Embedded Files
( - previous issue - / - next issue - )
pdf = www.bit.ly/3d8KsWz
AR 26:46 - Suicide, "self-loss," and "White Coat Shamanism"
In this issue:
CENSORSHIP OR CONSENSUS? - "woke" classicists seeking to destroy their own discipline
CONSCIOUSNESS - "the sense of unity to which mystical experiences so tantalizingly point"
Apologia Report 26:46 (1,551)
December 1, 2021
CENSORSHIP OR CONSENSUS?
"Canceling Western Civilization" by Robin Phillips <robinmarkphillips.com> -- "ISIS militants disdain the heritage of the past, and consider statues a form of idolatry" exemplifying what Phillips later calls "a radical form of cancel culture....
"Such hatred of art is not limited to Islam. In the 1650s, after Oliver Cromwell took control of Great Britain as Lord Protector, his men roamed the land with long poles, which they used to shatter stained-glass art in the high windows of ancient cathedrals. Cromwell, too, sought to eradicate much of the past, particularly where cultural memory had found expression in art and Christian holidays. Under the Protectorate he set up, the liberal arts were carefully regulated, and the theater was banned altogether. ...
"Fundamentalism can be religious or anti-religious. ISIS fundamentalists are religious (but anti-Christian), while Communist fundamentalists were virulently anti-religion. ...
"Ironically, even as American forces were fighting against fundamentalism in the Middle East, a new form of it was rising within the United States itself. ...
"The new fundamentalism goes by various names, including wokeness, radical liberalism, critical theory, and progressivism. In this article we will simply refer to it as 'Woke Fundamentalism,' or Wokeism for short. ...
"Woke Fundamentalism is a virulent version of cancel culture, which aims to send Western civilization down the memory hole. ...
"Wokeism has been attacking the liberal arts by undermining the notion that the arts have intrinsic value. The Woke follow Karl Marx, who taught that the liberal arts have merely extrinsic value as instruments that can be used to achieve various pragmatic goals. ...
"A hallmark of twentieth-century experiments in Marxism was the effort to channel man's aesthetic faculties to purely useful ends, and to insist that works of imagination and beauty should be created and/or used only as tools to serve the goals of the state. ...
"Woke Fundamentalism has been drawing from the Communist playbook by treating the liberal arts as if their value is merely instrumental in advancing social-justice agendas. ... [T]he Woke leave the disciplines of higher learning in place even as they pragmatize and polemicize them, hollowing out their content so that these disciplines become little more than weapons in the hands of social justice warriors. ...
"Earlier this year, at the annual meeting <www.bit.ly/3oVdG0F> of the Society for Classical Studies, we got a sense of how tense this conflict has become. In an address <www.bit.ly/3nKTwXY> to a panel of classicists, Dr. Mary Williams argued that the classics have more than instrumental value, saying, 'Maybe we should start defending our discipline in and of itself, and saying it's Western civilization, it matters.' She was roundly rebuked for these and other comments before being kicked out of the meeting." (Related: <www.bit.ly/3xk5mLK> "How I was Kicked Out of the Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting")
"Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an associate professor of classics at Princeton University ... serves as an interesting case study in how the Woke radicalize academics by attacking the very thing that makes them good scholars in the first place, namely, love for their subjects.
"In February the New York Times ran a glowing profile <www.nyti.ms/3xiyO4O> on Peralta.... [article subhead: "Dan-el Padilla Peralta thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece and Rome off their pedestal - even if that means destroying their discipline."] ... [I]n college, when he announced his decision to major in the classics, he received push-back from some of his closest friends. ...
"Peralta ... responded to these concerns by arguing that the classics were intrinsically valuable, regardless of their political utility. But then his perspective began to shift. The Times profile reports that he became increasingly troubled by the perceived lack of practical utility in the classics, until he finally abandoned the position that the literature of Greece and Rome has inherent value. ...
"The question of classics' utility was not a trivial one. How could he take his education in Latin and Greek and make it into something liberatory? 'That became the most urgent question that guided me through my undergraduate years and beyond,' Padilla said.
"After coming to these realizations, Peralta tried to unlearn much of his earlier education. 'I had to actively engage in the decolonization of my mind,' he said. ...
"[H]e is now trying to bring attention to the problem of 'whiteness' in the classics. Greek and Roman language and literature are intrinsically bound up with white supremacy, he teaches. This is part of his larger agenda of woke activism, and his reduction of classical scholarship to a tool for political and social ends. ...
"Peralta ... represents a consensus among the Woke in academia that their various disciplines - from classics to history to art to literature - should be pragmatized and politicized. ...
"[W]oke iconoclasm and anti-intellectualism are actually more sinister than book-burning and statue-crushing, for they allow institutions of higher learning to continue operating even as they are being subverted." Salvo, 57 - 2021, <www.bit.ly/3HhFWTG>
News Flash: Just learned of the CRT Guidebook for Parents on how to respond school boards by Christopher Rufo <www.bit.ly/3DSpmYh>
For an excellent defense of the classics' utility, see Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath. [1]
---
CONSCIOUSNESS
In writing "The Dangerous Art of Depersonalization" for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle (Sep 23 '21), Zen practitioner and writer Alex Tzelnic refers to the process of "ego deconstruction." He describes different belief systems affected by similar phenomena. In addition to Buddhism and the idea of mindfulness, Tzelnic discusses shamanism, psychedelic drugs and psychosis. (We have previously noted such associations in Apologia Report, finding it independently described in various ways over the years. Visit <www.j.mp/ar-chive> to read more about related topics from our past issues.)
Tzelnic begins by describing a suicide case involving "depersonalization, a condition marked by a sense of detachment from one's body and thoughts [and leading to an] inability to identify as an individual with a history, personality, or future [including] writing emails in the third person...." Just prior to taking her life, the victim asked "So the question arises what happens AFTER the deconstruction of your body/mind/ego?"
Tzelnic finds that this is "a question that has both inspired and haunted seekers for millennia." Taking this further, he speculates that "It may be impossible to isolate the factors that determine the ultimate outcome" of depersonalization. He believes that "considerations could protect against negative experiences with contemplative practices."
Tzelnic acknowledges that in Buddhist practice, "ego deconstruction is a goal." The negative influence of the self is a primary concern in Buddhist philosophy. Related to this, he observes: "When one is not engaged in a task, researchers have found that the brain's default mode is self-referential processing, which occurs in an area of the brain known as the default mode network (DMN)." Enter the self. Evidently, when you're doing something that doesn't tax the brain, in your day-dreaming "you're either the hero or the victim, but the star nonetheless." This calls for a solution. Enter Buddhism: "This raises the question: can we spend less time succumbing to self-obsession?"
Tzelnic moves on to related practices, beginning with psychedelic drugs. "A 'bad trip,' in which the sudden loss of self leads to intense destabilization and potentially destructive behavior, is what first led researchers to conclude that psychedelics could mimic the experience of psychosis. They weren't entirely wrong."
Psychosis is defined as "some form of loss of contact with reality." Tzelnic reports on researchers examining the potential dark side of meditation in a study which faced a conundrum in making a distinction between an "adverse effect" and a "religious experience."
"Phil Borges, a documentarian of indigenous and tribal cultures, notes in a TED talk <www.bit.ly/2ZjYGke> that in some of these societies shamans are often those who have suffered a mental break. ...
"There's no question that psychosis requires professional intervention. And the depersonalization that occurs through meditation, drugs, or mental disorder can nudge one into a dangerous state, as occurred in the case of [the suicide described above]. Yet it is also possible that one could be nudged in a more spiritual direction to experience depersonalization as a unifying awakening."
Tzelnic also believes that Timothy Leary (1920–1996) - "a complex figure in the history of psychedelics" - contributed valuable insights by coining the terms "set" and "setting." The application Tzelnic sees is that "Despite the volatility of these [psychedelic] substances, experiences of bad trips in a research setting are more infrequent because set and setting are carefully considered." The psychedelic context here employs "the help of an experienced guide (what Michael Pollan <michaelpollan.com> has called 'White Coat Shamanism')." Tzelnic regrets that this sort of set and setting framework "is often absent from the meditative experience that has been taken up in the West."
He concludes by speculating that "learning how to properly support and integrate experiences of self-loss [may eventually lead] to the sense of unity to which mystical experiences so tantalizingly point." <www.bit.ly/3HFTF77>
-------
SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath (Encounter, 2001, paperback, 323 pages) <www.amzn.to/2kMa9oE>
( - previous issue - / - next issue - )
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse