Native Spirituality

A California new age group has been spamming my Salt Lake Community Directory for the last sevreral months. An open directory allows anyone to add a site. I then have to delete those that don't fit the site.

I have nothing against new age, nor do I have anything against California. In many ways, California new age is a welcome bit of rationality compared to what goes on in Salt Lake. I have to delete the entries because I want to maintain the integrity of the regional directory.

Anyway, the entry that showed up today is David Stanley Bell who wrote a book called Foreplay to Afterglow for the Soul, which I guess is about some sort of orgasmic nature experience. Mr. Bell appears to be among the legions of baby boomers who've decided that they were really Native Americans because Native Americans have a superior spirituality. This is one of the quotes from the site.

Native Spirituality is close to nature, dominant culture seems to "rationalize" away truth in exerting its dominion over nature.

The idea that western culture lacks spirituality and that Native Americans lack rationality seems to be a very widespread belief. The basic idea seems to be that nature and science are somehow at odds, while nature and spirituality are in harmony. I love the little aacusation that the science of the dominant culture is a way to rationalize away truth. The impulse of science is to pursue truth by detailed examination of nature.

The actual history of science seems to be the exact opposite of this modern myth. In ancient times, we find man trying to make explanations for all their hardships in supernatural forces. The dominating theme of the spirituality is that this nature we see around us in an illusion, we should seek truth in myth.

It was the scientists who told us to start examining and learning from nature. For that matter, the idea of looking first at nature for answers is still the primary theme in science and analysis.

I think it is also possible to argue that the idea of dominating nature comes from the spiritual side of western culture. Churches and religions seem to have a strange preoccupation with the the way we organize society. It is generally through religion that we find the justification to dominate others and nature. Science does not provide the justification for human dominance.

This theme of a superior spirituality of Native Americans is extremely interesting. The "noble savage" was central to JJ Rousseau (1712-1778). The idea appears in many writers such as Wadsworth. There was even a popular myth in early American that the Native Americans were in fact a lost tribe of Isreal ... giving them great religious significance.

I believe that the early colonial experience with native cultures found the Native American tribes to be extremely diverse. The Cherokee and other tribes found great utily in European science. The French Indian wars found a certain Machiavellian streak in north eastern tribes. The plain Indians and western tribes showed great ingenuity in adopting the horse and rifles before the appearance of white men.

Different pioneer journals seem to indicate that white people were aware of a great amount of diversity among native tribes. They seemed to know that you could seek aid from certain tribes, but needed to avoid others.

I Will Fight No More Forever attributed to Chief Joseph shows a person receptive to Libertarian ideals.

The modern myth is that white man only became aware of the great spirituality of Native Americans in the spiritual awakening of the 60s.

Reading this site by David Stanley Bell, the different rantings of Ward Churchill and other white people who pretend to be indians, I can't help but think that our present new age myth of the super spiritual indian is as much a myth as Noble Savage and other images that white people have tried to impose on Native cultures.

It would be fun to pretend that I am an indian. I think the definition of who and what native americans are should be up to native americans.

As for my particular love of nature. I think I will stick with the love of nature that is inherent in analytic science.

July Stats

The July stats for my community directories still look poor. In July the sites had 7969 clicks to advertisers and netted $703.28. I expect about $50 of that to be reversed. I have about 650,000 page views.

Oddly, most of my traffic seems to be coming through ProtoPhoto, which was a pathetic attempt to make an online photo gallery. I wish I had time to beef it up. The site had a tight diskspace cap. I moved it to a new server, but have not had the time to start working on the content.

Hopefully Back to School will start reversing the fortunes of this web collection. The truth of the matter, though, is that my heart just is not into selling things. My desire is simply to explore ideas. Shopping online is still just a concept in my mind. To really excel at selling stuff, I think you need to be someone who's primary focus is stuff.

BlogShares

I am playing with the Blogshares program to see what it does. This is a program that let's you buy and sell shares in blog sites.

I don't imagine this blog ever having any value because it doesn't have a theme. The shares idea sounds like an interesting way for people to value their ideas. So, I think it will be a fun game to figure out.

Bolted On

Ha, ha. I think it is a hoot that John Bolton's rise to the position of US Amabassador to the UN will happen through non-democratic means (through a recess appointment by George Bush.)

There is a chance that Bolton's abrasive style is exactly what we need to start to help get the UN back onto its classical liberal track. There have been cases where critics have turned to be good administrators.

One thing is certain. For the upcoming year, the United Nations will be interesting.

Year Six is a Winner

I was supposed to be doing other things. But, I decided to read Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince instead.

It was definitely a thrill ride. Unlike the previous novels, this works leaves a large number of issues to be resolved in the final year.

I understand that Ms. Rowlings originally intended the work to be a seven part series. I hope that she does not sell out and that she concludes the series as orginally planned. I understand that Rowlings is now the richest writer ever. She has all the money she will ever need. I will be greatly saddened if she sells the integrity of her series for more.

Scotty-less

Scotty died.

I am now starting to worry that there is no one at the helm to beam us up.

Martyrs for Freedom

Sheikh Mujbil al-Sheikh Isa, Dhamin Hussein Ileywi and Aziz Ibrahim were Sunni members of the Iraq Constitutional Committee. They were gunned down in an effort by the insurgency to stop the process of forming a government.

Murdering your own people for being engaged in the process is a sign of the poor quality of debate that defines these modern times. I do suspect that future generations will look back at the thugs running the insurgency as evil, misguided people. The hard part, as always, is living through these modern times.

Unfortunately, Bush's war has translated into shrillness in debates. It is easy to imagine the shrillness dominating discourse taking place in the Western World escalating into wide scale violence. The loss of people who are authentically trying to engage in the process is temendously sad.

For that matter, the primary reason why I dislike both the left and right is that the extremes are generally set on preventing discourse.

Suicide Bombings

I wonder if Arab countries have newspapers and web sites that tick off the daily total of dead Arab Fundamentalists in their war against the new Iraqi and Aghanistan governments?

They probably do, but the message with the body count is more of the tune: "We've had this many martyrs for the cause of fundamentalism...long live the cause" The US body counts tend to carry the political message "what a waste of human life."

US Debt

The papers are now plastered with applause for George Bush's debt management. Apparently, somehow the US has collected more money in taxes so far this year than expected. It could be that people unable to find jobs are cashing out stocks and taking the capital gains hit. Who knows? It could just be money collected this quarter that will not show up in the future.

Apparently the appearance of an unpredicted increase in revenue means fiscal responsibility on the part of the Whitehouse.

Anyway, I thought I would add a link to the Treasury's debt page. Even if the unexpected increase in tax revenues helped cut the record deficits in half, the US is spending far more than is healthy. The debt jumped from $5.6 trillion (when Bush took office) to $7.8 trillion today. The unexpected increase revenue might save the Bush administration from crossing the $8 trillion mark this fiscal year...but we will cross it early next fiscal year.

BTW, Clinton's famed decrease in the increase of the budget and his famed budget surplus happened for the same unexpected increase in revenue. Clinton's suplus occurred because the stock market hit the stratosphere.

The Whitehouse simply has to stop this game of taking credit for leaps and dips in the stock market. Everytime there is an increase in the stock market, there will be an increase in tax revenue. It really has nothing to do with the skill of the president.

SOHO Groups

I crashed the SOHO Groups monthly meeting this morning. We were split into groups about different topics. I was in a group that discussed networking. My speil, of course, was that blogs are a great tool for building networks within the local business community.

In addition to their corporate web site, companies should have blogs, or at least encourage people in the company to have blogs. The blog would then be a free form space that overviews the activities of the business.

While the blogs themselves are not informative. In many cases, they are not even good reading; such blogs end up building an authentic link structure for the overall community. While the blogs themselves may not be that interesting, aggregate information from blogs written by people who care about their local community is extremely helpful in finding informative web sites.

Rather than limiting your networking efforts to a links page on your website, creating a blog and making short write ups on things would help build a more authentic topology for links.