on Edgar Cayce, the “sleeping prophet,” as the next fifth-Wednesday post, since he’s one of my favorites. For everyone thinking of some other such figure (Gurdjeff, for example), I implore you to rally behind Cayce this time. Then, for the *next* fifth-Wednesday post, let us agree to rally again behind the next such figure. (Who hasn’t JMG discussed yet?)
Is this wicked of me? This is kind of like the strategy used by that guy who won season one of Survivor…
A couple of additions to the prayer list that I missed earlier, from private messages:
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
Thank you for this series. I was hoping Wagner had a better solution than compassion (since there really isn’t a long term safeguard against Amfortas figures gaining power).
My Fifth Wednesday vote is for Islam envy.
JMG, I have a feeling that if Wagner couldn’t see a resolution and saviour from Valhalla, it’s because there isn’t one. Not for the Faustian superstructure. Seems like the Divine would have to hurry up timetable to overlap a renewal just in order to save the chestnuts. But by all appearances renewals come precisely when the old house catches fire and burns, after that has cleared stuff away for new growth. I suppose it’s possible to pull off, just not very likely and would truly be a gratuitous event. The eucatastophe is more likely, maybe by essential nature, to involve the fall of sun, moon and stars, the ruling powers, which it would provoke anyway no matter the timing. (Trying to read Tolkien compatibly here)
My vote for Fifth Wednesday is for Gnosticism.
Hi John Michael,
It’s an intriguing question the one you posed in the conclusion of the essay.
Hard to say really where things will go in relation to that, however, I fully expect to find out.
I’m very much enjoying your political astrology. Have you ever considered going back to producing the annual prediction essay?
Cheers
Chris
Oddly enough, I only knew about Bryant because of the Scopes trial – for some odd reason it was part of the history teaching in my last year at high school here in New Zealand (for some reason one of the topics was US politics during the 1920s – the only other names I can remember from it were Coolidge and Harding).
My fifth Wednesday vote: the extent to which Protestantism is a Magianized form of Christianity, made over in the image of Islam
Okay, everyone’s votes have been tabulated.
Ben, as usual with Nietzsche’s arguments, that works only if you accept Nietzsche’s presuppositions and ignore those of the person he’s attacking. From Schopenhauer’s point of view, the origin of beauty is irrelevant; the question is the use to which the individual puts it. Is it just one more way to stir desires? Then it’s yet another expression of the Will. But it’s possible to contemplate beauty for itself, irrespective of what the Will intends for it, and then the Will turns on the Will and negates itself.
Enjoyer, you’ll get no argument from me. I’ve been practicing daily meditation for almost forty years now and it’s been the single most beneficial practice I’ve ever done.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Ambrose, so noted. My exposure to the literature is mostly via Japanese sources, and that may well have given me a false impression.
Patrick, I’m not sure there is a solution; Wagner may have settled for compassion because that’s the best of a bad lot.
Celadon, I’ve come to disbelieve in eucatastrophes. They occur tolerably often in fairy tales, political theories (but I repeat myself), and the theologies of prophetic religions, but they don’t generally happen in real life; instead, you get ordinary cyclical change punctuated by the stray plain old ordinary catastrophe. But most people don’t want to hear that!
Chris, nah, my political astrology now goes to my SubscribeStar and Patreon platforms. A guy’s gotta pay the rent somehow!
As a side mote, there’s an interesting resonance between the swan-killing on Parsifal and an early episode in George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie, in which Curdie shoots at, and wounds, a dove (which turns out to belong to a very strange old woman). In both cases, the killing of injuring of the bird is a trigger for the development of the story, and the central character.
MacDonald’s story was published in 1883. Parsifal debuted in 1882. Although MacDonald was well-read in German (especially Romantic) literature (and German), it seems unlikely that he would have been able to be influenced by it, though at the time he was living in, I think, Italy. The end of MacDonald’s story also resonates with your reading of Parsifal, and Wagner.
For the fifth Wednesday, my vote is for him to talk about the antichrist, and the time period in which we find ourselves today(see the link>
https://simonsheridan.me/covid-19/the-coronapocalypse-part-37-finale/
As for the question of whether art can serve as a way to ameliorate the blind strivings of Will, it’s useful to remember the very old idea that the aim of art is to lead to “contemplation” — not the enactment of desire, but its recognition and resolution in awareness.
James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus remark that the difference between propaganda and pornography, on the one had, and art on the other, is that the aim of the first two is to provoke action, while the aim of the third is to give rise to contemplation., a suspension of the impulse to action. In another terminology, in the first two the beholder “enjoys” the energies evoked, identifying with them, and in the third the beholder “contemplates” them, stepping back from them.
Yes, M.P. Hall! I had forgotten him.
Since Quin got in with that suggestion before mine–and to give my vote-maximization strategy a better chance of succeeding–I now switch my vote to M.P. Hall, and urge potantial co-conspirators interested in Cayce, Gurdjieff, etc. to vote for Hall as well.
Again, the idea is to avoid dividing support for various modern esoteric figures JMG hasn’t discussed yet. (If this works, we can make him write about Cat Kerr!)
PS. This is nit-picking, but you may need to know this in case you publish the Wagner stuff as a book:
There is something called “Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit” which is different from classical Sanskrit, although there are Buddhist texts in both languages. Some wits now speak of a Buddhist Hybrid English (e.g. talk of “dependent arising” or “the Perfection of Wisdom” or other things no normal English speaker would say or even understand),
I’ll vote for Reich for the fifth Wednesday post. I enjoyed this post but nothing is jumping out at me to comment at the moment., so thank you, and that’s all now for now.
Another side-note. As for canonical Buddhist languages, one can’t forget Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit.
(I once heard an Indologist remark, with some exasperation, that there was no such thing as Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit — only bad Sanskrit. One does not want to get between an Indologist and a Buddhologist when terminology is on the line!)
It’s also useful to remember the Korean Buddhist Canon (Tripitaka Koreana), which is still regarded as one of the most complete & accurate collections of Buddhist scriptures, treatises, etc. (I remember going to the library to scan items from one volume or another for a friend who lived hours away, and whose vision made scanned texts the only workable way to read the material.) The Korean Canon has been used to supplement defects in the Chinese canon, and as a basis for the later Japanese canon.
This is a beautiful essay, Reminds me of Edmund Wilson at his best. Thank you.
Once again, all votes have been tabulated.
LeGrand, hmm! Fascinating. Thanks for all these.
Ambrose, Hybrid Sanskrit sounds entertaining. Having seen and heard the mess that Japanese speakers make of Sanskrit mantras, very little would surprise me.
George, you’re welcome and thank you.
JMG, oh granted. You probably know I read Tolkiens word as I think he intended it, which is not literally or allegorically, although it’s a fair discussion whether he falls a foul if his own semantics and gets into the usual weeds. Even taking as spiritual and spiritually discerned, that’s plenty of room for cycles and surprise and none of the usual rationalizations. I’m still wrestling w his ideas but the charitable take is that that term should be regarded as placing its valuation outside human ken, discerned if at all by a few who work, as a gift, and leading to the end of an age and the loss of much. You’ve definitely set limits to how I view and interpret Tolkien, or helped set them. Cheers
I vote for an analysis of Trump’s trade policies and how they might unwind the American empire and still save the American heartland.
I find Mary Bennett’s angle towards the Islam envy conversation entertaining and relevant, we can see a case of Islam envy happening before our eyes, even if most intellectuals will scrupulously deny any direct connections. If my topic doesn’t get enough votes then I might switch.
One idea I can’t get out of my head is what if Parsifal, after redeeming Kundry, had married her? Then perhaps he would truly have succeeded where Siegfried failed.
I vote for Islam envy please.
A suitably sobering conclusion to a great series!
For 5th Wednesday, I vote for your take on Little, Big.
The Gospel According to Zen? 1500 years too late!
https://earlychurchhistory.org/beliefs-2/the-ancient-chinese-jesus-sutras/
For fifth Wednesday I’d like to vote for a Gnostic related topic as well. Those first two centuries of Christianity were much more diverse than I suspected. Irenaeus of Lyon vs Valentinus and all. But as unorganized as the Gnostics were even if they had won in the short term would the religion have survived in the longer term?
For recruiting purposes splash some water on them, then feed them wine and crackers followed by Amen is lot faster than telling someone that salvation is out there and a few years of study should suffice to find it.
OK I’m exaggerating a bit, but we still have assembly line conversions vs individual apprenticeships.
@JMG and @Teresa Thanks for the advice. In this case, oddly enough, everything within the story is screaming at me to go some other way – not that I’m afraid of tragedy or sacrifice, but there’s some more satisfying answer I just haven’t thought of. At the same time, easy positive solutions have all proven just as inauthentic. Into the drawer it goes until I can figure it out, I suppose, like the first three Ring Cycle operas.
As for the Dragon Prince, yeah, that’s just the tip of the iceberg in the moral incomprehensibility of that preachy series. The creators are very liberal, in the colloquial sense.
So what are we to make of this no new books policy for the New Testament? The last one was written a really long time ago in human terms and a whole lot transpired since then. You’d think that at least some of what happened would have inspired someone to write something momentous enough for at least a footnote.
No more prophecy? No more prophets? Why? Did God stop talking to us or did we stop listening? Did we lose the perceptual faculties required to tune in on Heaven’s wavelengths? Was such an ability on balance a maladaptive trait culled by natural selection? Or were prophets squelched – cancelled – by temporal hierarchies jealous of their power?
Didn’t it say in the Bible that Jesus would come back like a thief in the night? Did we miss it? Were we too distracted by our cell phones? His return would surely necessitate the addition of some new writings.
I would love to see you write that article about how Protestant theology was influenced by the Islamic world. It came in second last time.
Yes, Buddhism and Christianity are not saying the same thing in the different ways and they do not offer the same results. Usually the argument is saying that whatever the differences they have the same mystical experience in the end as do all religions and spiritual practices. I beg to differ.
Years ago I was reading about the states of consciousness that can be attained or constructed through diligent Buddhist practices. And by the way I don’t doubt they can be attained. I paused and said to myself I wonder what the Christian equivalent to this is. Suddenly a personal awareness of the love of a personal God for me as an individual flooded me. As it says in The NewTestament “we love because He first loved us” “ and “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit He has given us” To put it in a simple way I get to hitch a ride with Jesus into the loving presence of God in the here and now and more deeply when I die. There is no way you can squeeze this into a Buddhist understanding of reality. I am open to your metaphor of the world as valley surrounded by different mountain peaks, the peaks being different paths you can follow with different results, instead of the more common metaphor of all the paths going up the same mountain peak.
So noted about old American conservatism. It seems like an example of convergent evolution, arising more or less independently in somewhat different conditions from Europe and dying out sooner, but still substantially similar due to representing a similar set of interests and preferences.
I find it interesting to note that the turn towards compassion in Europe was driven in no small part by conservatives of this sort. Disraeli in Britain with his One Nation Conservatism, aiming to unify working-class radicalism and aristocratic traditionalism against the new rich and doctrinaire liberalism, may have expressed it especially clearly, but Bismarck in Germany was of similar mind and more influential in practice. After all, he created the German social state that others, including the British with their welfare state, would later copy. This was driven… maybe not by compassion per se, but by a combination of political calculation (this was the best way to undermine revolutionary socialism in Germany) and a set of conservative notions including scorn towards liberal economic dogma and old-school feudal paternalism towards the population that simply needed to be adapted to new realities.
Likewise, our Alexander III is usually remembered as a hidebound archreactionary, an image he himself gladly embraced, but he also introduced what may have been his time’s most generous labour legislation. In his view peasants must know their place, yes, but they also mustn’t be abused by some upstart dwarves. Unfortunately for all, his son would let most of those policies lapse, but they were supported by many Russian conservatives on similar grounds (though others were already starting to move towards pro-business and social darwinist stances). Liberals and socialists (who, for the most part, very much did not want to make capitalism more tolerable at first) often found themselves playing catch-up with the conservatives and reactionaries in this regard.
I’ll vote for Gnosticism.
So… No miracles, then ? *wailing sounds*
The apparent anticlimaticness keeps it real (as rappers used to say) and mature, I reckon.
Remains commodification. Some would say it began with agriculture but is it really a practical idea ? When reading the previous installments, I don’t recall if you explicitly made the link yourself, but I couldn’t help seeing the ring leaving the rhine as part of the transition between what Spengler would later call the Age of Faith and that of Reason. So we’ve got an Age of Memory to look forward to ! That’ll do the trick.
Of course, back to square one : the transition betwixt Reason and Memory, without burning down the whole casa.
@Ambrose
On the surface that’s quite correct, but on a deeper level I’m afraid it’s not. Sanskrit is considered to be a divine language in Buddhism, which is why mantras are invariably in Sanskrit. Tibetan and Chinese texts were translated out of Sanskrit, and a great deal of its influence remains. Pali is a really a dialect (Prakrit) of Sanskrit, in fact it’s Magadhi. Although Pali is the canonical language of Southern Buddhism the languages and cultures of South East Asia are actually directly derived from Sanskrit, through the old Indian trade routes. Which is why there are still ‘Brahmin’ astrologers in Thailand. Newari Buddhism has been extensively studied, it’s simply that it’s rather an obscure field. Most importantly, it was through the study of Sanskrit that all of the Indian religions came to be known in the West, so John Michael is quite correct. Furthermore, our understanding of the Indo-European language family came from the study of Sanskrit, thanks to Sir William Jones who noticed its similarity to his native Welsh. His essays were studied in detail by Schopenhauer. My choice for a topic is again ‘autism and magic’.
I haven’t contributed to this series of posts but I have been following along with great interest. Thank you for all these posts!
“Thus the Will is a will in torment, and in Schopenhauer’s view the constant frustrations, annoyances, and agonies of human life are reflections of the ultimate truth of existence.”
I’ve been thinking recently about concepts such as Ma’at; that the cosmos has an ordering principle in it and spiritual traditions that stem from this concept involve realizing this principle and harmonizing one’s life with it. Such an idea seems incompatible with Schopenhauer’s Will as you’ve described it. Are these ideas as incompatible as they seem?
If occult philosophy is any guide, then maybe things become more ‘ordered’ with each higher plane, but I also recall that Schopenhauer was aware of occultism so perhaps he addressed this? I haven’t gotten to Will as World and Representation yet.
I’m hesitant to describe ‘compassion’ in relation to a cosmic ordering principle but I am struck that both Christianity and Buddhism, with all the deep differences you highlighted, still have compassion as a central feature of both. But I don’t know if this is as universal as it seems.
It looks also relevant that we live in a culture that often aims at eroding our sense of compassion for ourselves (i.e. through advertising), which makes it harder to have compassion for others. And finally it makes more sense to me after this series of posts how commodification plays into that; it’s meant to measure how unequal the value of one thing, or person, is against another (i.e. how many of this thing is worth this other thing?) which seems somehow to devalue both of them, and which is opposed to simply treating beings as equals. I’m oversimplifying and I’ll need to keep reflecting on it!
Also, I’d like to cast a vote for a post on Manly Hall.
Once again, everybody’s votes have been tabulated.
Celadon, I see Tolkien’s theory of the eucatastrophe as a contribution to Christian theology. From his standpoint, the eucatastrophe to top all eucatastrophes is the one Christians will be celebrating a little later this month, and the absence of such things in mere history isn’t that relevant. Lacking that particular belief, I see things differently.
Slithy, good. That’s something I have in mind if I ever write that science fantasy series — admittedly it’s only one of several changes I plan on ringing on the themes Wagner set out.
Dashui, if the cheap book in question had relied on those it wouldn’t have been such trash. You might be interested to know that one of the initiatory orders to which I belong quotes material from the “Jesus sutras” approvingly, and recommends them as a source of themes for meditation.
Siliconguy, one of the major shifts that occurred in later Gnosticism was the recognition that room has to be made for ordinary believers as well as those who want to go whole hog into the Path. You can see that in full flower among the Cathars, among whom the ordinary believers, the Credentes, had one set of fairly simple spiritual disciplines, while the serious practitioners, the Perfecti, took things much further. If Valentinus had been elected Pope, that likely would have become standard in the Gnosis much earlier.
SirusTalCelion, well, which of the characters do you think can tell you how things need to go? Have a conversation with that person, or a whole series of conversations, and see where it leads you.
Smith, oh, there have been plenty of additional scriptures produced since whichever church council it was formalized the canon; the Book of Mormon is the most famous here in the US, but there are many others. As for Jesus as a thief in the night, now you’ve got me thinking of the Ninja Jesus, clambering over roofs and slipping through windows to carry out the will of his Father… 😉
BeardTree, exactly. I’ve been trying to point this out for years; different religions lead to different outcomes. From my own religious perspective, every individual soul ultimately has a different place in the greater scheme of things, and that’s why there are so many religions — the Divine is beyond human definition, and calls each soul in a unique way to what will ultimately be a unique place.
Daniil, that’s a good point. So, in effect, the liberals in the early 20th century coopted what had been a set of conservative policies, and the conservatives countered by taking over what had been the liberal policies!
Thibault, exactly. The abstraction we call money replaces concrete wealth with the coming of the Age of Reason, and then starts to lose its meaning and value as the Age of Memory dawns. (Spoiler alert: that’s where we are now.)
Another vote for Christianity and Islam here, and another thank you for this series of essays. It’s been fascinating, and I’ll look forward to the book when/if it’s published.
“That’s one of the secrets of compassion, after all: to feel compassion for others is to define them as your equals, and that makes it possible for you to see yourself in their place and themselves in your place, and learn from their failures and their successes, their sufferings and their joys.”
The penny just dropped.
This strikes at the very heart of what has always been wrong with human governments: those set in authority set themselves in circumstances where they never live the experiences of those they govern, and consequently can never define themselves as their equals. This not only explains why the ruling class can never seem to learn from past errors, but also why corruption, exploitation, and oppression seem so inevitable: what should be compassion for the masses never amounts to more than mere pity – and what good is that? Most bullies pity their victims.
Hence the profound wisdom of the ‘golden rule’: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
On a more mundane note, I vote for an analysis of the new policies of the Trump administration; in particular, I would be interested in how these policies could affect those of us living up here in Canada. (I’d ask for predictions of how the world will look 4 years from now, but I already know that could all be summed up succinctly in a single word: ‘different’.)
>there have been plenty of additional scriptures produced since whichever church council it was formalized the canon; the Book of Mormon is the most famous here in the US, but there are many others.
Something tells me that the original testaments weren’t written by looking into a hat. Then again, maybe they were.
>As for Jesus as a thief in the night, now you’ve got me thinking of the Ninja Jesus
As for why nobody has been able to – find Jesus – would you want to be found if you decided to claim you are Jesus? Look at what happens to anyone who claims to be Jesus. At best, people ignore you, at worst, you’re taken away to a place where men in white coats feed you massive amounts of pills and perform experiments on you. I’m not Jesus and I wouldn’t want that. Would you?
As far as Ninjesus goes – I can see it now, Assassin’s Creed: Jesus
>So, in effect, the liberals in the early 20th century coopted what had been a set of conservative policies, and the conservatives countered by taking over what had been the liberal policies
Rule of Alternation
JMG, quite fair enough! It’s just dawned on me that “even if” one is hoping for an eleventh hour saviour or event to bail out our royal mess we’ve made, then even that (according to its own lights and doctrine) would have to be one heck of a bumpy ride! Hence, looking for such or pinning hopes on such is kind of a double fools errand: silly, for trying to avoid addressing one’s own issues and problems and involvement, and foolish for thinking that any deliverance out of such as we have cooked up, would involve anything but the most radical change. It’s like wishing for change, that isn’t really change. But having your cake, and eating it too, seems to be kind of the problem to begin with. Thanks for all the sharpening of my thinking, over all these years. I’m wondering if the young wandering Parsifal to show up, at this point, would have to basically not care about saving the System, in order to be the virtuous Parsifal to begin with! He would march to his own drum, but with compassion. I don’t see any “saving the System” inherent in that! Regards, and thanks for these brilliant essays.
“exactly. I’ve been trying to point this out for years; different religions lead to different outcomes. From my own religious perspective, every individual soul ultimately has a different place in the greater scheme of things, and that’s why there are so many religions — the Divine is beyond human definition, and calls each soul in a unique way to what will ultimately be a unique place.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the years too, and it’s really actually impossible to know, as you’d have to experience the subjective reality of everybody’s spiritual states. It’s certainly possible that people experience the same kind of mountain, or elephant if they’re blind men, and describe it differently based on their particular experiences, language and cultural context. It’s also possible there’s different mountain peaks. There are folks like Bernadette Roberts, the Carmelite nun who has written books such as “The Experience of No-Self” based on her own experience, that seem very similar to Buddhist experiences, but using Catholic language that is somewhat difficult for non-Catholics to understand, and I can very much see Zen, Advaita-Vedanta, Catholic, and Sufi mystics as talking about the same thing. And you have somebody like Sri Ramakrishna who realized God through many different spiritual paths… And there can also be spiritual practitioners who experience mountains that are very different from other spiritual practitioners in their own traditions, but more similar to what practitioners of other traditions experience. I tend to think that you’re right though in the fact that each soul has their own unique mountain.
My vote is for gnosticism. 🙂
I vote for Muslim envy and the Protestant Reformation.
Thanks
“The abstraction we call money replaces concrete wealth with the coming of the Age of Reason, and then starts to lose its meaning and value as the Age of Memory dawns. (Spoiler alert: that’s where we are now.)”
I know this is a dead obvious point, but this is nowhere more evident than with cryptocurrency: a profusion of digital ledgers based on absolutely nothing of intrinsic value, with all the problems of both fiat currency and metal-backed currency… and it’s one of the few major arenas left in which fortunes can still be made without outright criminal acts (not that there’s any lack of those in the crypto space).
@JMG
Does money losing its value refer in large part to inflation making money increasingly worthless in aging civilizations? I know the Roman world suffered from inflation, at least.
@Ambrose (#24): Fair enough! Insofar as he is the eternal, prexistent Logos, sure, but as the God-man Jesus, born in a stable, his prospects weren’t looking so good…at least in terms of worldly station.
@Beardtree: Cento per cento.
JMG, I suspect eucatastrophe, by its very nature, runs against the current of “the World,” as such—the latter tends toward catastrophe, as you note. Good point on theology. The eucatastrophe, like so much else, is best first sought within before it can become manifest without.
@jbucks: Have you considred the notions of telos and Logos? One approach might be to align one’s individual will, inasmuch as we are able to, with the divine will—an idea perhaps not so far from the story of Parsifal.
Axé
JMG,
Is this the end of the Wagner posts? Say it ain’t so.
My Fifth Wednesday vote is for Gnosticism. Though, based on many of your recent comments over the last year or two, I would say it could be a series of fascinating posts itself.
Thank you,
WILL1000
For the 5th Wednesday, continuing the theme of Germanic Sturm und Drang and artistic expression, I suggest a look at the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic.
@The Other Owen,
“As far as Ninjesus goes – I can see it now, Assassin’s Creed: Jesus”
Considering the Animus (a type of machine) in that series works on the basis of genetic memory, I suspect Dan Brown would be on board!
Once again, everyone’s vote has been tabulated.
Old Steve, it’s just barely possible for a ruler to have genuine compassion for those he rules. It’s even happened a few times in recorded history. As a rule, though, you’re quite correct.
Other Owen, how exactly those earlier scriptures were written is an interesting question. I’ll look forward to the ads for the new game.
Celadon, you’re most welcome and thank you. Everyone I’ve ever met who expected the Second Coming, or the arrival of the Space Brothers, or the Singularity, or some such thing to show up in the near future was very clearly hoping that the world would change so he or she didn’t have to. “Lord, save me from the consequences of my own repeated actions!” is the prayer that rises to heaven in such cases. It doesn’t surprise me that the answer is so reliably “No.”
Isaac, I grant that nobody can know for sure who hasn’t been there, but then that’s equally applicable to those who insist that all religions reach the same goal. What we can say is that the descriptions of mystical experience tend to cluster in particular groups, which are not specific to traditions — you’re right, for example, that some Catholic mystics sound like Buddhists while others couldn’t sound less like Buddhists if they worked on it for a year — and that, to my mind, gives some credibility to the idea that there are irreducible differences among the things lumped together as “mystical states.”
Slithy, it’s a great example. I see the rise of cryptocurrency as part of a desperate attempt to create the illusion of economic expansion at a time when real wealth is contracting; “if we all pretend this is worth something, then it’s worth something” is the underlying logic. It’ll be interesting to see how the whole rigmarole unravels.
Patrick, that’s certainly one common example of the way it can happen. More broadly, as societies go to bits, people turn to real wealth — actual goods and services — in place of whatever arbitrary tokens they previously used to denoate wealth.
Fra’ Lupo, exactly. Eucatastrophe is a theological concept that, like other theological concepts, is somethings (but never reliably!) reflected in the outer world of experience.
Will, it is indeed. The orchestra has fallen silent, the curtain is shut, and the lights have come up. Later this month we’ll stroll out of the opera house into the City of Dreadful Night and see how things are shaping up.
“So, in effect, the liberals in the early 20th century coopted what had been a set of conservative policies, and the conservatives countered by taking over what had been the liberal policies!”
Yes… and perhaps relatedly, I’ve been struck by how much Western progressive rhetoric today resembles that of conservatives some 150 years ago, when it comes to issues like free speech or populism. Members of the vulgar mob, er, low-information voters, are so easily misinformed and susceptible to dangerous ideas spread by homegrown Jacobins… I mean, extremists. While today’s conservatives embrace the anti-regulatory views and rabble-rousing tendencies of the 19th century’s radical liberals. I suppose it makes sense that those things would come in packages, but I must say the labels attached to those packages today are considerably more incongruous to me than what the previous arrangement. It seems like at least back then both sides knew what they were, as opposed to liberals who recoil in horror from freedom and conservatives who giddily embrace disruption.
Going back to the main topic of the post, I forgot to ask, but what does this make the Grail itself, the sacred portion of the sun-teasure? Is it compassion or the source of compassion, or something else entirely?
It seems pretty clear that Islam envy has won this time, but to hopefully start the ball rolling on something else for later, I’ll cast my vote for an overview of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, either as the “final Western opera” (that is, the logical apex of the art form), or as his meditations on what went wrong with Feuerbach’s worldview — but perhaps those are the same thing?
One for discussion of islam, please.
JMG,
Bummer. I’ve got that Doors song (The End) going through my head as I stroll down the boulevard in the City. I’ve enjoyed this series much more than I expected and look forward to reading the book. Here’s hoping you can place with a publisher.
WILL1000
Hi JMG,
Thank you for another great article on Wagner.
For the 5th Wednesday, I would like to vote for Islam envy by the West.
Thank you
Maybe if a country required military or working class experience (work a common man job like cashier or fast food or truck driver) to run for political office, its rulers would be genuinely compassionate.
Something that might be of interest to the Schropenhauer/Buddhism angle is the works of a Georg Grimm, an early 20th century Bavarian judge and student of the pali language who read the suttas in the original. He had a kind of existentialist read of Buddhism informed by Schropenhauer and the nikayas. He was known as “the most benevolent judge in bavaria” and was placed under house arrest by the Nazis before dying in the 30s. I think hes worthy of some more attention after he died in obscurity.
My vote is for islam envy. It seems as though the telos of progressivism ironically is Islam given the the likely future of Western Europe. It seems progressives want to make western societies into vacuums where everyone can fulfill their desires and islam is most eager to fill that vacuum.
JMG,
Wagner’s (Schopenhauer’s) three ways out of the trap are reminiscent of the three paths that you have discussed in the past – those being mysticism (love, devotion), magic (power), and occultism (knowledge). Maybe there are some similarities, overlaps? I would say that the path of art not only includes contemplation, but creation and crafting. I know that when I am in the middle of creating or crafting something, I tend to lose track of time and the anxieties of the day fall away.
I was an athlete in my younger years and the most joy I experienced was getting lost in the game at hand. It is another world and being “in the zone” is a state of bliss. I remember coming off the field at the end of football practice or a game, soaked in sweat, but feeling a buzz, as I would describe it, like nothing else. Anyway…
Thanks again,
WILL1000
“To put it in a simple way I get to hitch a ride with Jesus into the loving presence of God in the here and now and more deeply when I die. There is no way you can squeeze this into a Buddhist understanding of reality.”
I wonder what Shinran would have to say about this.
I vote for the Protestant-Islam connection as the topic for your next 5th Wednesday post.
JMG,
“Later this month we’ll stroll out of the opera house into the City of Dreadful Night and see how things are shaping up.”
Spooky. And necessary. It’s been a while since the last “update on the general state of the world” post. And things are changing astonishingly fast these days.
” What we’re discussing here would better be called “sympathy,” a word which replaces en– with syn– “with.” (Interestingly, Latin and German both have exactly the same structure for their comparable words: compassio, mitleid.) ”
This replacement word, “with”, is a gigantic word… it can embrace infinities. 🙂
Not only does it place people on an equal footing, but it can do so between people who are very, very different from one another. And *different* as to their comparable qualities – eg strength, wisdom, courage, age, experience, vitality, and on and on… And it can do so without the procrustean impulses that are set up by other words that purport to be about equality – like “unity” or “collective” – but somehow require that some be (in Orwell’s usage) “more equal” than others.
To work *with* one or more other people accomplishes much, while allowing each person to be fully themselves, only more so.
Thank you for this. 🙂
Hi John Michael,
🙂 I hear you about that, and a person has to walk in several different worlds all at the same time – and one of those worlds demands that the bills be paid. Always was it thus, otherwise we’d head off and do our own thing, which is not the desired outcome is it?
Well, you did call the heavy rain. Next up heat waves? And err, also financial ructions. That’s the thing with the financial types, they believe that they are smarter than they may well be. Hard to know really, and I for one hope that such folks get to put their brain power to more useful purposes. And they may just get the opportunity to do so. Right now, they don’t appear to be producing that much which is of actual use to a society. Can’t say I’ll mourn them, but oh boy, this one is gonna hurt right where the belief systems are held for many.
That’s the problem with being a blood sucking squid with tentacles everywhere – sooner or later, you kill the blood doners. They might not like that, well at least this is my take on the world. Like everything, a bit of balance would be nice, but alas, it is not in our species nature at present. Hope you have some popcorn ready?
Cheers
Chris
JMG said, “Patrick, that’s certainly one common example of the way it can happen. More broadly, as societies go to bits, people turn to real wealth — actual goods and services — in place of whatever arbitrary tokens they previously used to denote wealth.” You know, your statement that people will stop engaging in the defined “economic” activities, because they become losing monetary propositions, is really jaw dropping: after I thought about it, of course, that is how it unfolds. It would have to. That’s how things change, because humans never agree to it. Similar to, the Bryan Ward Perkins’ thesis that Rome collapsed when 80% of the peasants realized the barbarian war lords would be better off for them. Come to think of it, the state of “Empire” or “global economy” or “civilization” is really just a translation of economic activity or reality. It would have to change, if the underlying reality changes. Oh, brother…talk about “voting with your feet” – “reforming with your hands”. And none of it requires human planning or consent, just individual choices netting to a new reality.
I don’t get it. Why negate the will? It is your only genuine connection to reality. i mean, sure it is frustrating that failure is your best teacher, but how could it be otherwise? And what about the great joy you experience when after struggling and failing to achieve some goal you finally master it? Sure sometimes you need a break from your struggles But negate my will??? Nah i would rather learn from it.
I will actually vote this month for Gnosticism
And a bit off topic for this weeks post but……. The Arctic melt season has started off with the lowest ice volume in recorded history, it is down about 2000 cubic kilometers ( ~10% less) than the previous low. I will keep folks updated over the melt season to see what happens.
Once again, everyone’s votes have been counted.
Daniil, it’s religion — any religion, but especially the formal Christianity of Wagner’s own time. That’s why the choir is singing “redemption to the Redeemer!” in the final triumphant chorus. The notion that so many people are caught up in these days, that compassion is the essence of religion, is one of the things that Wagner saw coming.
Will1000, thank you.
Patrick, sure. Now try getting anybody in power to agree to that!
Muninn, interesting. I’ll look into him when time permits.
Will1000, hmm! That’s a good point, and one I hadn’t considered.
Bruno, I know. A lot has happened while we were in the opera house.
Scotlyn, you’re welcome. I’ve been thinking about those words and concepts a lot, for a variety of reasons.
Chris, I’ve been going long on popcorn futures since I started blogging about peak oil all those years ago. Just think, you don’t have to go to the tropics — the tropics are coming to you. 😉
Celadon, excellent! Yes, exactly.
Dobbs, keep in mind that to Schopenhauer, the Will was in a state of constant torment. Me, I disagree with him; I’m one of those people he talked about in one famous passage of his book, those who “stand with strong bones on the enduring earth,” and rejoice in what the Will is bringing into being — but he couldn’t do that. Some people can’t. Please do keep us posted about the Arctic ice; can you recommend a good source or two?
Ecosophy Enjoyer and JMG,
I have 12 descendants–children, grandchildren, great-grandchild. Three of them have Asperger’s and three have ADHD. One of each of those three meditate and it has greatly improved their lives. I encourage parents with children with any form of autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, etc to encourage their children to take up meditation.
My vote for this month’s fifth Wednesday is Manly Hall.
Thank you JMG, it’s been a great journey to explore Wagner’s work and philosophy. I have recommended these articles to some of my friends who I think will appreciate it.
May I cast my vote for an exploration of Gnosticism?
JMG, forgot to add, so I’m doing it now: for this month’s extra post I vote for Islam-Protestantism.
JMG,
I’m not sure what happened, but the post by Tengu (I think?) that I replied to above (my reply is #76) seems to have disappeared.
If you deleted it, feel free to delete my reply if you think it appropriate (for privacy reasons, for example).
If not looks like the blog software ate another comment.
My 5th Wednesday vote is for Gnosticism.
NSIDC (https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today) tracks the Arctic & Antarctic sea ice extents, and the Greenland surface melt.
However, a record low Arctic sea ice maximum in March does not indicate that there will be a record low sea ice minimum in September.
@JMG: Did my earlier questions perhaps get lost in the shuffle when you were replying to others? I was interested in what input you may have had.
Although some of the later comments reminded me about the analogy of the ‘many paths up many mountains’ view of religion, which sheds some light on my questions.
@Fra’ Lupo: I’m embarrassed to admit that, until your comment prompted me to look, I didn’t realize Logos and the idea of an ordering principle of the cosmos were related! I had understood logos only in its usage in rhetoric. Thanks for the pointer!
It was great to read the whole series!
I’m actually enjoying the operas, still watching the Valkirie: I think it would have been a ‘meh’ experience without the symbology, and the music so far is not so memorable. I was tought in musical class that Wagner reinvented the opera in the sense that the music was intended to bring emotional states to whatever was being represented in the stage. And it’s true. The music isn’t really memorable, no easy to sing tunes, it’s just a perfect background for the story, as if it were a modern movie. The concept of film soundtrack may be obvious for the modern person, but probably back in Wagner’s days it was a novelty.
About the themes of the story, an interesting commentary might require several days of study, so I may just comment on something less profound. As presented, it seems that Wagner tried hard to understand his time, the inherent problems, and how to get out of them, at least in his frame time. For a moment, I thought we were trying to find ourselves the Holy Grail, the solution of all of our predicaments: a mythical political and economic system that could provide happiness and wellness for everyone. But no, that was just a wish. Compassion, as shown, was just another necessary step in the scheme of the world.
I believe the only right answer is in evolution. As systems keep evolving, they may sooner or later fit the challenges of their time. Evolution is faster and more resilient when there’s more genetic diversity, so probably is cultural evolution when there’s more cultural diversity. Sometimes we will like the outcome, sometimes not, but as long as the system we inhabit is alive, with a will to exist of its own, there’s hope. We just need to remember that all things of this world are temporary.
Didn’t some Protestant bigwig say that Islam is the rod of God’s wrath?
So, Protestants and their view of Islam; was it really envy? Sheesh. It sounds like a really interesting topic. This one please. And I wonder how Muslim shot-callers and scholars felt about Protestants. There must have been some close association, with Ottoman borders just a stones throw (or cannonade) away.
JMG,
Long time fan, but first time replier.
I saw you are asking for a new topic for the next post so I finally got the bravery to ask something that’s been on my mind for awhile, but was heightened after listening to a recent podcast you did a couple months ago discussing your book “monsters”.
I have long shared the opinion with you that magick is not supernatural. However, in the back of my mind I still can’t deny the personal supernatural experiences I have had when it came to me naively playing around with voodoo and santeria or even christian pentecostalism. I personally always felt the magick practiced there yielded quite an otherworldly result.
Anyway, I bring this up because on the recent podcast I listened to where you go in depth discussing lycans and heightened aetherial power on full moons I was forced to try and reconcile the non-supernatural magick I now practice, mainly NLP and self-hypnosis, with the supernatural experiences I’ve had in the past. I feel I may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to magick being supernatural.
Could always use a more experienced explanation on this if you have the time. Thank you.
Thanks very much for this series that opened my eyes to Wagner.
For the Fifth Wednesday, I will start the lobbying process for Goethe’s “Faust” , how Faustian in the civilizational sense is namesake of the civilization?
Thanks again,
Drew C
“Will, it is indeed. The orchestra has fallen silent, the curtain is shut, and the lights have come up. Later this month we’ll stroll out of the opera house into the City of Dreadful Night and see how things are shaping up.”
Hmmm: James Thomson (BV) or Dhalgren? I’m waiting with abated breath. Or baited breath. Or just merely breathing.
“Dobbs, keep in mind that to Schopenhauer, the Will was in a state of constant torment. Me, I disagree with him; I’m one of those people he talked about in one famous passage of his book, those who “stand with strong bones on the enduring earth,” and rejoice in what the Will is bringing into being — but he couldn’t do that. Some people can’t.”
I suspect that the natural state of the Will is effortless and peaceful, and that the suffering we experience is not the Will itself but ‘defilements’ of the Will, a state of affairs brought about by ignorance.
HI JMG-
My vote is for a very basic exploration of the philosophy of Zen BUudhism.
Thanks!
This was a fitting end to a great series!
In spite of being a Christian myself, and in spite of Wagner’s following Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, which I know from childhood, rather closely here, I must say I was less impressed by Parsifal than by most of the Ring cycle. Maybe it was a latent discomfort with Wagner deploying Christian language and symbols so blatantly as a non-believer. The encounter between Parsifal and Kundry at Klingsor’s castle was the high point for me (and of course an entirely Wagnerian scene).
Your meditation on the difference between pity and compassion, as symbolized by Amfortas and Parsifal, rang quite true for me, even if I am not entirely sure Wagner consciously put this interpretation into his work.
The political application of saving capitalism through compassion might have a bit of validity for figures like Disraeli, Bismarck or FDR, but I think the driving force was much more the fear of revolution than any compassion for the poor. It might actually make more sense to say that politicians who had grown up in modest circumstances themselves, like Ramsay MacDonald, Keir Hardie, Herbert Wehner, Willy Brandt or Lula, had it easier feeling compassion for their (former) equals when they reached the pinnacles of power. It is not automatic, however – not all do who grew up in poverty.
As regards the fifth Wednesday, I am for any discussion involving 16th and 17th century Europe, including whatever relation there might be between Islam and Protestantism.
I really enjoyed your series on Wagner. Excellent stuff.
I vote for a “Little Big” as well
The word ‘compassion’ in this week’s blog immediately triggered two things in my mind:
1 – a cartoonish portrait of Wagner, shaved bald, wearing an ochre robe, and carrying a begging bowl; and
2 – a recollection of Leo Tolstoy’s mystical-Christian short stories, many of which have compassion as a central or key component. As far as I know, Tolstoy was not particularly influenced by Wagner (though I could be wrong); perhaps compassion was ‘in the air’ among the European elite during the latter decades of the 19th century? It is interesting, also that MK Gandhi, who was highly influenced by Tolstoy in his early adult life, picked up on the ‘compassion thing’ and managed to use it as a moral weapon against the British Raj.
Since William Jennings Bryant’s name came up, and the notion that Conservatives and Liberals have changed sides, I give you a link (indirect, you have to download a pdf) to Milton Friedman’s essay on Bimetallism, “Bimetallism Revisited” — https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.4.4.85 where he argues that if we somehow get “hard money” again, the older 1 Gold equals 16 Silver Standard works much better than the Gold standard.
On the Fifth Wednesday topic, I’m voting for Wilhelm Reich.
I personally would like to see a Best and Worst of the New Thought movement, kind of a follow up to your old post on affirmations from dreamwidth. Maybe next time.
I really appreciate how you finished with Parsifal at the time of year when the highest number of productions of Parsifal are being performed! Right before Good Friday and Easter.
Once again, everyone’s votes have been counted.
Slithy, Tengu asked me to take it down. I usually do that on request. I’ve taken yours down as well.
Patrick, thanks for this.
Jbucks, I did indeed — that happens from time to time. You’re quite correct that there’s a deep conflict between Schopenhauer’s thought and the concept of a cosmic ordering principle as found in ancient societies. Schopenhauer argued in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason that all such ordering principles could only be a priori structures in human consciousness and thus do not exist “out there” in the real world. Schopenhauer’s concept of compassion is that it’s precisely what we do because there isn’t any such principle of order in the cosmos.
Abraham, Wagner basically invented the way that music is used in movies — his ideas were picked up once “talkies” came in, and used relentlessly.
Michael, since I usually ask commenters to stay on topic, may I ask you to repost this question on this month’s open post, which will go up on the 23rd? Thank you.
Phutatorius, you’ll have to judge that for yourself. Do keep breathing, though!
Enjoyer, that’s certainly one opinion, but it wasn’t Schopenhauer’s.
Aldarion, those Christians who notice that Parsifal isn’t a Christian opera tend not to like it very much. Not everyone notices, though!
Ron, funny. I don’t happen to know if Tolstoy was influenced by Wagner or not.
Jon, thanks for this.
Rob, it did work out very well, didn’t it?
The danger of using compassion too much, or unsubtly, at the end of an age, might be that the age to come would take the rejection of such as a given, the nullification of too much compassion. We definitely need more metaphysics in the hour of decision! Kurt Vonnegut once exhorted his students and readers, Be kind, babies, be kind! What I don’t see in America at least is a deeper awareness about how love and kindness and compassion, and their opposites, often appear in disguise. I suppose that’s the value of fairy tale and art!!
Hi John Michael,
Don’t laugh, but a degree or two warmer with no chance of snow or frost, and I could probably grow coffee here. It’s probably already possible in some areas of Melbourne which no longer enjoy frosty mornings. I’m not sure anyone has noticed there, they don’t seem to comprehend what the lack of insects means.
Anyway, the floods following on from the recent heavy rains further up in the north east of the continent, are really something else to see in the satellite images. The scale is hard to discern from the photos, but it’s huge.
Clouds clear to reveal immense scale of Queensland flooding
It was hard not to notice reports that your mid Western states are also meant to be enjoying super heavy rainfall.
Cheers
Chris
I want to sort out the individual and collective dimensions of Parsifal’s redeeming act.
—
Compassion is an individual action; pity is not. You can institutionalize pity but you can’t institutionalize compassion.
—
Compassion by definition is an individual able to identify with another individual rather than looking down or up at them – objectifying or commodifying them. In another metaphor, it is Martin Buber’s I-Thou rather than the I-It of pity.
—
Parsifal shows a savior motif where the action of an individual can redeem a collective. His awakening banishes the sorcerer spell of Klingsor’s garden.
—
Can an individual wake up for a collective and redeem it? We’re having a form of this discussion over on the covid forum this week. So far the general consensus seems to be, No; each individual must awaken for themself. We can help others but not change them, not awaken for them. The sorcerer KlingsorFauci still enthralls those who do not take that step.
—
[Note that I am on a Linux machine, and I’ve seen the editor on this blog (which I suspect is on a Windows server) strip out the paragraph breaks, so I added dashes.]
That Chesterton quote really hit home, as a German.
Lords without anger or honor.
That in itself seems to be the driving force for many people to vote for more (superficially) nationalistic parties.
At least these Lords *appear* to share some of the anger of those who have side-lined in the recent decades.
I‘m bot getting my hopes up for an honorable Lord any time soon.
For the next fifth Wednesday, I‘d also like to vote for Islam Envy – which seems to be popping up in more and more places once more.
Not sure if this is on topic,
I have been reading about astrotheology – how religion reacts to space aliens. What will happen when humans encounter aliens, how will their religions react? So far, Christians have been fighting out such questions as “do aliens have original sin” or “do you need multiple Christs on multiple worlds or just one?” Christians are the forefront of these discussions. Ted Peters, the Lutheran theologian is the forefront proponent of this theology.
What does happen to religion when aliens are fully realized? Is it earth-centric? or can it go universal. So far, in my reading, Buddhism and Polytheism seems to best to deal with the questions of other worlds and other peoples.
It seems to me for some strange reason, the Wagnerian opera series seems to have this in the background – humans having their beliefs challenged. How they react is how they live.
—
What is Islam envy?
American parties confuse me, especially over the long term. In 1860, Democrats would have been the agrarian, therefore conservative party (thanks for the pointer to the patroon class!), while Republicans were the party of industry, so “progress”. However, Democrats wanted free trade, so in that sense they were liberals, and Republicans wanted trade protections. Neither party proposed redistributing wealth to the poor.
Were Democrats in 1932 still the conservative party, since they were still the party of the agrarian South? Would FDR therefore be a conservative leader (from an extremely rich and traditional family) who decided to support the desperately poor in order to avoid revolution?
The label “conservative” only makes a little bit of sense to me for the Republican party since Nixon, since it is strongest in the least urbanized regions and asserts old-time values and customs. However, until a few weeks ago, it still supported free trade. Now, it is curtailing free trade, but can make much more claim to the label “disruptive” than “conservative”!
I guess I’ll vote for the Ottoman Empire at its height. I wonder what will be the successor to the Ottoman Empire? That part of the world doesn’t stay fragmented for long, if history is any guide.
I think after your expose’ of Wagner, I understand a bit more why Tolkien gained traction while Wagner languishes amongst a small fandom. In one word – cynicism. Wagner had it, Tolkien didn’t. Maybe not consciously but at some level, people pick up on it and it turns them off. People value authenticity and whatever else you think of Tolkien, he was honest and authentic.
I wonder if anyone has thought about making an opera out of Wagner’s life? There’s plenty of drama there with cops, wine and loose women. You could call it the Wagner Cycle: Wash. Rinse. Spin.
>Maybe if a country required military or working class experience (work a common man job like cashier or fast food or truck driver) to run for political office, its rulers would be genuinely compassionate.
It used to be that way – even the upper class kids got those part time McJobs, or it was seen as good. Then at some point somewhere in the late 80s, everything started going solipsistic – those upper class kids stayed home and worked on getting into the Ivy Leagues and nothing else.
And that’s part of the problem today – you’ve got a LOT of people at the upper layers who have no idea how the lower layers work. And they hate and fear the lower layers partly because of that. There’s one guy I can think of who can bridge the layers – Vance. Whatever you think of him, he can speak Redneck and Ivy League fluently and translate between the two.
There aren’t that many of those around and frankly most of them don’t care to do what Vance is doing. Most of them aren’t allowed anywhere near the levers of power either.
>I don’t get it. Why negate the will? It is your only genuine connection to *this* reality
Fixed that for you. Hope that helps. Have a nice day.
As a person who grew up working class and is currently on the higher end of the professional class, I can firmly say that the professional class has zero compassion for and not even an iota of understanding of the working or welfare classes. It’s shocking, and they don’t even know very basic things about what a working class life is like, what they buy, what they watch on TV, etc.
Further up the chain, I’ve also heard the investor class refer to the classes below them as “the unwashed masses” (or variations on that theme) more times than I can count, and their idea of a poor person is someone who lacks the willpower and restraint to save money which is why they believe poor people are poor.
So, that’s what we’re dealing with.
Yes, of course. I disagree with Schopenhauer. Maybe he’s right after all and I’m too optimistic, but I think that his hardcore pessimism is very lopsided. He was a genius, though.
Opera doesn’t lend itself very well to religious themes. Operas about Joan of Arc, by Tchaikovsky and others have had no lasting success. Handel, a prolific composer of large scale vocal productions, used the oratorio form for sacred compositions; as did other baroque composers. I know of only two explicitly Christian operas which are still being staged, Dialogue of the Carmelites, by Poulenc, and Messian’s St. Francis. Richard Strauss’s Salome is magnificent, but I don’t consider it a sacred work, nor are the various operas on the theme of Faust. Berlioz’s is the best, IMHO.
Aldarion, Albert, the Prince Consort to Queen Victoria, was obsessed with European revolutions. He had seen crowned heads of state, many of them his own relatives, sent into exile and was determined that that not happen in Britain. Had he not died young, had he had in the person of the German prince mentioned by our host in an earlier discussion, a European counterpart capable of understanding him…I can’t help wondering if a German/British alliance might have avoided at least some of the horrors which came later.
JMG, I am afraid I preferred the treatment of Percival/Parsifal in Mallory, where he was one of four mighty brothers, and altogether a much more sympathetic figure. For me, the greatest weakness of Le Morte D’Arthur was that Mallory did not do for the Percival family what he did for the Orkney brothers.
My vote if for something related to Gnosticism.
Thanks,
Pierre
I’ve counted everyone’s votes, once again.
Celadon, that is indeed the advantage of fairy tales and other forms of literature. Parents, if you have small children, please introduce them to classic fairy tales instead of the current prechewed slop!
Chris, give it another decade or so and it wouldn’t surprise me if Australia becomes a major coffee producer. As for the floods, ouch! Yeah, we’ll probably get a lot of the same thing in the Mississippi watershed in the months immediately ahead.
Charlie, good. Very good. Myself, I don’t think an individual can do the job of a collective — it really does depend on one person at a time. BTW, the editor doesn’t actually strip out the paragraph breaks — it just looks that way in the preview screen due to a glitch. They get to me intact.
Sascha, I think it’s relevant all over the industrial world right now.
Neptunesdolphins, let’s see if there’s any evidence that genuine aliens can get here, and then we can have the discussions. Otherwise, all this sounds like theologians arguing over the spiritual status of the characters in Alice in Wonderland. As for Islam envy, I noted a while ago that Protestant Christianity emerged out of Catholicism at a time when the Ottoman Empire was the dominant power in western Eurasia and the charisma of Islam was at its height in the Western world, and suggested that the Reformation was an attempt by Christians to reframe their faith in the image of Islam. Apparently we’ll be discussing that in a few weeks.
Aldarion, the difficulty you’re facing is that you’re assuming that political parties stand for policies. They don’t. Each one is a loose alliance of power centers and pressure groups, and the policies they push depend moment by moment on what they think will give them an advantage. It would probably be better if we just assigned them meaningless names — the Oogieboogies and the Gorbleglorps, maybe.
Other Owen, by all means write that opera. I’ll certainly buy a ticket. 😉
Dennis, I know. One of the odd features of a writer’s status in society is that I get to meet people from many different classes, and the arrogance and frank hatred that the well-to-do direct toward the poor is very real and very ugly.
Enjoyer, I also disagree with him, while also acknowledging the man’s genius.
Mary, I prefer some of the older medieval versions myself, but since we were talking about Wagner, Wagner’s version took center stage.
@Aldarion #117 There has been the following strain in the Republicans exemplified by Pat Buchanan who ran against Bush in the 2000 Republican presicential primaries. “His campaign centered on non-interventionism in foreign affairs, opposition to illegal immigration, and opposition to the outsourcing of manufacturing from free trade.” and “Many of his views, particularly his opposition to American imperialism and the managerial state, echo those of the Old Right Republicans of the first half of the 20th century. ” I hope the current turn to these perspectives continues. Buchanan promoted the virtues of tariffs. I remember him arguing for tariffs during the ascendancy of globalism and free trade in the 1990’s this ascendancy was supported by the leadership of both parties at that time..
RE: Oogieboogies and the Gorbleglorps
I respectfully submit contrariwise an alternative: Tweedledee and Tweedledum
T & T seem to sound the same as the current incarnations of our political parties
WILL1000
“Daniil, it’s religion — any religion, but especially the formal Christianity of Wagner’s own time. That’s why the choir is singing “redemption to the Redeemer!” in the final triumphant chorus. The notion that so many people are caught up in these days, that compassion is the essence of religion, is one of the things that Wagner saw coming.”
Hmm, then maybe Nietzsche wasn’t completely wrong in his assessment? He may have misjudged Wagner’s exact relationship with Christianity at this stage, which seems basically instrumental rather than a matter of sincere belief (it reminds me of what you wrote about Spengler’s second religiosity, though with a focus on compassion rather than order), but it’s no wonder he was ticked off by a work affirming the value of formal Christianity. If anything, he may have been even more provoked if he had realised that Wagner embraced it precisely because he valued the idea of compassion. My understanding is that the insistence on compassion was one of the things Nietzsche found most objectionable about Christianity.
@Dennis Michael Sawyers (#121), JMG(#125):
Like you, my wife and I grew up in working-class families., and were raised with working-class expectations. I had thought I would earn my living as a locksmith. It was only a very weird chain of circumstances, largely out of my control, that carried me into a professorship at an Ivy-League university catering to the sons (and eventually, the daughters) of privileged families. What a weird, unsettling experience those decades were!
My one caveat to your comments is that I observed a difference between the few children of ancient New-England privileged families, with roots going back to the 1600s and 1700s, and the much greater number of children from families of more recent privilege. The latter were, as you also saw, clueless and generally without compassion. The former, on the other hand, were raised to think that their privilege was an accident of history, and that it entailed considerable obligations toward their fellow citizens who lacked it, including respect and compassion.
As my university grew larger, and much fatter at the swill-trough of federal money, the number of students from families of ancient privilege declined, and the experience of teaching undergraduates went noticeably downhill.
I am so thankful I was able to retire before I had to deal with term papers written by AI! (Already there were people who would write students’ term papers for them, but most students still did their own work. And there were already a few students whose very wealthy parents thought that the tuition they paid entitled their little darlings to perfect grades, no matter the quality of their actual work, and would become fairly dangerous if that didn’t happen. Fortunately for the faculty, at my university student final grades were legally and officially given by the administration, not by the individual professors — who merely recommended final grades to the administration. This took much of the pressure off the faculty in the most difficult cases.)
Ivory tower, my foot!
“It would probably be better if we just assigned them meaningless names — the Oogieboogies and the Gorbleglorps, maybe.”
The British had a good thing going with Tories and Whigs back in the day. Those words did have meanings, but not ones that had anything obvious to do with the policies they pursued at any given moment: “Irish outlaws” and “Scottish cattle-drivers”, respectively. Similarly, Sweden in the 18th century saw bitter factional conflict between Hats (hattarna) and Caps (mössorna).
Thanks! So in the United States, the National Park system, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act all became law under Oogieboogies administrations. For that matter, plenty of Americans seem incapable of remembering that Abraham Lincoln was an Oogieboogie president and his great opponent Jefferson Davis, before he became president of the Confederacy, was a Gorbleglorps senator. That makes it much easier to understand 🙂
Maybe my understanding of it is wrong as I have only being taught about the Gnostics and Cathars many years ago as I lived in areas generally associated with those two sects of christianity. My understanding was that they were both interpretations of the god of the old testament as the baddy in the story… but all in all very much a case of jewish envy…
Which brings a possible parallel with the reformation and its Islam envy of yet another christian sect, the protestant.
So my vote goes for Islam Envy and Gnosticism as parallels in western thought evolution. I bet there is plenty of esotericism shared across the board to link’em all in apostatic and heretic glory.
@Daniil, JMG,
The two US political parties should be called the Crips and the Bloods, criminal gangs that they are 🙂
Patrick #82
While I can think of a lot of good reasons for the suggestion of requiring “ordinary man experiences,” such as you suggested, among our rulers, no system of any kind is necessarily conducive of compassion. Compassion is a result of a) being raised by compassionate people, or b) having a realization from experiences in one’s life (could be anything), or c) working very hard on oneself to discover just how flawed you are as a person and realizing you share that condition with everyone else, or d) any combination of those and e) NOT being born a sociopath or psychopath.
You can’t buy compassion at the social engineering store, sad to say. Which is where the great stories of the operas we’ve discussed thus far fall down, insofar as I see all of them as discussions of big-idea “choosing” the direction of society. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood them, of course. Probably have.
Will1000, the question is which party is Tweedledum and which is Tweedledumber…
Daniil, oh, granted. Wagner’s take on religion was entirely instrumental, as you suggest, but there again he was ahead of his time — Christianity spent most of the last 150 years falling into the trap of the social gospel, which is precisely a matter of treating religion as a means to social improvement rather than an end in itself.
Robert, it’s good to hear that some dim scrap of noblesse oblige lasted that long.
Daniil, lacking any such convenient ethnic slurs or combative headgear, Oogieboogies and Gorbleglorps are probably the best we can do.
Aldarion, exactly. Doesn’t it make so much more sense? 😉
Rashakor, we can discuss that if Gnosticism wins the fifth Wednesday competition. Alternatively, by all means bring it up in this month’s open post.
Sgage, hmm! I could see a point to that.
Hey JMG
On the subject of the 5th Wednesday post, it’s a hard choice between Wilhelm Reich, the feminisation of modern society and Islam Envy. But as interesting as the other two are, I think the feminisation of modern society is the most relevant so I vote for this.
Also, on the subject of your comment to Chris about growing coffee in Australia, I don’t know if you know this but Australia does grow tea. The most famous being the Daintree tea farm that produces a nice black tea. Also, the southernmost tea farms on earth, which are the ones in Tasmania that produce a variety of green tea. Btw, did you know that Tasmania is the second largest producer of opium after Afghanistan? It turns out the Tasmanian climate is perfect for opium poppies…
After listening to tales from Pepe Escobars recent trip to Yemen it made me realize that this current military conflict we are in has a kind of Wagnerian dimension. It is a battle between the closest thing we have to purely commodified countries ( The US and its belligerent sidekick) and what is the closest thing on earth to a sophisticated country organized on someththing much older. Yemen is almost always referred to as ” the poorest country in the middle east” but that label can be taken a different way. Perhaps it looks poor because it has not commodified life, but instead still runs based on honor, duty and spirituality.
I hope something happens to bring this thing to a peaceful halt, but I fear it will finish in the way Ho Chi Min once predicted for Vietnam. ” We will kill many of them, they will kill more of us but they will tire first.
@Dennis Michael Sawyers (#121), JMG(#125), Robert Mathiesen (#129) others earlier about elites with no empathy…
I came from a sort of well-established business family (some banker energy, but mainly they came to KY and made a sawmill) on one side and a kind of old money but like dispersed out so it wasn’t as potent by the time of my dad on the other side (his dad was a naval officer and then a family doctor, his mother is in a direct all-female line to Martha Washington but like took the train to sheridan in the 1930s to hang w her (queer? divorced) dad in the relatively wild west in summers). My mom inherited land and was pretty hardcore broke (cash poor not assets) when I was real small, during the farm crisis of the 80s until she built a beef brand (which wouldn’t have been possible without her family’s support in terms of the land coming to her, probably connections that led to credit, experience, schooling; but then again, she had to do it, she wasn’t given a free ride). I ended up carrying this strong resentment to inheriting the privileges I did. I got with a relatively poor boyfriend in high school and was like thank the gods for their sane social relations among their family and friends, easier, more open and honest and kind. but then I used the funds to go to undergrad at Dartmouth without taking on debt. I was just so good at school and I wanted to get out from my home set-up so much and that was the pathway. While there though, I completely failed to capitalize on the relationships of the ivy league that are supposed to lead to future money, and I graduated in 2007 into the crash. I proceeded to marry a mexican farm worker and move to houston, hustle my first job there as a delivery driver… As time went on, I had to pass this huge karmic challenge where I basically burned up my resources by letting people with addictions in my life until I was living legitimately poor– food stamps and medicaid and addicts all around and scrapping a living running a handyman business and looking after small kids (still working for myself, I can’t imagine the pain of the people stuck in factory work, but suspect some people adapt to it a little more easily than others). Now I’m building myself back up into a position with more influence, but with real experience shared among neighbors and lovers and friends and my kids schoolmates of being poor in America. Translating between the classes feels like part of my life’s work.
I think “The Revolt of the Elites” is a super-important book in that it describes what you are talking about Mathiesen of “a difference between the few children of ancient New-England privileged families, with roots going back to the 1600s and 1700s, and the much greater number of children from families of more recent privilege. The latter were, as you also saw, clueless and generally without compassion. The former, on the other hand, were raised to think that their privilege was an accident of history, and that it entailed considerable obligations toward their fellow citizens who lacked it, including respect and compassion.” The core thesis is that the meritocracy with supposedly equal access to opportunities to climb in the class heirarchy (ie through reserved admissions slots to the Ivy League) was never meant to be the meaning of the Revolutionary ideal of equal opportunity for all to pursue life, liberty and happiness. That people regardless of their station, whether as farmers, locksmiths or as lawyers should be able to participate in the lively civic life of the nation. Maybe Vance can translate. But I’m more excited by a rumor I have heard, from none other than the author of this piece whcih I’ve had pinned to the top of my facebook page (I know, so 2000s) since May 2022, that there is a Producerist political movement abrewing!
Lasch author of Revolt of the Elites basically says that in the Revolutionary times only very rich financiers and bums didn’t produce, the whole middle was engaged in labor to produce useful goods. Today’s economy the non-producer portion of the country’s grown population (I don’t say adult because obviously in those times people we would call kids now were also expected to be doing something useful, another sector where the producer element is seriously in the decline) has expanded dramatically among both the rich and poor. From the article, “On a deep level, producerism challenged the fundamentals of the Enlightenment itself. It recognized human potential, but focused its attention not on how to create unbounded freedom (as liberals and socialists do in their various ways). Instead, producerists put their attention on the inherent value—and psychological fulfillment—brought by work, craftsmanship, reasonable limits on commerce, and local governance.” Sounds like something folks here tend to stand behind. And a way to channel people towards leadership who have made or processed tangibly useful goods alongside other humans, increasing the empathy and synpathy quotient of the folks with hands on various levers of power. Fingers crossed, shoulder to the wheel.
“The label “conservative” only makes a little bit of sense to me for the Republican party since Nixon, since it is strongest in the least urbanized regions and asserts old-time values and customs.”
There used to be a lot of Democratic farmers, but inflation in everything except the prices they received ended that. Then Clinton waged all out economic war on the West to buy the votes of the urban environmentalists. They had money to donate.
As was pointed out elsewhere, the parties do flip flop on many issues. Here is example (scroll down a bit.)
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2025/04/debt-rattle-april-4-2025/
“2008. Bernie Sanders: Free trade without tariffs will destroy American manufacturing.
Of course Bernie now says that Trump’s tariffs will destroy America. 🤡”
As for “Whatever you think of [Vance], he can speak Redneck and Ivy League fluently and translate between the two.”
Having grownup on a farm and been an enlisted guy in the navy I can speak Redneck and I learned PMC in college though probably not Ivy League. All but one of my civilian bosses was born and bred PMC and I frequently confused them. The operators were less confused. A comment one made was “when you swear we know you are really mad.” That was about it for barriers to understanding on that level.
John Michael, with your spontaneous tossing out of a great band name like ‘Ninja Jesus’, all willy-nilly, you inspired me to think about aspirational band names for the new religiosity crowd that’s currently finding its stride. Just about anything would be better than the drearily self-serious names that came out of the awkward Christian-rock programming we’ve had to recently endure here in the US. So, riffing off of your epiphany, I’m imagining that a fluffed-out ‘Ninja Jesus and his Nunchuck Disciples’ could easily go platinum overnight.
Meanwhile, a ZZ-Top-bearded ‘Desert Father Stylites’ might bring honey-dipped locusts back into fashion — everything old is new again! The heralded ‘Baobab Buddhas and their Dharma Dingos’ would be sure to take the Southern hemisphere by storm. Perhaps the ‘Marauding Muezzin Crusaders’ might even be able to finally drive a much deserved stake into the heart of the demonically begotten Eurovision Contest. Mamma mia, that last one would be more than worth the price of admission! As always, the winner takes it all…
Hi John Michael,
Please chuck my vote in for Gnosticism.
The other topic, well my take is that the left, activists etc. just want someone to say ‘no’ to them – and that religion will most certainly provide that lot with the desires of their most fervent wet dreams.
Dunno about your take on that subject, but this is what you get in a society which tells kids that they can do ‘anything’. That was one of the stupidest things adults you say to me as a child, and it just further reinforced the concept that the adults weren’t trustworthy and/or responsible. The original fairy tales are a wonderful antidote to such thinking, and would probably make a more interesting topic. Rule of the mob and stuff, just sayin…
Cheers
Chris
>Oogieboogies and Gorbleglorps are probably the best we can do
Oh, I dunno, in countries with uniparty systems things often split into “progressive” and “hardliner” factions. Sometimes you get a progressive that wants to implement Reform and Transparency, mainly because the status quo is just about to collapse.
>The two US political parties should be called the Crips and the Bloods
That’s an insult to Crips and Bloods.
>at my university student final grades were legally and officially given by the administration, not by the individual professors — who merely recommended final grades
In gaming, there’s a phrase for that – “pay to win”.
@Abraham #99: “The music isn’t really memorable, no easy to sing tunes, it’s just a perfect background for the story, as if it were a modern movie. The concept of film soundtrack may be obvious for the modern person, but probably back in Wagner’s days it was a novelty.”
I’ve just been re-reading Dmitri Shostakovich’s memoirs, Testimony, and he had some pointed things to say about Wagner.
On p.129, he wrote: “[Wagner] wrote some pages of genius, and a lot of very good music, and a lot of average music. But Wagner knew how to peddle his goods.
As for Wagner’s cynicism, Shostakovich had this to say:
“The forging of the sword in the first act of Siegfried was a stroke of genius. But why mobilize an army of your proponents against Brahms? Badgering a colleague doesn’t come from a fit of pique, it comes from an organic quality of the soul. And a mean soul will inevitably be reflected in music. Wagner is a convincing example of that, but far from the only one”
And (straying a bit OT), here is what Shostakovich had to say about virtue-signalling PMC “liberals”:
“Their cozy life as famous humanists is what they hold most dear. That means they can’t be taken seriously. They became like children for me – nasty children …
There were a lot of nasty children in Petrograd. You walk down Nevsky Prospect and you see a thirteen-year-old with a cigar in his mouth. His teeth are rotten, he has rings on his fingers, a British cap on his head, and brass knuckles in his pocket. He’s tried all the prostitutes in the city and had his fill of cocaine. And he doesn’t like life. It’s scarier to run into a punk like that than any gangster. The little angel could playfully knock you off – anything can come into a child’s head.
I have the same fears when I look at the famous humanists of our times. They have rotten teeth and I don’t need their friendship. I just want my feet to carry me as far away as possible.” (Testimony, pp.200-201)
From his music, as well as his life, you would expect Shostakovich to be a keen judge or character, and his memoirs do not disappoint!
Hi John Michael,
Apologies, this is way off topic, but things are moving so fast… You may have noticed? 😊
You might have missed this, but here is a thoughtful take on the current goings on from a down under perspective: Trump’s tariffs upend 80-year-old world economic order, and it will cost us all
It’s funny, but in some ways I see the ‘land of stuff’ not as powerful, but more like Japan just prior to WWII. Lot’s of production capacity, but rather short on oil. Sure they may have nuclear and coal, but it’s the heavy fuels like diesel which keep the big wheels spinning round. One of the most interesting points is that the strategic consequences of the past decisions are now being felt – in order to do more than bluster, a country has to be able to manufacture the means to defend itself and/or push an agenda. The neoliberals simply got lazy, it’s not a word you hear used much these days, but like dastardly, it’s due for a comeback. The absolute stupidest thing the neoliberals did was push Russia and China into an alliance, where the manufacturers can get the heavy fuels they so need. Truly a dumb move that one.
I look forward to reading your thoughts at some point in the future about energy.
Cheers
Chris
J.L.Mc12, I’m not at all surprised to hear that Australia grows tea; the US has some tea plantations in our southern states, and of course it grows as far north as Japan. No, I didn’t know about Tasmanian opium!
Clay, I suspect Uncle Ho is right again, unfortunately.
AliceEm, interesting. Thanks for this.
Christophe, funny. I may have to insert some of those in among the garage bands in my Ariel Moravec series.
Chris, exactly. That’s why they’re so obsessive about being rounded up and put into camps. They desperately want that, so that somebody will actually enforce some limits.
Other Owen, except that the progressives rarely want to progress and the hardliners turn soft and squishy as often as not. I’m sticking with Oogieboogies and Gorbleglorps.
Chris, thanks for this. Yes, we’ll be talking about that.
@Michael Martin #145
Thanks for this! I listened a lot of Schostakovich in my youth, but I know very little about the man. I’m still through act I of the Valkyrie, so I have to listen carefully to find where are Brahms’ tunes.
Neptune’s Dolphin, many typical features of religion presume human biology. For example, the Four Noble Truths may not apply to space amoebas who do not “die” in any meaningful sense, while the Ten Commandments regulate human reproductive behavior that aliens may not share. Our propensity to ascribe agency and human-like behavior to culturally-posited supernatural beings may be incomprehensible to outsiders to our species who do not form group identities in the same way.
I forgot to attach the link I think https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/producerist-manifesto I’ll keep yall posted if I am able to get more involved in helping bring the Producerist political movement back to life after a long hiatus.
AliceEm, I read the article at Tablet online magazine to which you linked. Here is the wiki article on the same subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producerism
I might like to discuss the Tablet article in the next open post. I have some reservations about both the article and its author. He has some good ideas, but also his own agenda. IDK if “His heart is in the right place” or he is a clever fellow trying to get out in front of The Next Big Thing. I do find his understanding of history to be superficial at best. Me, I think a system of syndicalism could fit well in our present structure of federal and local government, and, no, I don’t think it is a fantasy.
Quote of the day about the tariffs,
“No need for knee-jerk reactions,” [Russian President Dmitry Medvedev] posted on social media. “We should take a seat on the shore and wait for the enemy’s corpse to float by. In this case, the decaying corpse of the EU economy.”
The sanctions previously imposed on Russia have rendered them immune to the uproar, at least to direct effects. There may be some side effects from the Chinese though.
Compassion is poorly “marketed” in today’s society. I don’t think that’s necessarily Christianity’s fault, but Christianity hasn’t helped much either. Along with forgiveness, patience, respect, etc. it’s one of those qualities that bosses call virtuous because they benefit everyone else, at ones own self-sacrificing expense. (I view compassion as the emotional expression of respect, and respect as the intellectual expression of compassion.)
Under such incomplete understanding, Parsifal’s message will be unconvincing if not completely incomprehensible.
Thinking of compassion as a means of relief from the torment of Will divided against itself is more productive, but there’s yet another pitfall. You won’t be disappointed when you root for both teams. But that starts out sounding like an utter banality, and on further reflection, sounds even worse: a recipe for a fecklessly disengaged life.
Maybe you have to get there through fire to understand and apply compassion correctly.
Hippies & punks
& druggies & drunks
Crips & Bloods
Socs and Greasers
All these Binary tribes
are like picking nosehairs with tweezers.
>The sanctions previously imposed on Russia have rendered them immune to the uproar
Strictly speaking, they’re almost completely isolated from the dollar system. The people doing this to them thought this was going to be bad for them. What if it turns out to be the bestest most favorable thing anyone ever did to them?
JMG: for this month’s 5th Wednesday post, I’d like to see an essay on “The Magic Flute,” especially its Masonic symbolism.
Someone mentioned sentimentality, which is a cheap substitute for real compassion. I ran into an odd variant on it in a back of pre-hardboiled eggs in the supermarket. “Cage-free – roam freely in a spacious barn and are fed a healthy all-vegetarian diet.” The yokes are a pale yellow, almost as pale as a farmed shrimp. Of course, nobody asked the chickens what they’d like or could thrive on.
On “Revolt of the Elites,” that one goes back to ancient Greece and a comment in one of the tragedies that old-money families knew how to treat slaves well – the old pronciple of noblesse oblige – but the new-money families were brutal to their slaves. Because the old-money families know who they are and don’t have to prove anything.
Hi John Michael,
At the core of this whole story we’ve all been following for months is the pursuit of self interest over that of all other considerations. Wotan seemed like a single minded monomaniac who couldn’t content himself with enough. Not someone I’d hang out with, mostly because things would go badly – every time.
It’s odd really, but when the rentier class use their wealth to pursue policies which favour themselves (of course) and use hordes of new comers to keep everyone else in line, well it hardly surprises me that things get taken too far. And then there are problems.
If you’re interested in a view at the street level as to what people are dealing with down under, here’s another interesting analysis (you can sure tell that a federal election is due early next month): The rent crisis behind Australia’s two-faced cities. I’ll probably vote for the most disruptive folks around. The system no longer works, and neither party wants to talk about that, all they promise is slightly less of the same. To borrow and morph Wagner’s narrative, sometimes the sword and spear are broken so that the wielders and keepers can refocus their minds, before the articles can be reforged – but it’s a cycle with all that implies, sorry to say.
Housing is one of those things which is on my mind. If a bushfire came through here, and the house was destroyed (I constructed it to resist those forces, but you never know) we’d have to live on site in a shed whilst rebuilding. Renting a house nearby would not be an option. Sometimes I wonder if this area will eventually get cleared out to all but the hardiest of folks, just like it used to be.
Crazy times, huh?
Cheers
Chris
Dear JMG:
I throw my hat in the ring for Islam envy!
Chris @146, absolutely. Russian and Chinese leadership know, to quote Ben Franklin: If we do not hang together, we will most assuredly hang separately.
And with the lighter oils you get from fracking, we need heavy crude (Canada, Venezuela) to blend in so our refineries can process it. All oil is not created equal.
And renewable energy (and everything else in modern society) isn’t possible without diesel!
Cugel
Once again, I’ve got everybody’s votes tabulated.
AliceEm, thanks for this.
Siliconguy, a very Russian response! It’s been entertaining to watch all the shrieking over the tariffs, when they’re already serving their purpose — getting other nations to lower trade barriers to US exports — and they will wind down as that happens.
Walt, oh, granted. One of the things that justified Nietzsche’s fulminations against conventional morality is that so much of it is a matter of preaching to sheep that they should be passive, gentle, and motionless when the wolves show up.
Justin, now write a poem in which the words “Oogieboogie” and “Gorbleglorp” feature, and each have rhymes… 😉
Other Owen, it already has. The Russian economy is outperforming most other economies these days, precisely because it’s not providing a stealth subsidy to the US economy via our currency.
Patricia M, thanks for both of these.
Chris, crazy times indeed. As population contraction sets in, it’ll be fascinating to see how a system founded on endlessly rising house prices scrambles for ways to keep the illusion of growth going.
Vote for Islam envy. Jacques ellul brought it up too there’s something in it.
Here’s my vote for the 5th Wednesday: Reformation Europe’s Islam envy. Any pertinence to today’s importation of Muslim migrants?
>The Russian economy is outperforming most other economies these days, precisely because it’s not providing a stealth subsidy to the US economy via our currency
What happens when the rest of the world figures this out, I wonder.
One more vote for Islam envy, please.
Sure thing… I will attempt that in the tradition of Lear and Carroll.
My entire family seems to have gone to the Hands Off worldwide protest against Trump and All His Works. I never got the news that it was on or what it was about until then. My search on that name drew up a news dispatch from Al Jazeera! I merely said “Worldwide. Wow.,” and let it go at that. The actual results remain to be seen.
“>The Russian economy is outperforming most other economies these days, precisely because it’s not providing a stealth subsidy to the US economy via our currency
What happens when the rest of the world figures this out, I wonder.”
They know, the “advantages” that accrue to the issuer of the reserve currency are well known. So why do the other countries keep allowing it? The issuer of the currency is the buyer of last resort. Giant trade deficits are needed to keep pumping out the dollars needed to meet the demand for the currency needed for trade. The trade and having a big market to sell to, (the US) keeps people in the exporting countries employed maintaining domestic tranquility.
Here in the US we get to export much of our inflationary budget deficits overseas (the dollars we export are not causing inflation here because they are not here) which is good. The bad is that our economy gets hollowed out because imports are cheaper than making it ourselves. Walmart has been nicknamed Chinamart a very long time.
The US is supposed to shift to high-value more intellectual occupations. We are supposed to write software and produce superhero movies, not sew tee-shirts. Unfortunately, not to be insulting, the problem is that most people can’t write programs. I have written some, and I’m not at all good at it.
So we have jobs at the bottom end of the pay scale, the manufacturing middle class has been hammered, and the upper class has used financial manipulations to acquire a great deal of paper wealth backed by not much. Rock the system too hard and they’ll nothing after all.
Now AI is a new wildcard. Although it’s still useless for most things it can generate the boilerplate code that makes up most software. Programmers are already getting laid off because of it. So much for that economic engine. Interesting times indeed.
If want to read the investor class’s view of this you can read this. Even if you view them as the enemy knowing what they think is interesting. Note this guy moved to Puerto Rico because the taxes in Texas were too high.
https://images.mauldineconomics.com/uploads/pdf/TFTF_Apr_05_2025.pdf
@ JMG: your teaser about “The City of Dreadful Night” led me to Kipling. I made it through a couple of chapters in his “CIty of Dreadful Night” — about the smells of Calcutta, before moving on to “At The Golden Gate,” printed in the same volume. He arrives in San Francisco from India after about 20 days at sea, apparently before the 1906 quake and way, way before the famous bridge over the Golden Gate took over the name. It’s lively reading, and he seems fascinated by the cable cars and (after India) by the city of about 300,000 white people. White people everywhere! Ah, those were the days. I wonder if he saw Richard Boone, hanging out at the Palace, in between jobs.
“We think that between 2027 and 2030 it’s likely that the US will see peak production (of oil), and after that some decline” — Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub
Taken from this Substack article, excellent overview of the approaching oil production future and the limits on increasing production, especially in the USA..
https://substack.com/home/post/p-160573146?source=queue
By “The Honest Sorcerer”
Another vote here for Islamic Envy, as its time has come – now that we’re done with The Ring Cycle and will likely get a State of the World essay from you (about time, methinks) My mind is ready for something admittedly controversial. I may not agree with you in the end, but I will definitely read and ponder it.
Hey JMG
Tasmania’s Opium farms are surprisingly little known even amongst other Australians, which is strange considering that Tasmanians are notorious for feeling ignored and under-appreciated by “Mainlanders”, and their only other claims for fame are their nature reserves, Thylacines, Tasmanian devils, the Dark Mofo art festival, the MONA art museum, and the novel “For the term of his natural life” by Marcus Clarke.
But returning to the topic of this week’s post, the Compassion that Schopenhauer talks about seems to essentially be a more advanced form of “stepping into someone’s shoes” that kids are often encouraged to do. It also seems similar to the goal of “becoming one with the Universe”, but restricted to fellow human beings. It also seems that not only would compassion be a ability that requires not only empathy but humility or a lack or arrogance, since it would be hard to feel compassion when one feels the need to put up a barrier between others by feeling superior, it would also require that one doesn’t abase or loathe themselves to the point that they feel inferior to everyone else and thus incapable of being equal to them mentally or emotionally.
Please put my vote in for Gnosticism.
In Mahayana Buddhism, “compassion” (karuna) means wanting others not to suffer. “Love” (maitri) means wanting them to experience bliss. They are two of the Four Immeasurables (the others are joy and equanimity), imported it seems from a standard list of four Brahmaviharas (“abodes of Brahma”) found in various Hindu sources. Love and compassion are taken to define (relative)* bodhicitta, and thus Mahayana Buddhism., although Theravadins also use these terms. (“Metta” is Pali for “maitri,” and there’s a very popular Theravada meditation on it that comes right out of the Middle-Length Discourses.)
*Notice that these attitudes only make sense in relation to sentient beings. At the absolute level characterized by emptiness (sunyata), sentient beings do not exist–there is no distinction between “self” and “other”–and all is pure light.
A genius like to Mapplethorpe
Might find a rhyme for “Gorbleglorp”
But only Douglas Howser (“Doogie”)
Could do the like for “oogieboogie”
Yesterday I was in my favorite woodworking supply store that I have frequented for 40 years. It is located near where the April 5 Trump protests were happening yesterday in Portland . Several senior citizens with professionaly made signs entered the store ( it was an hour or so before the protests kicked off ). All eyes in store swiveled to look them over and they sheepishly proclaimed. “Don’t worry, the bus dropped us off near here and we just stopped in to browse before heading to our event.” I though about asking them if they were being paid but the atmosphere was calm with a kind of begrudging acceptance among the rest of the grizzled customers and staff so I thought I would mind my manners.
Food for thought.
Hi John Michael,
Well yes, that will most certainly be a problem, but the population growth was never going to be sustainable. Doesn’t mean that the gambit wouldn’t have been tried.
Ah, did you know, that if the deficit dollars can’t be exported, they have to be absorbed domestically in a way that doesn’t blow up prices at the street level. The easiest way to do that is to destroy the equity markets, like a kind of big time reset. I don’t have any insights into the bond markets, which are much bigger again, but presumably those are being reset too. Also starving folks and entities of excess funds has the great advantage of putting an end to a lot of mischief.
That’s my best guess as to what is going on right now. The Aussie has slipped below USD$0.60 this morning, so presumably our exports will be cheaper, but our imports will cost more. The great rebalancing is off and racing. It amuses me that the tariffs on Aussie exports are 10%, which bizarrely is the exact same as the Goods and Services taxes placed on US imports. Surely a coincidence?
None of this had to be this way.
Cheers
Chris
@Ambrose,
Good job! 😉
Other Owen, oh, they’re aware of it. They just know what happened to the last few countries to abandon the dollar, and they don’t have the thermonuclear bargaining chip Russia does.
Justin, I’ll look forward to it.
Patricia M, the interesting thing is that all the photos I’ve seen of the protests suggest that they were (a) not especially huge and (b) mostly people over 50. Thus I don’t think the Orange Julius has much to worry about.
Siliconguy, interesting. Thanks for this.
Phutatorius, hmm! I’ll have to read that one of these days.
BeardTree, your timing is excellent — thank you. That’ll be useful fodder for the upcoming posts on The Mess We’re In Now.
J.L.Mc12, exactly. Nor is Schopenhauerian compassion limited to human beings — remember the business with the swan.
Ambrose, ha! Thank you.
Clay, and they were all senior citizens. Hmm — that’s really telling.
Chris, granted, but here we are. Here in the US, the media and the stock-owning classes are shrieking their fool heads off, and most of the rest of the population are chuckling to themselves.
J.L.Mc12: “and their only other claims for fame are their nature reserves, Thylacines, Tasmanian devils, the Dark Mofo art festival, the MONA art museum, and the novel “For the term of his natural life” by Marcus Clarke.”
You forgot David Boon and the 58 cans of beer!
Gospel meaning Good News, I suppose that Good News According to Zen is at least a sensible title.
I would like to add my vote to the relationship between Islam and Protestantisms, particularly if you have the energy and knowledge to get into the different varieties of Protestentism who are only recently and modernly on speaking-ish terms. (Sideeyes the Calvinist NotBrother, hugs the Anglican NotBrother, and gooses the Anabaptist Husband.)
However, I love the idea of the symbolism of The Magic Flute, and urge the commentariat to keep that in mine for next Fifth Wednesday.
So many interesting topics to choose from! Please count my vote for Islam envy, JMG.
Thanks,
OtterGirl
My vote for fifth Wednesday is for Gnosticism.
When my dad, who chose not to be a priest after a year at seminary, much to the gratitude of seven people, had a conversation with me about me not wanting to practice Catholicism because the church had such a poor attitude towards women, suggested I look into the Gnostic church I had no idea I would be a good and obedient daughter when I took up Druidism ten or so years ago.
I’d love any more information that can deepen my understanding.
Thank you.
>Giant trade deficits are needed to keep pumping out the dollars needed to meet the demand for the currency needed for trade
BIngo. Baked into the rules of the game, set up back in Bretton Woods. You want to balance things? Then you have to give up the reserve currency. You can’t have both.
Methinks that Trump wants to balance things AND keep the reserve currency. I’m thinking he wants this because he doesn’t understand the game but perhaps he’s being as delusional as a screaming bluehair is on the odd Tuesday. In any case, wanting two contradictory things eventually gets you nothing. Although if you go full bluehair fanatical on it, you can get 70% of the what you want before it explodes in your face.
Shrug, there are no good choices left. I’m glad nobody and I mean nobody can blame me for what’s going on right now. I’m so glad I’m not a Boomer.
Hi John Michael,
That’s the unspoken thing, isn’t it? If the average punter on the street has no skin in the big game and already see themselves as losing out but picking up the tab, I see no reason why they wouldn’t cheerily chuck fuel on the fire. That’s common sense.
Didn’t Warren Buffet make the wry observation that when the tide goes out, you get to see who’s swimming naked?
It’s hard not to notice that yields on bonds are apparently declining… Hmm.
The underlying reality is I believe that if debt increases at a rate which is faster than economic growth, then we’re already in decline. That seems to have been the case for many years now.
Man, I looked deeply into this weirdness way back in 2008 and decided I didn’t want anything to do with it, so kept no direct exposure to the mess. Indirectly, well, it’ll affect everyone.
I tell ya what’s interesting about the past few days though, it’ll be fascinating to see if there are margin calls, which can only lead to more selling. People tend to forget that financial assets aren’t necessarily liquid.
My best crystal ball hunch is that once the dust settles, there’ll be direct cash support to people who’d filed their annual returns. That’s my best guess at this stage, and it’ll perk up everyone’s spirits at the street level and get bricks and mortar consumption going again.
Are you watching this mess unravel?
Cheers
Chris
More on topic than last time. 🙂
An interesting thought popped in my mind the other day regarding some symbolic items in wagnerian operas and their relationship with some western symbolism in general and how western elite come to understand them.
Could the spear, all along, be an allegory of another symbol of power: the quill? As in “the quill is mightier than the sword”.
It occurred to me that the dichotomy between the sword (might is right, attacking force) and the quill/spear (intellectual, political, legal power, the spear being the judicial as a defending force) sets the contest of powers in the world we live in as well as Wagner’s.
Ultimately, only the sword wielded by a hero can slice through the gordian knot spell (bureaucracy) that the quill bearers (both religious and civil clerisy) have built since the Renaissance.
The most cogent comment I’ve seen on the market is that it is going through the equivalent of heroin withdrawal.
Treasury Secretary Bessent:
“It would have been easy to keep pumping up the economy, borrowing a lot of money, creating a lot of government jobs. There was no controversy when we were doing all that, but you would have ended up in a calamity. If you go back and look at the financial crisis in 2007-08, the economy looked great right up until then. You go back to the end of the dotcom bubble, and the whole credit problem, fraud at Enron and some other companies, the economy looked great until it didn’t.”
In support of that is this from the CEO of Citigroup back in 2007, “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”
Bankers have just as much self control as heroin addicts, so that analogy works.
It’s a good time to be a boomer (as in retired) with no debt and a paid off house. I found this on the news but not on the BBC where it should be if it was true.
Sir Keir Starmer will declare the end of globalisation and admit it has failed the public amid the growing fallout of Donald Trump imposing global trade tariffs, including 10 per cent on the UK.
Clay and JMG: I know numerous people locally who attended the protests. There’s a broad mix of ages. Their signs were handmade, and they’re not paid shills for anyone. I’ve seen many photos and videos that show the same kind of age mixing and homemade signs from a variety of places. I have no idea. I did note that when a local TV station posted a link to their story on FB, the comments were overwhelmingly from people who opposed the protests, thought they were fake, etc.
@Annette #182: “… not wanting to practice Catholicism because the church had such a poor attitude towards women, …”
I know what you mean. I think that radical feminism is, in many ways, a backlash against the misogyny of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
To me, one of the crucial differences between Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism, is that the Orthodox view of sex roles is traditional without being misogynistic.
So, where did the Roman misogyny come from? I think it dates from the 10th-11th Century Cluniac reforms, which (among other things) led the charge for mandatory clerical celibacy.
The leader of this movement was Abbot Odo of Cluny. The late Dr. Hervey Cleckley (best known for his study of psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity), wrote a book about sexual psychopathology entitled The Caricature of Love. In it, Cleckley writes extensively about Odo and his malign influence. It seems that Odo was one seriously “sick puppy.”
Many people speak of a “Lavender Mafia” in Catholic seminaries. It seems to me that this “Mafia” originated in the 11th Century, and may be the real driver behind the Schism between East and West.
More the shape of things to come info. In this substacker you have a kindred spirit
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/averting-collapse-is-no-longer-profitable
His general Substack. Worth combing through.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/
This guy, from the agricultural perspective. https://gardenearth.substack.com/
https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/is-100-years-of-cheap-food-coming
@JMG, Clay, Owen re: Butt-hurt Baby Boomers:
Here is our old buddy, JHK, on the subject for this week:
https://www.kunstler.com/p/farewell-fugazy
“The Baby Boomers have gone especially psychotic. That’s why there are so many old folks waving those Soros-made placards in the astroturfed crowds of the “Hands-off” protests. After an eighty-year run of the most mind-blowing comfort and convenience enjoyed by any generation in world history, America’s Boomers stare into the abyss of their fading Fugazy fortunes as their stock portfolios tank. Kind of too bad. Maybe you shouldn’t have gone along for the ride. Maybe you should have cared for your country a bit more.”
It seems like this commentariat consists of a lot of “dissident Boomers” like JMG and me. Like many others here, I saw through the stock market Ponzi scheme early on. In the early 1990’s, I became aware of the Fed’s “plunge protection team” established in the wake of the 1987 crash. I decided, then and there, that I wanted no part of a rigged casino, where only “the house” ever gets to win. As George Carlin said, “It’s a big club – and you ain’t in it!”
Yes, I am relatively “poor” by American middle-class standards. But, as Alexander Pope said:
“Oh, fool! to think God hates the worthy mind,
The lover and the love of human kind,
Whose life is healthful, and whose conscience clear,
Because he wants a thousand pounds a year.
Honour and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part, there all the honour lies.” (Essay on Man, IV)
I’ve done my feeble best to live accordingly. God will judge how well I did when I face Him.
>If you go back and look at the financial crisis in 2007-08
I think it’s a little more serious than an addiction.
My theory is the real economy died in 2008. What you have been seeing is an undead economy, kept alive by hidden state misdirection and sleight of hand (state of hand). And every time they take their illusion too seriously (the economy is healed now and can run on its own) and pull the plug on all the “assistance”, it wobbles for a brief moment and then starts going away. And then they desperately put the plug back in and crank everything to 11. This has happened at least twice now, that I know of and there may be other incidents I’m not aware of. This would be incident #3, as I reckon things. Like a Folger’s Taste Test – let’s see how it goes.
From the anger I’m seeing on certain parts of the internet, I don’t know if being a GoodBoomer is going to buy you anything over being a BadBoomer. In any case, all the bad decisions, happened on 106.9 The Boomer, from the 70s, 80s, 90s and today! Makes me glad I can say “Don’t blame me, had nothing to do with it”, the decisions that is, although the music is starting to get tiresome too.
JMG,
Can I allow Ambrose to cast my vote for this month’s 5th Wednesday? (His vote counts twice; I don’t vote.)
I think he deserves some kind of reward for managing to write a poem rhyming with those two words.
@ The Other Owen,
What you are talking about with regard to having the reserve currency is called ” Triffens Paradox”. The dilemma that the country has which holds the worlds reserve currency. Historically this was delt with in several ways. Since Bill Clinton it has of course been resolved by running a huge trade deficit. In the early years after Bretton Woods the US expanded the dollars in circulation around the world in other ways because in those years it had a huge trade surplus. There was the Marshall plan where huge amounts of US dollars were given or loaned to European countries after WWII to rebuild. Of course the Biden administration gave it a try with spreading money around the world using USAiD to fund color revolutions and such. Also there was a huge amount of US world currency loaned out around the world to build infrastructure ( this of course came with Imperial strings).
I think The empire is past the point where any of these tricks to maintain the reserve currency in the long run will work. Instead of hating Russia we should use them as a model of how a country can draw its horns back and thrive with an internally focused and self sufficient economy.
Edit-o: I should have deleted “I have no idea.” Sorry.
@Ambrose #173 and JMG, regarding the world as illusion doesn’t seem particularly conducive of compassion. However, regarding the world as real (or at least important) and individual identity as illusion does. I don’t know if there’s any branch of Buddhism (or any branch of occult philosophy) that holds that particular outlook, though.
One thing that I find interesting is the difference between the ways that Buddhism and Christianity interacted with indigenous, pagan, or otherwise non-prophetic religions. Buddhism was very syncretic and preferred to blend with local practices rather than try to completely destroy them the way Christianity tried to. I think that in an alternate universe where Gnosticism became the main strain of Christianity, it would have taken more of a Buddhist route as it spread.
Michael Martin: “I think that radical feminism is, in many ways, a backlash against the misogyny of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.”
??? What misogyny? Clerical celibacy? Not ordaining women? Too many of them being gay? I don’t get it. I would have thought radical feminism was motivated by secular social, political, and economic issues, and largely indifferent to religious ones. Okay, there’s abortion, but that doesn’t involve misogyny; that’s a disagreement over at one point a fetus / baby gets human rights.
“To me, one of the crucial differences between Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism, is that the Orthodox view of sex roles is traditional without being misogynistic.”
But…their theology on gender and marriage is almost the same as the Catholics! It’s like comparing McDonalds to Burger King. Sure, they’ve got married priests, but technically so do the Catholics. And the Orthodox have had all the same scandals that other religions have had, they just don’t get as much press coverage, being decentralized and all. Here are a couple of news stories:
https://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Church-settles-sex-abuse-suit-against-priest-3194082.php
https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=82116&page=1
Annette Simard: “my dad…suggested I look into the Gnostic church…”
Did he say which one? I’m astonished that ordinary people (even religious people) would have any awareness that gnostic churches even exist today. There are older groups in LA, Redwood City, and Palo Alto (all California), and more recently the Johannine Gnostic Church has been prominent..
JMG,
In his post today” Neo Iconoclasm”, Tim Watkins at the honest sorcerer. co. UK refers highly to your Wagner series and uses it in his essay.
Great series by the way, Thank you for it.
Stephen
“Nietzsche, however, was wrong.”
*screaming noises from professors!* Alas some have put Nietzsche on a pedestal, then as today.
@ Chris regarding stock market woes.
My only input on this is that – I don’t worry directly about the stock market issues, I worry about how people panic and make it others problems. The adage of ‘The drunk driver has the right of way’.
The market correction has been LONG over due, they have been pumping this thing up with printed money for decades, I suspect this is why the panic. Many folks are afraid that others will find out the dollars they trade are actually monopoly money and have nothing to back it up.
Reminded of a Hopi saying, those that are materialistic will panic and build shelters. Those that are spiritual already have their shelter within. It is funny, many astrologers had said April this year was going to be a big change for many. This stuff works.
@Karen/JMG/Clay. RE : Protests and age.
My brother has been in the police force for 35 years now and he has said that when senior citizens/regular looking folk make up a lot of participants, it is a much more organically formed protest. These are people that generally have the time to focus on various issues and the means to actually protest. Doesn’t mean they are right or not misguided but it is more organic.
It is when you see the more motley, rough crowd that you are seeing the paid for protests. Most police officers practically know the people by name they so consistently turn up to various causes.
JMG, sorry for the off-topic comment, but wanted to let you know that you were quoted (favorably) in Chris Bray’s substack: https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/a-hundred-year-moment-of-decision. You, Chris Bray, and James Howard Kunstler are my oases of sanity and clarity of thought!
JMG,
Tim Watkins references this series in his recent blog post – Neo-iconoclasm and I suspect that his post will provide some grist for the coming posts on “where we are now” that you may be planning.
Once again, all votes have been tabulated.
Annette, we’ll certainly get to it. I wonder which Gnostic church he had in mind; there are quite a few these days, and — being Gnostic — no two of them teach the same things.
Other Owen, that’s not my read. My read is that Trump knows perfectly well that the dollar’s ascendancy is doomed, but he also knows that if he can force the transition to be gradual, it’ll be a lot less traumatic to the US than if it happens suddenly. He’s leading what amounts to a retreat through hostile territory, the most difficult of all military operations, and he — or the people who have his ear — know that uncertainty is among his best weapons.
Chris, I’ve been having quite the entertaining time watching all this. I do have some skin in the game, and in fact I bought shares on Thursday; they’re up on average since then. Of course I didn’t waste my money on the big tech companies that are speculative favorites; I focused on industries that will do well in a post-global economy. I also followed my usual rule, which is to do exactly the opposite of what the mass mind suggests. Since the media and the usual forums were shrieking about an imminent crash, I knew it was a good time to buy.
Rashakor, interesting. Yes, you could probably make that case.
Siliconguy, yeah, that seems about right. Cold turkey is a rough way to do it, but it works.
Karen, thank you for the data point. Can you direct me to those photos and videos?
BeardTree, delighted to see it. The Honest Sorcerer has been saying sensible stuff for a while now; his is one of the blogs I check from time to time.
Michael, now I want to hear Ted Nugent belting out “Butthurt Boomers” to the tune of “Cat Scratch Fever”! Yeah, there are a fair number of dissident Boomers — i.e., those who didn’t cash in the ideals of their generation when so many others did — in the commentariat here, though I’m pleased to say that the largest share of the commentariat seems to be from the generations younger than mine. They’re the future; the Boomer generation belongs to the outworn past. As a generation, we failed — utterly, irrevocably, and cataclysmically. I think the main reason so many Boomer politicians cling to power when they should be in retirement homes is that they can’t bear to face that failure, and pretend to themselves that the dream is still in reach.
Jessica, nope — you and only you can cast your vote.
Walt, I’ve seen that approach — the world is real but individual identity is not — in some of the odder corners of the occult scene, but it’s certainly not common.
Enjoyer, it would have been a much happier timeline, to be sure. I like to imagine a world in which Christianity and Paganism worked things out the way that Buddhism and Shinto did in Japan, where pretty much everybody attends services of both, and theologians work out elegant fusions of the two along the lines of Ryobu Shinto.
Stephen, Yavanna, and John, thanks for this! Nice to see word getting out.
I focused on industries that will do well in a post-global economy
Could you please share what some of these industries you think might be?
Thanks.
>I think The empire is past the point where any of these tricks to maintain the reserve currency in the long run will work
Forget the long run, it’s breaking in the short run now as well. It was the Boomer’s parents that set us up for this epic mess that we’re all going to have to clean up. The Boomers get a pass for this bad decision. That would’ve been Ronald Reagan’s generation, and they’re all pushing up daisies. The Boomers did nothing about it before it got out of control though.
I’m not at all certain that this cleanup can be done in a controlled and steady way. To me, it looks like a bunch of half measures with the next stop being Collapse. I mean, I appreciate that Trump is at least doing *something* about the problem (so unBoomer of him) but they are still – half measures.
Said the oogieboogie to the gorblecorp
“you’re really just a floogiemoogie in the warble corp”.
Said the gorblecorp to the oogieboogie
“you’re just a flimsy burglewarp in a droognoogie.”
The undid each others every flop
in radical reactionary physics
they battled and they fought alas
without any thought to civics.
Said the oogiboogie to the gorblecorp
“I have no need for flim flam reflection!”
Said the gorblecorp to the oogiboogie
“your scrimscram actions always meet rejection!”
And the judge in court decides between lawfare objections.
We might just need a bailiff yet if we cannot calm the jury
as people move fast and break things, always in a hurry.
NEWS FLASH! It’s just come out
fifty percent of the senate identify as furry.
“You oogieboogies move to slow” said the gorblecorp
“You have no vision of where to go and all you catch are carp.”
“You gorblecorps are devoid of care,” said the oogieboogie
“with your monodog that does not share,
and a gospel of prosperity and circumcision.”
Back and forth they went, they were hornlocked all the way
“they came from Skull & Bones or Bohemian Grove” I heard people say.
“The government is warlocked,” — I’ll have to look into it later
between the doves & hawks, and the spouting spox, find room for double haters!
I’d pick a third
so help spread the word
I’d like to see a politico with moxie
or see a changer whose a total stranger
and maybe even foxy.
Until such a time I’ll commit thoughtcrime
and avoid the swamp of putrid slime.
The oogieboogies and gorblecorps
will one day go the way of whigs
so bide the time in this decline
and twirl your whirligig.
@Michael Gray 200: I just finished Galbraith’s book on the great crash of 1929. He devotes some space to considering why the Great Depression followed; what the linkages were, if any. He was so busy being sardonic that I may have missed whether he offered any definite answers. As I read the book, I was curious as to whether he’d mention the Glass-Steagal Banking Act of 1934. This Act was eventually repealed under Bill Clinton and the Gingrich congress in the 1990s. It had supposedly been one of the safeguards put in place to prevent recurrences of the crash-followed-by-depression. I believe its repeal was a bad idea. It separated commercial banks from infestment banks (if memory serves) and I think its repeal contributed significantly to the Bush-era hiccup of 2008. (Yes, “infestment banks was a typo, but I liked it so I left it in.) Galbraith touches on this on page 166 of his book, writing “commercial banks were separated from their securities affiliates,” without further comment.
Now I hate to say it but the only group of which I was aware who were objecting loudly to the repeal of Glass-Steagal were the obnoxious followers of Lyndon Larouche.
Let’s see… my local paper:
https://www.citizensvoice.com/2025/04/05/rally-held-on-public-square/
Harrisburg (maybe you could pick through the video):
https://www.abc27.com/local-news/harrisburg/hands-off-protest-draws-massive-crowd-to-the-state-capital/
Scranton:
https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/2025/04/05/scranton-and-wilkes-barre-part-of-hands-off-rallys/
If you can go to Facebook, search “Hands Off”:
https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=hands%20off
It can be difficult to find posts that came through my feed a few days ago, which is one of the annoying things about Farcebook. I haven’t gone looking for news outside PA.
” How many people nowadays, for that matter, remember that environmental conservation used to be one of the core planks of conservative platforms? (In the United States, the National Park system, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act all became under Republican administrations.)”
In my Environmental Ethics class, my professor criticized some idea (I can’t remember what) as “Roosevelt environmentalism.” To which I piped up “The last time we got anything done was with Roosevelt, what have contemporary environmentalists even accomplished lately?” I could have also thrown Nixon in there, but I didn’t think about it at the time.
@JMG “My read is that Trump knows perfectly well that the dollar’s ascendancy is doomed, but he also knows that if he can force the transition to be gradual, it’ll be a lot less traumatic to the US than if it happens suddenly.”
It is better to ween off the drug slowly that have a total shock to the system. I see folks squeeling about this a lot recently, and I get it – fast change and living in interesting times can be uncomfortable. My only question is “What is the alternative?”, just let thing carry on as normal until the bottom of the bucket drops out and the biggest economic
implosion of all time occurs?
Trump and a lot in the Whitehouse are mostly business folks and they know a 80% drop of the dollar is a better businesses move than a 100% drop. They just cannot signal this to the world.
I saw chat today about the additional China tarrifs today and folks saying “You fools, 90% of Walmart comes from there!?!?”. Personally, the idea of slowing down the beast of Walmart and similar businesses sounds like a great out come.
The folks that have to worry about this are those that relentlessly use Uber eats or any of the gig-economy apps. The people that do the actual work on those are probably about to get stable jobs to cover these gaps in imports. Not going to be someone to deliver a burrito at 2am for $4 an hour any more. Good, they deserve better and convenience is the biggest drug of our civilisation it would be good to ween off.
There was one sign I saw last week that was encouraging. A post on reddit where someone was going on about this and that about government and everything is awful and it is the end of everything etc. The top response “Anybody else notice how few insects there are nowadays?”. At least some are focusing on the real world even if it is with a negative sense.
I am also seeing a lot of folks in various more realistic environmental movements saying “we have had enough of pre-figuration, if we want change we have to do it ourselves now.” Be the change and all of that. The tides are changing and if you cling to debris of the way it was, you are going to drown.
Sorry to be sucked into the events of the week, this is meant to be about Wagner but a lot is going on.
Jessica: Thanks! I am ashamed, all my plotting has come to naught.
But as soon as I figure out how to brigade the comment section, then THIS will be our fifth-Wednesday topic:
https://protestia.com/2022/06/28/charismatic-prophetess-says-heaven-smells-like-pumpkin-pie-and-cows-drive-around-on-tractors/
(It’s Kat Kerr, not Cat Kerr like I said earlier. Imagine Anne Geddes gone mad–kids in heaven float through the air in giant bubbles, and all the aborted fetuses get to have tea parties with Jesus. )
Hi John Michael,
Like your style, but sadly, here again, being down under where free speech is not a thing, I can’t say anything about that. The authoritas get a bit weirded out and can mistakenly construe such loose talk as giving financial advice. 😊 We do strange down here! And other commenters from this country would be well advised to avoid specific discussions on that topic.
Hey, thought you might be interested in a very quick glimpse of the sheer scale of the recent flooding up north. If you can see it from space (at a considerable distance), you know it’s a lot of water: Watch desert floodwaters gushing towards Lake Eyre
Hope the talk went well and that the travel was pleasant.
Cheers
Chris
JMG, I realize we’re out of operas (unless you throw a couple of those others into the mix, like somebody suggested), but I was kind of hoping you would cover Nietzsche. After all, you’ve already got Feuerbach and Schopenhauer in here, and the German philosophy market is as substantial as the opera interpretation market. If the book is feeling a bit short, maybe a chapter on the interpretation of Wagner, and including Nietzsche and Shaw?
@207 Phutatorius “As I read the book, I was curious as to whether he’d mention the Glass-Steagal Banking Act of 1934. This Act was eventually repealed under Bill Clinton and the Gingrich congress in the 1990s.”
When they took the breaks off of the banking sector with that, the 2008 crash was inevitable. The specific flavor of it was unpredictable but the outcome was obvious. But this goes to the point that for the most part both major parties have been complicit in the build up to this point.
This is how it has been said that the worst president ever is the one that is currently sitting. The market crumbled under Bush but it was setup from over a decade earlier. They all inherit the problems of the past. And they usually are complicit in continuing the policies of the previous administrations like a ratchet. While I’m not a fan Trump, essentially on the specifics of how things have been implemented (good ideas done questionably), this idea has definitely changed this time around.
I do wonder what Galbraith would say of the current situation, he was fairly down on the conservatives in his time. “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”. That said the Republicans are modern conservative in name only, they have fundamentally changed a lot in recent years.
Ever-inquisitive JMG, you replied to Karen@#187 and asked her for photos & videos showing “…age mixing and homemade signs from a variety of places” related to last Saturday’s Hands Off events. I think I can contribute a couple of links that might work for that:
• An article with photos written by a Cal Poly SLO reporter about a local instance here in Central Cal, which given the source likely biases slightly towards showing students: https://mustangnews.net/protestors-san-luis-obispo/ (the final paragraph of the article quotes a remarkably cognitively-dissonant statement made by an organizer.)
* Yes, it’s Al Reuters but I think this collection of photos is pretty comprehensive and meets your request criteria too: https://www.reuters.com/pictures/47-signs-anti-trump-hands-off-protests-2025-04-06/ Peculiar that they chose to display 47 photos; that number has some particular associations, but I find it unlikely they conciously wish to promote The Orange One.
“Industries that will do well in a post-global economy.” Australian novelist Kerry Greenwood (who died yesterday, aged 70,) had her 1920’s detective Phryne Fisher tell her broker “No. I won’t buy the stocks you’re recommending. Food, beer, and land is what I’m investing in.” This early in 1929.
I don’t know about the land, but food and beer strikes me as sensible investments.
About Trump’s economic tactics – yeah, a fighting retreat might just well work. And I’m trying hard to practice acceptance of uncertainty, about the weather and everything else. I do notice that everybody’s cutting corners everywhere, even cutting down 4-page reports to 2 pages. St. Jude’s has stopped its mass mailings of notepads and address labels; their last one was at Christmas. If you don’t give, you don’t get, which is only fair. As the saying goes, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.”
Edward, not without running afoul of potential legal issues — as I’m in effect a journalist, I could be accused of boosting stocks in which I’m invested. What I’d encourage you to do is simply to spend some time thinking about what goods and services will be in high demand as the global economy winds down and much more of what’s consumed in America will be made here. Then research the companies that provide those goods and services, see which of them look well positioned, pick up some stocks…and then hold onto them for years. This is not going to be a fast process, you know.
Justin, excellent! It’s been a while since I handed out a gold star for a comment but this bit of verse richly deserves one.
Karen, thank you for this. I appreciate your willingness to provide sources.
Enjoyer, I don’t imagine that went over well.
Michael, I’m delighted to hear that some activists are starting to consider, you know, actually changing the things they can change, rather than simply waving signs and insisting that other people have to change so they don’t have to. I’ll be doing a post in the month or so ahead about the death of environmentalism and what can be done about it; that’s one of the few signs I can think of that suggests it won’t be a long cold wait.
Ambrose, if visionaries like this would simply get it through their heads that their visions are symbolic and not literal, we’d have less stupidity in the world. Mind you, the visionaries on the other side of the culture wars are just as silly…
Chris, oh, granted. There are limits to what I can say about that here, but I can drop some hints. As for Lake Eyre, didn’t the Outback use to have rain-fed lakes all through it, supporting a large population of bunyips? Those days may be coming back…
Ambrose, nope. That would require a whole second series of posts on Nietzsche — his approach to philosophy is unique enough that it can’t simply be summed up the way I did with Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. I’ll consider such a series at some point.
Bryan, thanks for this.
Patricia M, and thanks for this!
Haha, yes it did not go over well at all. But it didn’t go as bad as a previous incident…
Each of us in class had to give a ‘mini presentation’ about an environmental issue we care about. I did mine about why we need to take our own personal environmental stewardship seriously. Essentially, I argued that environmentalists should practice what they preach, lead by example and downsize their lives. I gave examples like consuming less meat, biking instead of riding cars, using less electricity, growing a kitchen garden, growing native plants instead of lawns, thrifting, buying local instead of online, etc. You know the drill.
Anyway, halfway through the presentation, another student piped up and said that none of that matters because “Just 100 companies are responsible for 70% of emissions!” I got kind of mad and I snapped back “Who do you think those 100 companies are polluting for? Who’s buying their stuff?” (Although I said a different word than ‘stuff’.)
Anyway, I got in a little bit of hot water over that one.
@JMG ” I’m delighted to hear that some activists are starting to consider, you know, actually changing the things they can change, rather than simply waving signs and insisting that other people have to change so they don’t have to.”
I think this is one of the good things that have come out from endless coverage of various protests for the last 25 years. 25 years of going to the streets banging on about the issue in vogue that week and it has all amounted to absolutely nothing. The ‘Occupy ‘ movement was the closest we got to anything actually vaguely happening and it dissolved.
The smart folks have received the message, it doesn’t work. Action is where the rubber meets the road. Not just another witty board and typical chant “What do we want YOU to do something! When do we want it? NOW!”
For instance I have seen some people in the Solar punk community that are actually doing things now. Not just another picture of a building with plants on it or cozy story about robots taking care of plants or another article about solar panels. Actual appropriate technology and social structures in action with all its dirty gritty unromantic details.
It is time to set the mental sail up and ride the winds of change!
Michael Martin #188: Interesting take on radical feminism and the misogyny of the Catholic Church. I most certainly felt the misogyny and for a while in my younger days I responded with radical feminism. This was a marvelous thing to manifest in West Virginia during the 70’s, I must say! And yes, my dad may very well have elected to drop out of seminary because he was deeply averse to homosexuality. I never did ask him why. His story was that one of his classmates was particularly fussy about picking apples. Reading between the lines. . .
Ambrose #198 and JMG: I don’t really know which Gnostic church my father was referring to. The conversation took place in the late 1970’s when I was on a home visit from college. He may have known about the Gnostic churches in California. My dad paid a lot of attention to the world and its doings. Sadly, I’ll never be able to ask him because he’s been dead now for 19 years.
Ambros
Thanks so much for the accolades, John, I really appreciate it. It was a fun challenge to go in the direction of nonsense verse with gorblecorps and oogieboogies as the theme.
I’ve really been enjoying writing some ballads and rhyming verse lately, such as this one, The Detroit Squatter:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/april-04th-2025
I’d like to try some more sonnets and villanelles as well.
Almost done reading your A World Full of Gods for the first time. It might very well be my favorite book of nonfiction of yours. Thank you so much for writing it.
The talk in this week’s post of compassion and pity reminds me of a trend I’ve seen lately with regards to the United States’s privileged classes. There’s been a lot of conversation among them about the new tariffs and general economic isolationism of the latest administration, which I’ve had the misfortune of being subjected to on the social media websites I use. Some of that conversation is the usual sneering elitism towards anyone poorer than them, but I’ve also been noticing a new note among it: a sort of condescending pity, saying that working class people in the US are going to be subjected to the horrible fate of working a factory job for eight hours a day, and isn’t that terrible. Granted, factory work isn’t the most pleasant thing in the world, but it used to provide a living, and it’s also a part of the US economy which has suffered the most from the shift to an imperial tribute economy. This new take I’ve been seeing is cast into a new light by the difference between compassion and pity highlighted by your post — even when supposedly sticking up for the American poor, the privileged classes can’t actually relate to them as equals.
My vote for a fifth Wednesday post is an analysis of how media, fiction and non-fiction alike, get affected when the society producing them is in decline. There have been points in history where a current of despair is notable in the works of art produced, and ours is one of them. Outside of that current, I’m wondering how much longer we can expect the giant media conglomerates which serve the status quo to remain relevant — or, for that matter, solvent.
>The ‘Occupy ‘ movement was the closest we got to anything actually vaguely happening and it dissolved
The consequences of Occupy were neither what the protestors or the subverters wanted. But there were consequences to it. Unforeseen consequences. That are still going on.
In that vein – Relay these words. Prepare for unforeseen consequences.
>That said the Republicans are modern conservative in name only, they have fundamentally changed a lot in recent years
I would say, no, they haven’t. They’re the same do-nothing posing grandstanders they’ve always been. Blah blah blah and absolutely no action.
>why the Great Depression followed
In the rural areas, the economy was bad well before 1929. All the Great Depression was, was the crappy economy finally making it to the big cities and the Fancy Folk/Cloud People. These things are not events, they are processes, much like the weather.
I’ve been thinking on Schopenhauer’s “Will in Torment”. My instinctive reaction was “What about surprise?” Say I kick a stone, intending it to skip down one path, but it skips down another. To call the change in course an “obstacle” is not quite right – I would feel interested, even elated to see a course of action I *willed* take a different, yet intriguing course. So then the Will learns of other Wills that, though different do not directly contradict it. (I have not read Schopenhauer)
Consider also Lao Zi, though: A tree that does not bend to a hurricane is snapped in two. A rock in a stream is worn to gravel. In rigidity, death. In flexibility, life. So perhaps Schopenhauer just had a very precise, demanding and unyielding will, whereas a Will that sees differences and contradictions not as conflict, but as serendipitous novelty, would rejoice in all things. Admittedly, be blown with every light breeze and you risk becoming a mediator torn in twain by stronger Wills, but much pain can be evaded otherwise.