Everyone the Watcher

The mass availability, interconnectedness and searchability of today's communications media can present a seemingly limitless coincidental broadsheet report on the perils and successes through which our society passes, without disguise, unmasked, for all to see. But, this same web can be subtly intensified, made uniform, its gaps sealed with self-interested rhetorical caulking, its collective direction reprogrammed, then used as a whole as a cloak more powerful than any veil of simple secrecy.

So, each person, in the interests of an authentically democratic, free society, in the interests of justice, must watch not only through the media those who wield power and influence over others, but also watch the media itself (which can be used to wield concerted influence), watch for inexplicable inconsistencies, irrational infatuations, personality cults and other unjustifiable distractions. Those distractions, however inadvertently, function as a usurpation... [Keep reading...]

Cave Painting: the making of meaning

It is the simplest construction: the color seeps in, a single shade mixing with the varied and ancient qualities of the rock. Texture is born. The act redefines the full gamut of existence. It says we are here, and we are made of presence, and we are aware, and we can articulate experience. The expressed fact and the existent being come together. Civilization is begun.

A brush moves over an uneven surface. It is tipped with pigment made from organic and mineral resources, a distillation of the environment. Its purpose is manifold, something beyond decorative, sacred. Such a distillation is undertaken, not merely to make a picture, but to depict, to portray, to record, to do with physical reality what the mind does with experience. [Keep reading...]

Within the super-scientific outlook of the digital milieu, there seems to reside a trigger for mystical inquiry, for a questioning of the most fundamental meaning of being itself. With the proliferation of choice at the transient, material level, we are faced with the need to ask ourselves why and how the larger, more resonant, more defining choices are to be made. All across the shifting terrain of social discourse, the human individual must face the question of whether any choices might have permanent, irreparable consequences.

ECOLOGICAL HUMANISM

Human life is inherently ecological. The human body is a masterpiece of systems ecology, on the microcosmic scale. The body itself is an integrated, extensive and complex community of smaller organisms, cooperating to allow optimal function for conscious life. Its systems are in turn integrated into the environment, the web of surrounding systems. We can choose to excel or to fail in our attention to this aspect of our reality... Our power to create and to innovate is only enhanced by biological diversity. [Keep reading...]

RESORT TO BEAUTY

A regular part of living in the human world is debate about what the average person can do to reduce terror, violence and suffering, while helping to strengthen the weave of trust among us. Government has certain roles, and often the grave responsibility of physical combat is seen as highest among them. Thankfully, the average citizen need not carry weapons or plunge into battle to make the world safe. There are many other avenues available to imaginative people to build strength, prosperity and security into a free society.

The highest obligation of an individual citizen is to have an authentic individual existence that gives purpose to all the other defenses of innocence and individuality. (Both Aristotle and Confucius warn that one must first have one's private life in order before one can serve humanity well, and both agree that the highest private pursuit is genuine self-knowledge.) [Keep reading...]

INDIVIDUALISM & FULFILLMENT of the individual

Modern individualism, born with the Modern Age, enhanced by the secular nation-state, intertwined with the tenets of pragmatism, is one of the foundations of liberal democracy. Beyond basic humanism, and a faith in the inventive capacities of the human mind, it motivates the individual human being to adhere to a program of self-serving material immediacy, in the physical as much as in the spiritual realm.

The pragmatist mandate of catalytic self-interest proposes the individual pursuit of happiness as a great engine for securing prosperity, learning, mutual understanding, moral decision, and the defense of liberty, all of the elements that maintain a system whereby the rights of the individual are protected. [Keep reading...]