Keeping an Open Mind

The Closed Minded Fool!
The person who still learns, is the person who still listens!
Rodney's Painted Pen commentary

Keeping an Open Mind

As I leap into the saddle once more this grand day, in order to experience another romp upon parchment if you please, I am suddenly taken by this odd fact in my eyes, that folk seem determined often in cement fashion and steadfast form, to remain closed minded about many vital issues that circle us in life daily.

Odd to me due to this fact, most all know that the fool hears no longer, while the learned man continually walks through life with his ears open. I find this mule-footed stubborn stance many folks take quite quizzical indeed, for surely most are aware that the listening individual remains the person who grows daily in a myriad of ways, due to bright input, whilst the arrogant and mule stubborn type individual is still spouting the same verbiage identical to what they advocated twenty years ago.

Yes, I had a man tell me once, and only God knows why! He directed this thought and lesson towards me as a very young man, but he stated, Rodney, "for a man to ever learn he must listen" For we all know the content of our own heart and opinions quite well, most others around us as well in most instances, therefore, for us to speak the exact same opinion, message, passion, etc, for years shall finally lands us in the arena of boring where others are concerned and view us, for surely they have heard it before!

Now besides becoming a bore to all around us, leaving us with a tiny host of friends, due to our small amount of enlisted information and additional viewpoints and colored input added to our repertoire of mind voiced over the years, we as well risk experiencing a greater more glaring repercussion from our closed minded ways, being this, we make huge mistakes! Yes, personally, involving, family, community and world.

For when individuals insist on huddling in the smallest hovel of their own mind only, never allowing the input of others to paint their character in diversity and blended thought and perhaps beauty, they merely become vaulted individuals walking and roaming about in time stagnate .
Often these sad folk, spend their entire lifetime merely parroting their parents opinions, and those few others trusted, be it minister, teacher or uncle, but in fact have never stopped to examine some of these weightier issues of life themselves personally. I laugh now, perhaps some thinking this a tad foolish, and if so, I ask you now, were your parents republicans? And what are you this day?

I am not saying this day for heavens sake, that it is wrong to inherit traditional values and belief systems from our parents, for we all do, and rightly so, and wrongly so, often as well! We as well we are influenced by teachers and varied other folk in life, yet all mankind one day in time, needs to be willing to reassess and weigh afresh, their opinions and most passionate persuasion of thought, especially where others are concerned, and I think daily would be advised.

Yes, I have sensed for years now, that many a fine folk are just plain trapped in this stance of bedrock stubborn, never even for an instant entertaining another person's take on an issue. I think it high time we once again began to listen to our conscience, yes I know, haven't heard the mere mention of the word lately have you?

I shall submit a personal and astounding personal example for your perusal this day if I may?
I for many years was a tough advocate of the death sentence, for years! Though I had always stated that I could not however personally pull the switch either! Hmmm, that's speaks volumes now does it not, of my stance then?
One day five years ago when writing a piece, I suddenly realized in colored revelation and bursting illumination, from my very heart within, that capital punishment was wrong period! No matter how you cut it! Now I speak only to the personal conviction that my own heart freshly dictated, not presuming to know what is right for you.
But I was astounded, absolutely astonished, and pleased most of all, that I still in childlike fashion could hear the inward call and conscience of my heart.

Imagine that, an old dog can learn new tricks! And being a middle of the road dog trainer, I can attest to this fact personally as well.
Folks, change can take place! Minds can be modified for the good, but...always at the heart, core and hub of every new excursion and voyage of growth, learning and enlightenment, remains this vital prerequisite, one must listen, watch and feel!

Peace,
Rodney Evan Bohen
www.rodneybohen.com

The politics of a double crisis

“Auguries For A ‘Vile’ Decade” was the headline of a Financial Times column by its veteran commentator Samuel Brittan in May.¹ He was quoting Michael Saunders, a Citigroup analyst, on the prospects for British capitalism, but generalised the prediction to “the old industrial West as a whole”.

Brittan is one of the select group of people whose advice on the best policies for capitalism is taken seriously by governments and central banks. The analyses and prescriptions of this group are repeatedly proved wrong. But when they panic it is a sign that those they advise face serious problems—and they are in a double panic today.

Their latest terror is the upward spiral of energy and food prices. This comes on top of the credit crunch, which, far from going away, is turning into a recession in the US and Britain with unpredictable consequences for the rest of the world. Oil, at $130 a barrel, is ten times its price in 2000 and twice that of a year ago; grain prices have doubled in 18 months. Not since the mid-1970s has there been such a combination of spreading recession and escalating inflation worldwide. It is hardly surprising that some commentators are talking of a “third oil shock”—the first being the one in 1973-4 that marked the end of the long post-war boom and the “golden age of capitalism”, and the second the one that marked renewed global crisis in 1980 and the final demise of the old Keynesian ideology of “managed capitalism”.

What the high priests of capitalism now fear is that the latest shock will be just as devastating to their system. The repercussions of the credit crunch have already forced governments in the US and Britain to break openly with the neoliberal ideology they had been propagandising so enthusiastically. The British government was forced to “buck the market” in order to save it with the nationalisation of Northern Rock; the US Federal Reserve had to pour half a trillion dollars into the money markets in March and organise the takeover of one severely damaged big bank, Bear Stearns, by one that was less damaged, JP Morgan. While the whole neoliberal ideology was thrown into turmoil, its adherents crossed their fingers, hoping the recession in the US would not be as bad as many feared and would have limited effects elsewhere in the world. The old mantras about globalisation gave way to talk of “decoupling” national economies from each other. Then came the latest leap in the oil price.

In this issue of International Socialism Carlo Morelli disentangles the factors underlying the rises in food prices, while Chris Harman debates our previous analyses of economic crises and the credit crunch with Jim Kincaid and Fred Moseley.

But what matter above all are the political and social implications of the double crisis. There is a danger that people forget these as the media concentrate on electoral defeats for the centre-left in Britain and Italy, and the drama of the US presidential election.

The more longsighted advocates of capitalism like to believe they can cope with recessions. They recognise that in the short term there can be explosions of anger from below and schisms in political structures as different sections of capital try to shift the burden of dealing with the crisis onto each other. But they believe that if immediate political crises can be contained, the system can return to stability as prolonged unemployment replaces popular anger with deep-seated demoralisation and as certain sections of capital restore their fortunes at the expense of others. So in some pro-capitalist circles there is already complacent talk to the effect that “the average recession only lasts 18 months”.

This view finds its counterpart among sections of the left who remember only the stultifying demoralisation of the early 1980s and early 1990s. There is, in fact, a degree of amnesia on both sides. The supporters of capitalism assume that recovery from crisis is ordained in advance, forgetting the experience of Japan in the early 1990s, let alone the whole industrial world in the early 1930s. The pessimists of the left forget the generalised class rage of the first Thatcher years and the popular upsurge of feeling that shook the Major government as it launched its pit closure programme in 1992. But it is certainly true that not every recession leads to great challenges to the system.

Be that as it may, inflation and recession together are an explosive combination. For inflation causes workers of all sorts—including even those with little or no class consciousness—to see struggle as the only alternative to declining living standards. And it does so just as recession undermines wider acceptance of the mythical virtues of capitalism.

Demonstrations and riots over food prices have already affected a wide range of cities across the Global South. In Vietnam, Bangladesh and, most significantly, Egypt they have come on top of waves of strikes among groups of newly militant workers. The international agencies’ concern to organise an emergency fund to cover part of the cost of rising food imports for poor countries is at least as much to do with political stability as with concerns over people’s welfare. When the king of Saudi Arabia puts hundreds of millions of dollar into such efforts, the implications of upheaval in Egypt for the whole Middle East must be uppermost in his mind.

The global elite is not merely worried about the poorer parts of the world. It is also concerned about the heartlands of the system. So Samuel Brittan, echoing the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, writes about getting people to accept “a dent in living standards” (although doubtless neither Samuel Brittan’s nor Mervyn King’s living standards). But that raises a central problem for them. Even before the double crisis many governments were having trouble getting people to accept the medicine of counter-reforms prescribed for them. As an article we quoted from the New York Times two years ago put it:

There is a strong sense in Europe that, because of weak governments and divided publics, the continent’s three big countries are unable to make the economic changes that most political leaders agree are essential.²

Little has changed since. Just a year ago Nicolas Sarkozy in France portrayed himself as the capitalist superhero who was going to change all this. Now he has the lowest opinion poll rating of any French president for half a century and is derided by his former big business fans for his failure to implement the most important counter-reforms he promised.

Politics, Lenin famously remarked, are concentrated economics. The politics of the period ahead will be determined by the clash between the pressure for governments to impose cuts in living standards and the reluctance of the mass of people to accept them. The key question will be what form those politics take. It is in that light that we have to view the other trends focused on by the media.

Materialism

When an advocate of the traditional worldview reproaches the notion of "materialism," he does so, not as do the pseudo-religious of the modern West--who in point of fact drape a modern mentality in religious guise, and who are either themselves unsure of what exactly they believe, or have thus far not been able to articulate it to a satisfactory degree--but because he finds fault with the very notion of "matter": that is, with the specifically Western and modern notion of "matter," which is inherently fraught with so many limitations that one wonders whether such individuals are at all able to see in color.

It is verily such a limited concept which would give rise to absurdities such as Cartesian dualism, which can more or less be said to be the philosophical origin that, through its far-reaching influence, contributed to the disintegration of metaphysical knowledge in the Christian tradition, aided in no small part by the nascent populist-oriented Christian sects of the Reformation, eager to substitute theories which they could mentally assimilate for that which which was beyond their understanding.

It comes as no surprise that once "matter" and "spirit" became conceptually discrete and thus separate categories that any knowledge of what was originally understood by Spirit would be forgotten, while the study of phenomena would give rise to all sorts of mechanistic ideas, to the ridiculous extent where material origins are now postulated for all of cosmic materiality.

We should hope that this has been a sufficient clarification regarding the scope of what we have been trying to express, and would like to thank the author of Materialism for inspiration through preliminary research on the subject, with our qualification, as always, that we should take care not to fall into the trap of that limitation called monism, but embrace the fullness that is succinctly expressed by what in English can only be translated as non-dualism, the subject of which is far beyond the scope of this short essay, and shall have to be treated at another time.