the unlikely story of how America slipped the surly bonds of earth & came to
believe in signs & portents that would make the middle ages blush
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Following hard on the heels of that last post and its promise -- "I'll be sure to let you know what I find out" -- here's what I found out. For starters. Note the unintended high irony of the book title. The time frame is 1962...
Murphy's family owned land on California's Big Sur coast, with redwood canyons, hot mineral springs, high cliffs, and magnificent outlooks on the Pacific Ocean. With Richard Price, a former Stanford classmate, Murphy started an institute there, which he and Price named after the Esalen Indians who had lived on the coast. In its first years, Esalen hosted seminars on Eastern thought and religious practice. Christian mysticism, shamanism, psychedelic drugs, humanistic psychology, ecology, and other subjects loosely grouped under the banner of human potentialities and the education of the whole person.
from Booklist: "Readers meet, for instance, Marshall Herff Applewhite, the bizarre Heaven's Gate founder who persuaded 39 people to commit suicide at the cult's California headquarters; Julia 'Butterfly' Hill, the environmental activist who frustrated the state's lumber industry for more than two years by living in a treetop; and John Walker Lindh, the California-born Taliban fighter captured in Afghanistan."
we are all just prisoners here
of our own device ~ eagles
As amusing as it manages to be in parts, the book ends up being a perversely recursive bit of meta-irony embodying what it sets out to parody: a smug and very much class-based ridicule, hauteur, contempt.
Nonetheless, to quote...
Not that the three classes at the top don't have money. The point is that money alone doesn't define them, for the way they have their money is largely what matters. That is, as a class indicator the amount of money is less significant than the source. The main thing distinguishing the top three classes from each other is the amount of money inherited in relation to the amount currently earned. The top-out-of-sight class (Rockefellers, Pews, DuPonts, Mellons, Fords, Vanderbilts) lives on inherited capital entirely. No one whose money, no matter how copious, comes from his own work -- film stars are an example -- can be a member of the top-out-of-sight class, even if the size of his income and the extravagance of his expenditure permit him to simulate identity with it. Inheritance -- "old money" in the vulgar phrase -- is the indispensable principle defining the top three classes, and it's best if the money's been in the family for three or four generations.
Only reason I'm posting this is that I was struck by the line drawing of those two old fucks. No disrespect intended. That and I'm interested in Old Money of the sort that was floating around California for about a century before the sixties hit. And here's what I'm thinkin... Esalen, right? Prime piece of real estate like that? Where'd it come from? Michael Murphy got it from his folks. Might have to look that one up, but I'm pretty sure. And what I want to know is: what kind of world were his, you know, People living in before Mikey was a come-hither glint in Mom's eye?
I'll be sure to let you know what I find out...
an Esalen book
“ A high prole regarding a destitute with disdain, but less for his poverty than for his style.
”
an Esalen book
Michael Murphy
co-founder Esalen Institute
Michael Murphy
co-founder Esalen Institute
posted by Doctor X at #
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
From the 1890s to the 1930s, a growing number of Germans began to scrutinize and discipline their bodies in a utopian search for perfect health and beauty. Some became vegetarians, nudists, or bodybuilders, while others turned to alternative medicine or eugenics.
posted by Doctor X at #
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
don't lean on me man, cause you can't afford the ticket... ~ bowie
In my recent research travels through the twisty passages of the net -- sometimes more like a midnight pub-crawl -- I've come, a time or two, glancingly, across references linking eugenics to the early conservation movement in America. Such things sometimes fall through the cracks, forgotten for months, then resurface as nagging urges to run just one more Google search, one more search on A9, one more slumming through the negro streets of Amazon at dawn, looking up an angry fixation.
So I ran the searches, poked around, filtered and sifted and sorted and -- as more usual than ever these latter days, as the net casts its web ever broader and deeper -- hit paydirt. It'll need some unpacking, but here's a taste...
Rainger succeeds best in his detailed and scholarly attention to Osborn's social milieu, which surpasses even that of Allan Chase's exhaustive Legacy of Malthus (1975). Such information (absent in Kühl) is essential for understanding the lavish funding available in the United States for eugenic research and promotion, but also for its ties to the conservation movement.
That last one is kicking around here somewhere, the other two are new to me. But won't be for long. They look to be bang on, as is Brechin's article and bibliography. Everything I could have asked for.
In July 1934, Henry Luce devoted an entire issue of Fortune magazine to Mussolini's Italy. It was introduced thusly...
Whether or not Fortune has adequately presented Fascist Italy is for others to judge. But as to Fortune's bias -- that is easily stated. No 100 per cent journalist can be more than a few per cent Fascist.
But the good journalist must recognize in Fascism certain ancient virtues of the race, whether or not they happen to be momentarily fashionable in his own country. Among these are Discipline, Duty, Courage, Glory, Sacrifice.
In its July 1934, issue, a song of praise for Fascism, Fortune magazine (owned by Henry Luce, a Morgan partner, and other powerful and wealthy Americans) told of the great corporations and how they progressed under Mussolini.
"The significant facts to hang on to," concluded Fortune, "are these: if you were an early Fascist, or contributed generously to the March on Rome, you are likely to enjoy the business benefits that accrue to a high position within the Fascist Party."
Last Sunday (January 22, 2006), the Guardian Online ran this long piece on the burgeoning neo-Nazi music scene. If you've found yourself questioning the contemporary relevance of some of the material I've been posting to this blog, this should serve as one answer.
White off the scale They're loud, proud and everywhere from East Germany to West Virginia. Neil Mackay spends six months getting to know the white supremacist practitioners of Nazi Hate Rock
Here's a sample...
Neo-Nazis... are on the rise across Europe and in the United States. In Britain, the British National Party won more than 800,000 votes at the last European elections. In Germany, they have seats in state parliaments and are doing better, electorally, than at any time since the Second World War. Italy is also seeing a marked upswing in votes for the far right. Increasingly central to the political success of parties such as the German NPD - the political grandchild of Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party - and the BNP is white power music. Bands include Whitelaw, Strike force 28 and Grinded Nig (whose album Freezer Full of Nigger Heads features songs such as 'Jackhammered Nigger Pussy'). Their records are available from most neo-Nazi record distributors online.
If you think that's heavy, try this -- if you have a strong stomach. Or this. Or this. Odin, Vikings, "the volk" (think Volkswagen, the Nazi "People's car"), and various Nordic and "Aryan" themes loom large in this world. As do, of course, those races that fall outside the holy bounds of white supremacy. And make no mistake, those boundaries are holy. These are religious views, spiritual values. Oh baby, what hath God wrought?
Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity
Because the issue is so politically loaded, it is extremely difficult to find trustworthy information on how the early birth control movement was tied to systematic U.S. eugenics initiatives. This book seems just such a credible source.
The following -- and the photo to the right -- are from Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare by Johanna Schoen (p. 22). The author is assistant professor of history and women's studies at the University of Iowa.
Under the leadership of Margaret Sanger, the early birth control movement sought the repeal of the Comstock Law of 1873, which prohibited dissemination of birth control or information about birth control through the U.S. Mail.... By the 1920s, Sanger had grown frustrated with the movement’s slow progress and had begun to work to forge a professional alliance with the medical
establishment. Hoping to gain broader support, she began to emphasize eugenic and economic arguments, increasingly grounding her claims for the legalization of birth control on the ideal of racial progress and and efficiency.
The book was published last year by the University of North Carolina Press in its Gender and American Culture series.
From the back cover:
In August 2003, North Carolina became the first U.S. state to offer restitution to victims of state-ordered sterilizations carried out by its eugenics program between 1929 and 1975. The decision was prompted by newspaper stories based on the research of Johanna Schoen, who was granted unique access to summaries of 7,500 case histories and the papers of the North Carolina Eugenics Board....
On an international level, the United States has influenced reproductive health policies by, for example, tying foreign aid to the recipients' compliance with U.S. notions about family planning. The availability of U.S.-funded family planning aid has proved to be a double-edged sword, offering unprecedented opportunities to poor women while subjecting foreign patients to medical experimentation that would be considered unacceptable at home.
Cover illustration: Birth control nurse Lena Hilliard
with a client and her children, late 1930s.
(Courtesy of Countway Medical Library)
For the zipper ref, read on. Freud would have a field day! But first, I wonder how many of you know that J.Z. Knight, a.k.a. "Ramtha," was the primary focal point of that POS movie, What the Bleep Do We Know? Never heard of her? Perhaps you've heard of Shirley MacLaine. Go search ol' Shirley up in Finding Enlightenment: Ramtha's School of Ancient Wisdom by J. Gordon Melton, "a research specialist with the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California" who never met a cult he didn't like.
The Ramtha Foundation also espouses a feminist apocalyptic theory. J.Z. Knight, a petite blond businesswoman, began in 1977 to function as the mouthpiece for Ramtha, the invisible eight-foot, 40,000-year-old "Lemurian" warrior. Based in Yelm, Washington, Knight has traveled across the country renting hotel ballrooms to hold weekend "dialogues" wherein Ramtha takes over her body, expounds his Gnostic philosophy, and dispenses advice. In a manner reminiscent of nineteenth-century female mediums (Moore 1977), J.Z. Knight channels an entity that defends the rights of women and challenges male hegemony. Ramtha condemns males for their omnivorous sexual appetite and encourages the empowerment of women:
Men defile your women. Men molest one another. You brutalize sex, eroticize violence.... And men, you don't have to go out and copulate everything to impregnate the whole world!.... You don't have to spill your seed every day!... See women as equals, as brilliant gods, just as you are. That changes the shadow, the destiny that allows you to go forward in harmony with Nature. (Ramtha 1987, 138)
Ramtha describes our planet as a "living entity" regularly visited by space brothers, and on the verge of irresistible "evolutionary processes" -- and paints an unusual vision of an Earth "laced with zippers" about to explode into volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and earthquakes (Ramtha 1987, 30-35). He recommends survivalist preparations -- put your money in gold, move to the Pacific Northwest, stockpile a two-year food supply, and cultivate vegetable gardens. Real estate agents have watched with interest the migration into Washington State of "Ramsters," "many of whom are middle-aged women" (Montreal Gazette 1984).
I was just talking on the telephone with Jeneane Sessum and we decided -- given recent discussion here about Indigo Children -- to start a new movement for "adult children" like ourselves who are subject to sudden paralyzing fits of extreme paranoia. We desperately need such a movement for people who have been incorrectly -- and heartlessly -- saddled with a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), but whose real problem is that they've been forced to hang onto an ever more tentative and fast-receding "reality" by their bloody fingernails!
If you feel that you too have been unfairly miscast in this way, please join with us in raising America's spiritual awareness of this endemic tragedy in the making by sending email to Jeneane, whom, in the course of composing this sentence, I have both nominated for and elected to the post of National Secretary. Thank you for your sensitivity, care and support. God Bless America.
for the Inidgos...
By rapidly and easily freeing their consciousness, DNA template, and spiritual identity from unnatural energetic blockages and energy "vampires", to reclaim Chistiac self-sovereignty over their personal 15th dimensional anatomy, and perform the DNA bio-regenesis necessary for eventual complete bodily merkabic ascension.
I don't know why I find this accidental screenshot (really, it was) so amusing. The book itself, Warpaths: Invasions of North America, is not exactly a laugh riot -- though it does show that the Amerindians (as it calls them) didn't just roll over for the invaders (a.k.a., us). The back cover (which is all I ever read) mentions "the extraordinary archers of the Calusa, who ultimately took the lives of Hernandez de Cordoba and Ponce de Leon..." This is the first news I've had of Ponce de Leon since the eighth grade, and I'm glad to hear he got what was coming to him. Put that in your Fountain of Youth, motherfucker!
The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech...
That bit of doggerel appears at the head of "Considerations by the Way," the seventh chapter of the sixth volume -- The Conduct of Life (1860) -- of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 12-volume Centenary Edition published by Houghton Mifflin and Company in 1903-04. Fortunately, The Conduct of Life has been republished. More fortunately still, thanks to wonders of the world wide web you can click here to read the whole magilla.
Part of what you'll read, if you manage to persevere through Emerson's purple haze, is this:
That by which a man conquers in any passage, is a profound secret to every other being in the world, and it is only as he turns his back on us and on all men, and draws on this most private wisdom, that any good can come to him.
In the same piece, Emerson drew on his most "cordial speech" and "private wisdom" to give us this...
In the streets, we grow cynical. The men we meet are coarse and torpid. The finest wits have their sediment. What quantities of fribbles, paupers, invalids, epicures, antiquaries, politicians, thieves, and triflers of both sexes, might be advantageously spared! Mankind divides itself into two classes,-- benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast, the first a handful. A person seldom falls sick, but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die: -- quantities of poor lives; of distressing invalids; of cases for a gun.
The emphasis is emphatically mine. By the way, "fribble," as used above, is a nominalized back-formation from an intransitive verb that once meant, I am informed by Merriam-Webster (Unabridged): TOTTER, STAMMER, FALTER. The un-Unabridged version suggests DODDER, which (say I) remains in use in the not uncommon, but now hugely deprecated phrase: "that doddering old fool." So probably, tribbles are, less floridly expressed, old people -- most likely those suffering from what we now know as paralysis agitans or Parkinson's: "a chronic progressive nervous disease occurring in advanced life and marked by tremor and weakness of resting muscles, rigidity, mask-like facial expression, and a peculiar gait -- called also shaking palsy." Emerson: the man's compassion was boundless.
Was he also "spiritually attuned" to the principles that would later come to be collected under the rubric of eugenics? Here's a final quote from The Conduct of Life. You be the judge...
Nature makes fifty poor melons for one that is good, and shakes down a tree full of gnarled, wormy, unripe crabs, before you can find a dozen dessert apples; and she scatters nations of naked Indians, and nations of clothed Christians, with two or three good heads among them. Nature works very hard, and only hits the white once in a million throws.
Although "hitting the white" is unfamiliar to the contemporary ear (except when it means getting sauced on Chardonnay), it must have something to do with archery, "the white" being (or once having been) the bulls-eye. However unintended the gaffe, it is nonetheless ironic, given that Emerson was Cheerleader-in-Chief for the populist doctrine of manifest destiny, to hear him combining "white," "Christians" and "Indians" in the same sentence. For the shamelessly naked Indians, it was a sentence of death -- "cases for a gun" -- which seems to be what old R. Waldo had explicitly enough in mind when he penned this inspiring essay, so full of cordial speech.
The following is from The Future of Human Nature by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The quote is taken from the second chapter, The Debate on the Ethical Self-Understanding of the Species, section VI: The moral limits of eugenics, p. 61.
With regard to the ethical freedom to lead a life of one's own while being subject to organic conditions not of our own choice, the situation of the programmed person does not initially differ from that of a person naturally begotten. Eugenic programming of desirable traits and dispositions, however, gives rise to moral misgivings as soon as it commits the person concerned to a specific life-project or, in any case, puts specific restrictions on his freedom to choose a life of his own.
The publication date is 2003. It is not a work of history.
Habermas is emphasizing the irreversibility of genetic engineering, which is what he means here by programming. Note, however, that there are forms of cultural programming, which should give rise to similar moral misgivings -- as when a parent says (or thinks), "I'm raising my [son/daughter] to be..."
[check all that apply]
a Success
a Buddhist
a Catholic
a Lesbian
a Scientologist
a Libertarian
a Shining Path guerilla
a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
an Indigo/Crystal/Rainbow child
a Minion of Satan
in Corporate Management
Spiritual but not religious
While the latter sorts of social, religious and ideological programming are in theory reversible by the efforts of the individual affected, the psychological cost of this reversal may heavily outweigh any perceived benefit. I would point to the statistics on teen suicide as a valid index of such costs.
With the advent of genetic enginerring (a felicitous typo) eugenics is staging an inevitable comeback. But eugenic thinking has always confused the biological with the socially determined. The problem is not technology per se, but its use in the hands of people who combine pathological perfectionism with astoundingly naive or wholly unexamined notions of what it might mean to be "perfect."
Such agendas have invariably led to class-oriented racialist notions of who is "fit" to survive and who should be eliminated -- whether through programs of active euthanasia or passive neglect.
The race goes with us on their credit. The knowledge that in the city is a man who invented the railroad, raises the credit of all the citizens. But enormous populations, if they be beggars, are disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants, or of fleas -- the more, the worse.
from the book description:Doreen Virtue, Ph.D., is a spiritual psychologist who works with the angelic realm, including the fairies. She is the bestselling author of many books, cards and audiocassettes, with sales of over 1M copies!
It’s true -- you can spiritually heal; instantly manifest your heart’s desires; and commune with angels, goddesses, fairies, and ascended masters! In this true spiritual adventure story and reference book, Doreen Virtue writes about the enlightened beings who can unlock the magical gifts within you. ...you’ll travel with Doreen through a Sedona sweat lodge, the Polynesian island of Moorea, a goddess temple at the Isle of Avalon, and other exotic locations. You’ll read the powerful messages she received from Mother Mary while visiting Lourdes, and you’ll peek over Doreen’s shoulder as she gives psychic readings and receives information about Lemuria, merpeople, and the new Rainbow Children.
virtue is her own reward
Who dries your eyes when you cry real tears?
Who know or cares what an imitation is?
Only you do
You can paint his nails
Make him wear high heels
Why waste time altering the hemline?
Or do you?
Tear off your own head
Tear off your own head
It's a doll revolution
~ elvis costello
posted by Doctor X at #
Saturday, January 14, 2006
"You ain't been blue till you've had that mood indigo..."
~ sinatra
I've been tracking this quintessential New Age "development" for a couple years now, but it's so weird, and so depressing, that I haven't known where to begin trying to describe the phenomenon.
Yesterday, the New York Times saved me the effort by running an article on the so-called Indigo Children -- Are They Here to Save the World? by John Leland, 12 January 2006 -- and it's drawing comments from around the web, for instance, this note on boingboing.
Annette Piper, right, in her store, Spiritual Freedom, with her daughter Alexandra, 10, said she realized she could tell what's wrong with people by touch.
photo:
Rollin Riggs for The NY Times
In The Indigo Children, Mr. Carroll and Ms. Tober define the phenomenon. Indigos, they write, share traits like high I.Q., acute intuition, self-confidence, resistance to authority and disruptive tendencies, which are often diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, known as A.D.D., or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D.
Offered as a guide for "the parents of unusually bright and active children," the book includes common criticisms of today's child rearing: that children are overmedicated; that schools are not creative environments, especially for bright students; and that children need more time and attention from their parents. But the book seeks answers to mainstream parental concerns in the paranormal.
The paranormal, right. But note the focus on IQ. This is inherently related to the material I've been developing here on the eugenics movement, in which intelligence testing played a major role. (See previous post on Abraham Maslow's mentor, E.L. Thorndike.)
Fortunately, not everyone is looking through the same rose-tinted glasses...
To skeptics the concept of indigo children belongs in the realm of wishful thinking and New Age credulity. "All of us would prefer not to have our kids labeled with a psychiatric disorder, but in this case it's a sham diagnosis," said Russell Barkley, a research professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. "There's no science behind it. There are no studies."
Dr. Barkley likened the definition of indigo children to an academic exercise called "Barnum statements," after P. T. Barnum, in which a person is given a list of generic psychological characteristics and becomes convinced that they apply especially to him or her. The traits attributed to indigo children, he said, are so general that they "could describe most of the people most of the time," which means that they don't describe anything.
But now, thanks to self-appointed angel guru Doreen Virtue, we're on to the second generation: The Crystal Children.
By laying these harebrained expectations on kids, the New Agers are building a whole generation of narcissists. I don't mean stuck-up egotists. We're talking about Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), in which the child never develops a genuine sense of self because he or she is too busy attempting to live out the fantasies of a delusional and psychologically abusive parent.
This requirement to embody by proxy the parent's own grandiose "spiritual" dreams of power and glory almost invariably results in lasting damage to the child -- and often to the people that child will come into contact with as an adult.
The chart below shows the historical development of theories of intelligence. But theories of intelligence were aimed not just at finding highly gifted individuals. They were just as intent, if not more so, on identifying "morons" and the "feebleminded," for this map of cascading influence also traces the history of eugenics -- a term coined by Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin. James McKeen Cattell was a student of Galton's, and Edward L. Thorndike studied with Cattell. In the '30s, Thorndike was teaching educational psychology at Columbia, and running a research project that later resulted in a 1000-page textbook: Human Nature and the Social Order
Into this project in 1935, Thorndike invited a young psychologist who is not represented in this chart -- or indeed in any genealogy of eugenics I've been able to locate. And it hasn't been for lack of looking.
It occurs to me that readers coming to these pages for the first time may not have much in the way of previous context. Overall, this is a good thing. It means I don't have to carry the karmic baggage of previous incarnations. On the other hand, karma is implacable and, as they say, crime will out. So I guess I really can't elude my checqured career, however much I'd like to.
On the surface at least, my past work appears to have little bearing on the present work in progress. I've done some thinking about how they may be related, but it's not obvious even to me. As you can see from the Gonzo Marketing quotes below, they were business books.
front matter: I round the corner in Covent Garden and hear what sounds like Coltrane wafting up the block. Bent into his horn as if in fervent prayer, a musician is laying down fat splashy hop notes in the rain, punctuating the oblivious crowds of pre-Christmas shoppers. His saxophone case is open for donations and I drop in a ten pound note. He's surprisingly good to be playing in the street. Seeing the denomination, he jumps up and presses a compact disc into my hand. I turn it over. Karlsax Online it says.
p. 205: Paradoxically, the old Manichean agenda to put an end to the world, once based on spiritual opposition to the material plane, is now within the reach of the worldly powers. And this is no joke.
p. 210: ...the sublunary sphere was the material world and all its material girls -- the world, literally, under the orbit of the moon. In the eyes of the early Christian Church, the "things of this world" were mundane -- that is, "worldly" in a highly pejorative sense. The other world (as in "otherworldly") was the only world worth having any truck with: the destination of the just: heaven. What happened down here below on earth was of no interest or importance except as it related to getting out of this world, escaping this vale of toil and tears for a purely spiritual realm, "a better place." This was echoed in the Manichean dualism with which we opened this final chapter: world bad, spirit good. Simply put, matter didn't matter.
“ ...history is not predestined. It is, however, littered with with petty control freaks peddling fascism tricked up to look like freedom...
I posted the following screed to Amazon about a week ago. Within 24 hours -- thanks to many Mystic Friends and Special Angels™ -- it was ranked the #1 "So you'd like to..." guide on the entire Amazon site. And it's still #1 at the time of this blog post. Here's the actual Amazon page. If you too vote YES there, you'll automatically become a member of the highly exclusive MFSA Club. (btw, the previous Mystic-B guide is here.)
So you'd like to... know if you qualify as NewAge++
A guide by Chris Locke,
author-in-progress, Mystic Bourgeoisie
I'd like to ask you to consider a category I've lately been calling NewAge++. It's hard to boil down to a nice brief dictionary definition (I'm working on it), but you'll recognize yourself as a bona fide member of the class if you can relate positively to the following qualifiers.
You're Not New Age Of course not. New Agers believe a lot of silly rubbish about things like tinfoil pyramid hats and crystals and astrological signs. You're way beyond all that. You're intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive. Your friends say you're deep. You got a lot out of Carl Jung's 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Vintage)'. You read 'The Power of Myth' after watching that fascinating Bill Moyers special with Joseph Campbell (it almost made the fundraising bearable). You've even looked into Eliade's 'Shamanism'. New Age? No way. You're no dum-dum.
