Gus diZerega

My blog at beliefnet is now up.  from now on please visit me on A Pagan’s Blog.

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Within a day or two my blog will have undergone three changes.

First, and least significantly, it will look much different, though hopefully with all the same information.

Second, this new look will be because I will have moved it to Beliefnet.com, to become their first Pagan blog.  I will therefore have  a new url.  My last post on this present url will give it.  Soon thereafter I hope anyone coming here will be automatically redirected.

Third, I will be blogging every day, or nearly so. My content will increase considerably as a consequence.  It will largely be similar to what I am writing now, but with a bit more explicit Pagan connection.  My main focus will be serving the broader Pagan community, and people with compatible interests.

I will therefore have less (not nothing, less) on emergent and spontaneous order subjects, but not because I am doing less on this fascinating issue.  I am now also Founding Editor of a new online open source academic journal, Studies in Emergent Order.  One aspect of the journal will be a blog, where I an the other authors can post bits of wisdom and bloviation alike on those topics.  The journal will have new scholarly work on this topic from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Thanks to globum for this image

We residents of los Estados Unidos are not the only Americans with good reason to celebrate.

The people of Bolivia have just voted in a constitution that for the first time recognizes the rights and cultures of its indigenous people as of equal value with those Bolivians whose views were decisively shaped by Spanish colonialists.  For Pagans this is particularly important because Bolivia’s new constitution not only guarantees religious freedom, it also recognize Pacahmama as of equal stnding with Jesus.

Pachamama is the Mother of the Earth, or Mother of the Universe, in the traditional beliefs of people of the Andes.  Despite the efforts of the Catholic Church, Her worship survives strongly.  Now Her worship is legally recognized as equal to Christian belief and practice.

Legal recognition is important.  Our own country supposedly guarantees religious liberty with the 1st Amendment.  That did not prevent Christian absolutists of various types from outlawing the practice of Indian nations’ traditional beliefs across the country.  I have talked with a Crow Sun Dance leader who described to me going to those celebrations in secret, so the local law authorities would not come and close them down. (more…)

One of the interesting if disturbing issues unfolding before us now is the frenzied defense of torture by many right wing ‘Christians’ and their allies in the media.  Bill O’Reilly who makes more noise as a supposed defender of Christianity than anyone not at a pulpit, defends torture.   Focus on the Family leader James Dobson believes torture is so important  opposition to it constitutes a reason to vote against a candidate.  Pat Robertson found supporting torture a better qualification for President than opposing abortion.   The less said about moral monsters like Sean Hannity  and Glenn Beck  the better.  Senator Inhofe is outraged that people are outraged by torture and Senator Cornyn commits what outside the Senate’s ingrown decadence would be a felony of obstructing justice to defend torture and those who committed it.

I have read many times, and soon will give a more explicit coverage of that argument here, that the moral and demanding ethical content of the monotheistic spiritual traditions of Judaism and Christianity (Islam is presently on the outs) were a step forward from the supposedly simply ritual and manipulation oriented practices of old time Pagans.  Popular as this argument is in many Christian circles, there is no historical support for it.

But we needn’t look to history.  Today we have the supposed guardians of the Christian moral tradition defending practices copied from the techniques of the Soviet secret police.

We are told we need these tactics to learn the truth.  But the Soviets and other dictatorships used these methods to get confessions regardless of what the truth was.  This has been repeatedly shown historically.  In our own case innocent people have been tortured.

The ‘Christian’ right is not in any meaningful sense either Christian or moral.  Ignore the self-professed labels and you have pretty good examples of what, in Christian terms, would be Satanists.  Until the genuine Christian community takes these guys on loudly and very very publicly, they really can’t say much about the morality of other people’s religions.

I am sure I am not alone among my readers in having partied long and well last night.  What a wonderful day.  I know it is alwys risky to invest too much hope in a political leader, for whom so many of us find a convenient rohrsach blot to see what patterns we want.

But it was wonderful nonetheless.

I don’t have a hangover.  But we as a country probably have a long one ahead of us.

Pantheacon is a giant Pagan gathering held this year Feb 13-16, over the Presidents’ Day weekend, at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, California, near the airport.  It is a wonderful event I would attend even if I were not presenting. But I am presenting.

My workshop combines explanation with participants’ personal experience. Based on people’s prior experience, topics can include: moving healing energy within your own body, the importance of motivation, auric cleansing, chakra stimulation, relieving energy coagulations that lead to physical symptoms such as pain and stiffness, working with depression and anger, self-cleansing, spirits, and applying these methods in healing circles, coven circles, and other spiritually oriented groups.

This workshop integrates what I learned studying six years with a Brazilian shaman as well as almost twenty years of healing work.  It also includes insights and issues that arose from a stroke I received last May, and from which my recovery is virtually complete.

It is Sunday, 3:30 PM in the San Carlos room at the Doubletree, 2050 Gateway Plaza, close to the airport, San Jose, CA.

There has been a lot of discussion as to whether newspapers as they currently exist can survive the age of the internet.  I want to suggest that no, they won’t, and further, that this is a good thing.  A very good thing.

Americans have gotten news by a variety of ways throughout our history.  During Revolutionary times printing was relatively slow, papers were expensive, and most people had access to them in public lace such as taverns or coffee houses.  The penny press made them widely and cheaply available, but again, subject to considerations of profitability.  As corporations took over more and more papers from individual and family owners, profitability became the only real value served by newspapers.  And not just the paper’s profitability.  What mattered more was the profitability of the corporations owning the papers.  This meant that the media were only subsidiaries of corporations often with even more important holdings in areas like defense.

Their capacity to serve citizens, never really high, plummeted.

The years of the Bush Administration, with its ideology of big business can do no wrong,  have seen many newspapers serving the interests behind political power, with the same concern for truth, as do state owned papers in less free societies.  Reporters simply passed on press releases and rarely gave much effort to real reporting.  Even family owned corporations such as the New York Times became such mouthpieces for the Republican oligarchy that I will never subscribe to it again.  This abasement occurred after savaging the Clinton administration for far smaller sins.

Corporations are incapable of serving citizens, only consumers.  Not only that, they seek a lowest common denominator in order to gin up subscriptions and therefore make the most money off advertising.  They have done inordinate harm to the American polity.  Of course exceptions exist (I think of McClatchy), but this is the bigger picture.

Good riddance to a corporate press.  May the rest of corporate involvement with news media go the same way – and as quickly as possible.

What can take its place?  Many of the best blogs now do serious investigative work – far more than most reporters, it seems.  Finding reliable blogs that treat subjects in depth remains a challenge, (as a start I recommend Digby and Greenwald) but the same holds for more traditional news, and many of our problems have been made worse by thinking the traditional media was somehow other than a tool for the government and its beneficiaries.

Yet newspapers serve vital purposes in informing citizens of public affairs and controversies.  So far blogs seem less able to do this as well.  E are in a time of creative restructuring, because without good news sources, good blogs are difficult to maintain.

A professional news media must somehow continue to exist.

My guess is that newspapers may become services provided by civil society rather than the market in any strong sense.  Foundations and private contributions could become major funders and the resulting papers will serve Americans as citizens.  There will be fewer readers as stories become more substantive. This smaller readership will consist of people who take their role as citizen relatively seriously.   I suggest this will be a good thing.  These stories will then be disseminated by citizens and  blogs and other means to the wider audience.

Papers with such a base could hardly help from doing a better job pf reporting than the current corporate press.  As far as I am concerned, it cannot disappear quickly enough

One of my favorite blogs, Balloon Juice, brought my attention to an article reporting research demonstrating that a perception of personal powerlessness leads to a greater tendency towards superstition, conspiracy theories, and false conclusions.  I think this has enormous implications for understanding America today.

As institutions become ever greater and farther removed from any sensitivity towards real people, increasingly we are immersed in a society where our influence in many of our daily activities is small and indirect.  Government is not open to our influence in any way we can actually experience.  The same holds for big business, big education, big medicine, and any other area of life where the personal has been overwhelmed by the impersonal.

That indirect emergent processes that coordinate our actions with others may be at work is irrelevant because we do not experience any efficacy on our part.  Thus, the emergent social process I study however beneficial they may be are inadequate for creating a good environment for human flourishing.  I fact, they may breed habits of perception and thinking that ultimately weaken the significant contributions they do make to human well-being.

I have been groping towards a theory of civil society as the actual realm of human well-being because it is not dominated by any single impersonal feedback processes.  This research suggests my intuition may be even more important than I had imagined.

In terms of broadly liberal social theory, it makes the case for focusing on the individual rather than some abstraction of a part of an individual as the unit of analytical and ethical concern.  Out with the ‘consumer,’ the ‘rational actor,’ the ‘citizen,’ and let us return to human beings in all their complexity. I believe this research also radically strengthens arguments for ‘small is beautiful,’ ‘buy locally,’ and the importance of a sense of place approaches towards social life.

I have recently seen many discussions by conservatives, real and feigned, attempting to analyze the collapse of the Republican Party at the polls and the apparent repudiation of ‘conservatism’, with no sign of any improvement in the next elections in two years.  This led me to think about what went so terribly wrong in conservative circles over the past several decades, as a movement with a strong intellectual heritage became associated with the blitherings and blatherings of Limbaugh, Coulter, Kristol, and others while jettisoning almost all its former political principles on the altar of George Bush and the new imperial presidency.

I think I have something worth adding to the discussion. (more…)

One reason I wanted this site was to serve as a place where much of my published work could be made easily available.  Some hacker removed it a while ago and left junk.  It has taken me a while to restore it because of a year from Hell - a death in the family, a stroke,  move, and various other things.  But due to the efforts of my wonderful web mistress, the original articles are back up along with a number of other more recent ones.

If you look up at the top right, under ‘pages’ you will find the basic headings.  Click on one and it will take you to where you can see what is available.