I concluded that in all societies the culture of the day emerges largely unconsciously from the synchronization of the contextual settings of that day with the continuum of the societal cultural field which is composed of two layers : at the deepest level are the axioms of civilization which are imprinted in the subconscious of the individuals and on top of the axioms is the societal worldview (religion or other grand narrative that in cohesive societies is shared by all the citizens). We have to be realist. Because the continuum, of their societal cultural field, is irreconcilable Westerners and Chinese share visions of reality that are not compatible.
Western dualism is the master axiom of the Western civilization. It is grounded in absolutist opposites that are in a confrontation to the death. God the good fights the evil devil and for those who abandoned their religion the absolutist formula is a little shorter : good and evil fight to the death. Westerners are thus constantly viewing themselves as being on the side of their god, or of what is good., or both. And the differences they observe in the behaviors, attitudes and actions of "the other" are so many signs, in their eyes, of the evil she or he represents. Driven by a dualist absolutism the subconscious of Westerners forces them to believe that "the other" has to convert to their Western way and if "the idiot" refuses they believe that it is their moral obligation to destroy her or him. Watch the present craze against Russia...
The contrast could not be starker with the Chinese understanding that reality is animated by complementary polarities that are in a constant dance of accommodation while the contact between these polarities results in sparks of energy that power their flow in space and time. And watch how in the Chinese vision of the working of reality there is no place for absolutes. there is no place for a creator, there is no place for a beginning and an end ... In consequence the Chinese perceive "the other" not as a danger but as an opportunity to learn or to gain something.
Bhadrakumar's perspective is naturally given by the continuum of his own Indian societal cultural field and it is in this sense that his perception of Western behaviors and actions is so interesting to me. Here follow some quotes from "Why Biden loves to demonise Putin", Indian Punchline, by M. K. Bhadrakumar. 2022-03--04.
"....racial prejudices come easily to Christian countries, beneath their veneer of modernity. America’s bars are pouring bottles of Russian-made vodka into street drains; Governors are calling for Russian liquors to be pulled from store shelves. True, symbolism, particularly when it comes to food and drink, can be powerful among Americans traditionally to express their cultural identity. ... when the US President Joe Biden, a conservative Irish Catholic, incessantly demonises Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, is it accidental ?
... The Western rhetoric against Putin is the language of Inquisition, infamous for the severity of its tortures. The West’s sanctions against Russia are on the one hand borne out of racial prejudices and on the other hand due to the Manichean fears that the five centuries of their world domination are coming to an end. The Ukraine conflict tolls the death knell for western hegemony, where the sword and the Bible became interchangeable. These are momentous times in the chronicles of Christianity. "
Yes the veneer of Western Modernity is very thin indeed. Racial prejudice creeps so easily to the surface in Christian countries that it begs the question if the Western mind is so weak that it simply can't accept being beaten by "the other" at its own economic game ? I'm afraid that the application of dualism by the subconscious is irresistible. To resist the subconscious is possible in theory but it needs a lot of word to re-arrange the working of one's cognitive system. The large majority of Western citizens just don't practice this kind of discipline so their conscious minds are at the mercy of their subconscious. This is the hypothesis that I defend in "The Continuum of the Cultural Field". But not being in control, of the work of their conscious minds, big capital holders and their servants will recourse once more to the loser's solution of terror.
And speaking about terror many signs are indicating that a new worldwide campaign is currently taking off. Does that mean that big capital holders and their servants have decided to start a new crusade against the infidels who refuse to submit to their rules based order ? The problem with such an initiative is that once it is launched it is impossible to control it... are those working for 3 letter-agencies having no memory at all or are they merely so dumb ? I hope that the real International Community, I mean the new multilateral community of nations, duly registers this moment and prepares to bring those who decided, to launch this white-supremacism terrorist campaign, behind bars for the rest of their lives.
Why did the CIA prepare, for months or years, to launch an insurgency in Ukraine ?
For this part I rely on the reporting of Whitney Webb who is a very rare, smart, and courageous US investigative journalist. She published an article, on "The last American Vagabond" 2022-03-02, titled "Ukraine and the New Al Qaeda". What follows is a selection of quotes from this article :
"The coming terror threat of the "Globalization of White Supremacy", if we are to believe our unusually prescient intelligence officials, appears to be the “next thing” to befall the world as the Covid crisis wanes. It also appears that the CIA has crowned itself the midwife and chosen Ukraine as the birthplace of this new “terror threat,” one which will create not only the next proxy war between US empire and its adversaries, but also the pretext to launch the “War on Domestic Terror” in North America and Europe.
...the CIA’s warnings of an imminent invasion of Ukraine were scoffed at, not only by many American analysts, but also apparently by both the Russian and Ukrainian governments themselves. It is alleged that this all changed, at least from the Russian perspective, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s claim at the Munich Security Conference that his government would seek to make Ukraine a nuclear power in violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Surely, Zelensky and his supporters in Washington DC and Langley, Virginia would have known that such an extreme claim from Zelensky would elicit a response from Russia.
...this Ukrainian insurgency began to be formed by the CIA at least several months, if not several years, prior to Russia’s currently ongoing military campaign in Ukraine.
... In recent weeks, the State Department—for the first time—formally designated a white supremacist organization, the Russian Imperial Movement, as a terrorist organization, in part because it’s trying to train and seed adherents around the globe, inspiring them to carry out terror attacks…
... There are serious—and explicit—warnings about this coming from U.S. government and foreign officials that eerily echo the warnings that came about for al Qaeda before 9/11.”
... As a result of the current escalation of events in Ukraine, it appears inevitable that the effort to use RIM to paint Russia as a driving force behind “transnational white supremacism” are due to resurface. This effort appears to have as one of its goals the minimization of the role that Neo-Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion, the Neo-Nazi paramilitary unit embedded within Ukraine’s National Guard, are actively playing in the current hostilities.
... With the CIA now backing an insurgency that prominent former CIA officials are claiming will “spread across multiple borders,” the fact that the forces being trained and armed by the agency as part of this “coming insurgency” include Azov battalion is significant. It seems that the CIA is determined to create yet another self-fulfilling prophecy by breeding the very network of “global white supremacy” that intelligence officials have claimed is the “next” big threat after the Covid-19 crisis wanes. "
The mainstream media announces "The Globalization of White Supremacy"
After financing Muslim terrorism the CIA is now financing white supremacy while accusing Russia of being the instigator ! Watch how, these last few days, the mainstream media has started to accuse President Putin to be the head of a new worldwide terror campaign by Nazis and other extreme right groups...
2022-03-01
The Guardian "Putinism is breeding in the heart of the Republican party" by Robert Reich states that "the world is frighteningly locked in a battle to the death between democracy and authoritarianism".
Good versus evil is the prime expression of Western dualism. Dualism is the master axiom of the Western civilization. Everything else is deriving from dualism. But by lapping together “conservatism” and "racism" the instigators of this Psy-Op are divulging its origination in the Biden-Clinton camp...
2022-03-02
Salon followed Reich’s piece with a similar editorial entitled “How white supremacy fuels the Republican love affair with Vladimir Putin,” which concludes with the assertion that “today’s Republican Party is America’s and the world’s largest white supremacist and white identity organization” and “that “conservatism” and racism are now fully one and the same thing here in America.
So ok this is a Psy-Op originating in the Biden-Clinton camp...
2022-03-05
Guardian, by Sergio Olmos : "Key to white survival’: how Putin has morphed into a far-right savior".
No doubt any longer Putin is the boss of white supremacism... Westerners will soon start to believe that they have won the argument to dethrone Putin... and to crush Trump !
Sir, with due respect, Mr. Bhadrakumar and you are totally misunderstanding the true nature of Christianity. The Christian religion is not dualistic at all, quite the opposite! Dualism is instead the essence of its very opposite, the deadly enemy of Christianity: Gnosticism, in its Manichean version. The ideology of the Western liberal states is essentially Gnostic. The Christian heritage is still alive - in its Eastern brand - in Russia, which explains the inextinguishable hatred of the West. You can find more on the relation between Christianity and Gnosticism, if you are interested, at this link:
ReplyDeletehttps://thefederalist.com/2017/09/18/word-woke-encapsulates-evil-self-defeating-ideology/
about the "Catholicism" of Biden and kines:
http://jcrao.freeshell.org/Americanism.html
Dear Alberto.
ReplyDeleteYou write : "The Christian religion is not dualistic at all, quite the opposite! Dualism is instead the essence of its very opposite, the deadly enemy of Christianity: Gnosticism, in its Manichean version. The ideology of the Western liberal states is essentially Gnostic. ".
First lets clarify that you write about Eastern Christianity while I was writing about Western Christianity and Western civilization...
What we should always keep in mind is the following :
1. Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 and the fact is that the Christian creed was not unified at the time. There were a great variety of texts circulating locally and this is why the Empire ordered the church to unify the creed.
2. St. Jerome was commissioned in 382 by Pope Damasus to produce a new Latin translation of the Bible. The Greek Septuagint had been accepted by the Nicene Creed as the official version of the Old Testament. According to legend the Septuagint was a translation of the Torah from Hebrew into Greek that seventy Jewish scholars had been ordered to realize by the Greek King of Egypt Ptolemy II Philadelphus for inclusion in the Library of Alexandria. This formed the Greek Septuagint "translation by seventy interpreters" of the Greek Old Testament. The work was completed in the late 2nd century BC.
The new testament was composed of texts that circulated locally. Jerome and his team translated some 15,000 such local texts in Greek which was the high culture under Rome and his team then selected those texts that best served their personal vision of the Christian creed. The translators were naturally well versed in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and so their texts incorporated Aristotle’s interpretation of dualism as the intellectual foundation of "the ultimate cause" which is the finality of god . If you want to understand the profound meaning of dualism in Western Christianity you have to read Aristotle's Metaphysics.
I give a presentation of the origins of Western Christianity in "The Continuum of the Cultural Field. 2.5.1. Western Europe-Christianity".
The unification of the Christian texts realized under Jerome's leadership became the official creed of Western Christianity. And to my knowledge the Western Creed was never accepted by Eastern Christianity. .. but my knowledge of Eastern Christianity is insufficient for me to comment on it.
Dear laodan,
ReplyDeleteI was writing about Christianity as a whole. The theological differences between Catholics and Orthodox are objectively small, but they are magnified by their ecclesiological aspects. The doctrinal issues are objectionable to the Orthodox primarily because of their implications regarding ecclesiastical authority.
I disagree with your reconstruction of the developement of the Western (Latin) Church in some fundamental points:
1. Constantine did not establish Christianity as the exclusive religion of the state, but included it among the many cults sponsored by the Roman state, in the hopes of achieving religious unity and harmony. Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire later, in 380, under Theodosius.
2. The ecumenical council had already defined the Nicene Creed in 325, but as you can check neither the Creed nor the twenty canons which follow it (https://arcaneknowledge.org/catholic/councils/council01.htm) mention any official version of the Bible. Indeed the Greek Septuagint, back then and now, does not exist as a single version. This is the reason why Jerome, a scholarly man who had a deep knowledge of Greek and Hebrew (he did not need a team of helpers!), discouraged by the multiple versions available, turned to the Hebrew Bible, moved to the Holy Land and translated it in Latin instead. But he retained the Greek Septuagint as a reference to harmonize the text. He also retained some parts of the Septuagint. So it is untenable that Aristotle's dualism could pass into the new Latin version (the Latin Vulgate) through a translation from Greek to Latin. In addition, such an attempt would be immediately exposed and Jerome's orthodoxy has never been disputed. A textual comparison can disprove any claim that the Vulgate is anymore dualistic than the Septuagint. The Eastern Christians have never raised objections to the Latin Bible.
The Nicene Creed was not changed by Jerome's translation. It remained, and still is, the Western Creed.
There was no separation between Western (Roman Catholic) Christians and Eastern Christians before the schism of 1054: they were a single Christianity.
Indeed, the theological differences between Catholics and Orthodox today are objectively small, but they are magnified by their ecclesiological aspects. The doctrinal issues of papal infallibility, purgatory, and the filioque are objectionable to the Orthodox primarily because of their implications regarding ecclesiastical authority.
Indeed, in the 1200s St Thomas Aquinas developed the Scholastic theology (Thomism) relying on Aristotle's philosophy. Against the Orthodox contention that the Latins have uncritically borrowed from pagan philosophy,
a) The Latin Church did not receive Aristotle without modification (e.g., contrast Thomism with Averroism);
b) The Orthodox Church itself borrowed from pagan philosophy, esp. Plato;
c) There is no shame in using philosophy that was first developed by pagans, as though Christians were required to reinvent culture from ground zero.
Dualism is a basic element of Plato's philosophy. Aristotle criticised rationally Plato's dualism.
Dear Alberto,
ReplyDeleteYou write that you disagree with my reconstruction of the developement of the Western (Latin) Church in some fundamental points.
Let's see your words :
1. You write as response to my point 1 :
"Constantine did not establish Christianity as the exclusive religion of the state, but included it among the many cults sponsored by the Roman state, in the hopes of achieving religious unity and harmony. Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire later, in 380, under Theodosius."
This was in response to my following words :
"Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 and the fact is that the Christian creed was not unified at the time. There were a great variety of texts circulating locally and this is why the Empire ordered the church to unify the creed".
Come on man. This is not a rooster fight ! Nobody wrote that Constantine had established Christianity as the exclusive religion of the state...
2. Your second point.
About the Septuagint and the different books constituting the Bible :
--- Christianity was made the official religion of the Empire in 380 AD under the rule of emperor Theodosius who was the last emperor to rule over
both the eastern and the western parts of the Empire. That why when Jerome was commissioned in 382 by Pope Damasus to produce a new Latin translation of the Bible. The reasonwas that by that time Rome had no longer any authority over the East. The emperor in Constantinople was his own master and the church no longer accepted the orders from
--- The Latin Bible would serve in the South-West of Europe exclusively which explains why some theologians and some Orthodox believers talk about a Frank Christianity to characterize what is habitally called Western Christianity...
I wrote "The Greek Septuagint had been accepted by the Nicene Creed as the official version of the Old Testament". Sorry that was factually wrong. I wrote from memory and my memory seem to have tricked me. St. Jerome translated the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew version rather than from the Greek while under Eastern Christianity the Septuagint was the exclusive material being translated. From there arose a differentiation between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity in term of recognizing a legacy to Jewish religious practice. This translation of the Jewish Torah from Hebrew to Latin is what imprinted its Judeo-Christian character into Catholic Christianity.
Speaking about dualism. Jerome had definitely a decisive influence on Wesetrn Christianity because of his translations. But also because of his interpretations or his commentary on the Bible and this is why you can't be right when you write that "... it is untenable that Aristotle's dualism could pass into the new Latin version (the Latin Vulgate) through a translation from Greek to Latin". But there is another argument that runs counter to your view. It is that the text is one thing. Interpretations by famous theologians are another thing. I have in mind St. Augustine whom you forgot to mention.
Augustine was opposed to Jerome’s Latin translation from the Hebrew rather than from the Septuagint saying that this was driving a wedge between Christians of the East and West since the Greek-speaking Christians of the East were exclusively using the Septuagint. Augustine's argument delayed the adoption ofJerome's translation but it evenmtually won the day. But Augustine, at the difference with Jerome, was widely popular and his commentaries inforced Aristotelian Metaphysics in Christianity by satisfied the need for a simple explanation...
During the dark-ages, from the fifth to the 13th century, anything that did not fit the 'Latin Vulgate Bible' was banished and then come St Thomas Aquinas and his Scholastic theology (Thomism) relying on Aristotle's philosophy.
3. About dualism.
ReplyDeleteIt is rather difficult in a comment on a blog post to do justice to such a complex subject.
I would like to use the path of pragmatism and observation to show that in matter of fact Western Christian morality is rooted, among other, in the opposition of good versus evil which is a dualistic proposition per excellence whose full significance can only be grasped by comparing it to the proposition of another culture. And you can observe the daily application of this proposition in Western attitudes towards Russia : Western good guys versus Russian evil guys...
--- The Western "good versus evil" proposition automatically positions the Western actor (individual or society) on the side of good and that Western actor is thus subconsciously forced to view the difference of "the other" as being something that is evil. Think about it. This is what has driven the entirety of the encounter of the West with the rest of the world since the crusades and it is incontestable that this has resulted in hundreds of millions of individual deaths and also the violent extinction of uncounted civilizations and societies... To my knowledge Christian Orthodoxy was never associated in this entreprise and this fact had me always wondering why... I still do not have a satisfying explanation though but what I wrote in point 2 indicates some paths to the beginning of an answer...
--- The Chinese proposition in viewing the difference of "the other" is not rooted in the dualistic "good versus evil" proposition. In their view reality is change itself. That's why danger or crisis for them does not have the same absolutism that we Westerners attach to them. They furthermore view the animation of the parts or elements of reality as being powered by their complementary polarities in the way that the polarities of electricity discharge energy when they come in contact. (this contrasts Western opposites fighting it out till the death versus Chinese complementary particles that are in a dance of accommodation) . So the Chinese view the otherness of "the other" as an adaptation to other contextual settings and they think that this could be a source of knowledge or of wealth. So the otherness of the other in Chinese minds automatically, subconsciously, inspires curiosity and not fright and animosity as in Western minds...
You write that " There was no separation between Western (Roman Catholic) Christians and Eastern Christians before the schism of 1054: they were a single Christianity". What I wrote in point 2 does not concur with yopur affirmation. But that is not the point. What I 'm interested in is the role of Christian Orthodoxy in the Russian civilization.
Christianity shaped all aspects of Western civilization and if it is no longer practiced, as in many parts of Europe for example, its values have nevertheless been internalized in the subconscious of the individuals. Also Western Christianity did not "borrow from pagan philosophy". It borrowed from animism the dates of its feasts but that was it... for the rest it violently destroyed all visible signs of animism and of its practice and the empire implemented the violence... It is in this sense that Christianity shaped all aspects of Western civilization.
But that does not seem to have been the case with the Russian civilization... and your words confirm that impression : "The Orthodox Church itself borrowed from pagan philosophy, esp. Plato; There is no shame in using philosophy that was first developed by pagans, as though Christians were required to reinvent culture from ground zero." Yes that is right. But this applies only to Orthodox Christianity and not to Western or Frank Christianity.