09AR14-43

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Apologia Report 14:43 (1,001)

November 18, 2009

Subject: Islam and Western culture's self-destructive ideology

In this issue:

ISLAM - liberal uncertainty may condemn Europe's future

JUNG, CARL G. - unpublished work expected to have huge influence

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ISLAM

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, by Christopher Caldwell [1] -- in his review, Paul Marshall summarizes Caldwell's message by reporting that Europe's "immigrants might be considered hostile to European values, except that Europe itself increasingly has only a foggy sense of what those values might be. ...

"Caldwell looks with alarm at Europe's continuing rejection of itself. Without a rejection of the religion and culture that sustained Europe for centuries, he says, the immigration troubles might never have occurred, or at least would not have been so severe: His verdict is suicide rather than murder.

"The author notes that even the prominent German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who is an atheist, has acknowledged that 'Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.'

"Yet much of Europe has discarded its historic religious underpinnings as irrelevant at best, harmful at worst. Even the memory of what a religiously ordered society was like has seemed to disappear, Mr. Caldwell observes. 'A good definition of religion' for most modern Europeans, he says, might be 'an irrational opinion, strongly held.' ...

"Most European elites, though, have not debated seriously the potential effects of introducing into this land of postmodern chatter millions of devout believers in another religion, one previously seen as antagonistic to European culture. As Mr. Caldwell says, Europe's elites seem hardly to have considered that the ethical views they pride themselves on have little meaning when divorced from Christian origins. ...

"'There is no consensus, not even the beginning of a consensus,' Mr. Caldwell writes, 'about what European values are.' When the Netherlands decided not long ago to try to define its values and inculcate them in prospective new residents, it ended up producing a ghastly naturalization packet that included a video that featured 'gays expressing affection in public, and bare-breasted women on the beach.' Welkom, immigrants!

"In his reflections on Europe's slide into a sort of secular suicide, Mr. Caldwell notes the key role played by that most religious impulse: guilt. He argues that the dominant moral mood of postwar Europe was 'repentance for two historical misdeeds, colonialism and Nazism.' Over the decades, guilt has festered into 'a sense of moral illegitimacy' and a 'self-directed xenophobia' that now shapes the continent's response to immigration. ...

"All this may seem to cry out for a loud and long, soul-searching debate, but don't count on it. Discussion about immigration is decidedly circumscribed in countries where postcolonial guilt has led to taboos against criticism of anything putatively Muslim. The riots and slayings over a Danish newspaper's publication of a few cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad put an entire continent on notice to watch its words. Mr. Caldwell gives little advice and few predictions about what lies ahead. But he does address the question of 'whether you can have the same Europe with different people. The answer is no.'" Wall Street Journal, Sep 18 '09, pW8. <www.tinyurl.com/m7vwyz>

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JUNG, CARL G.

As a transitional figure between the academic world (psychology in this case), the New Age movement, and the occult, few, if any, have had the breadth of influence that Jung has had - much of it from his written work - well after his death. Much of his writing has never been seen and remains under the control of the Jung estate's heirs. 1z1 One of these previously unpublished manuscripts has just been released, and it's a game-changer. Jungians are all abuzz about his Red Book [2]. Sara Corbett explains all this in "The Holy Grail of the Unconscious" (lengthy cover story, New York Times Magazine, Sep 20 '09, n.p.).

"Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology and, along with Sigmund Freud, was responsible for popularizing the idea that a person's interior life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration - a notion that has since propelled tens of millions of people into psychotherapy. Freud, who started as Jung's mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.

"Whether or not he would have wanted it this way, Jung - who regarded himself as a scientist - is today remembered more as a countercultural icon, a proponent of spirituality outside religion and the ultimate champion of dreamers and seekers everywhere, which has earned him both posthumous respect and posthumous ridicule. Jung's ideas laid the foundation for the widely used Myers-Briggs personality test and influenced the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. His central tenets - the existence of a collective unconscious and the power of archetypes - have seeped into the larger domain of New Age thinking while remaining more at the fringes of mainstream psychology."

What informed the latter portion of Jung's work was an encounter with his own personal madness. "It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. ...

"He later would compare this period of his life - this 'confrontation with the unconscious,' as he called it - to a mescaline experiment. ...

"But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him.' ...

"Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings." Yes, Jungian art. The version now on sale is a color reproduction, "scanned, translated and footnoted."

It took Jung 16 years to write it. It took Sonu Shamdasani "more than five years of concentrated work" to understand it. Shamdasani, who teaches at the University College London's Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine, is also general editor for the Philemon Foundation, which "focuses on preparing the unpublished works of Carl Jung for publication. ...

"The central premise of the book, Shamdasani told me, was that Jung had become disillusioned with scientific rationalism - what he called 'the spirit of the times' - and over the course of many quixotic encounters with his own soul and with other inner figures, he comes to know and appreciate 'the spirit of the depths,' a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams."

Other interesting remarks by Corbett: "Richard Noll ... proposed that Jung was a philandering, self-appointed prophet of a sun-worshiping Aryan cult and that several of his central ideas were either plagiarized or based upon falsified research. ...

"Undergoing analysis is a central, learn-by-doing part of Jungian training, which usually takes about five years and also involves taking courses in folklore, mythology, comparative religion and psychopathology, among others. ...

"Jungian analysis revolves largely around writing down your dreams (or drawing them) and bringing them to the analyst - someone who is patently good with both symbols and people - to be scoured for personal and archetypal meaning. ...

"The Red Book is not an easy journey - it wasn't for Jung, it wasn't for his family, nor for Shamdasani, and neither will it be for readers. The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. ...

"As far as [Shamdasani] is concerned, once the book sees daylight, it will become a major and unignorable piece of Jung's history, the gateway into Carl Jung's most inner of inner experiences. 'Once it's published, there will be a "before" and "after" in Jungian scholarship,' he told me, adding, 'it will wipe out all the biographies, just for starters.'" <www.tinyurl.com/otpz78> (This online version of the article features an imbedded link to photographs of the book's colorful interior.)

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Sources, Monographs:

1 - Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, by Christopher Caldwell (Doubleday, 2009, hardcover, 432 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/kmd2l9>

2 - The Red Book, by C. G. Jung, Sonu Shamdasani, ed. (W.W. Norton, 2009, hardcover, 416 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/yz5xutp>

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