Leavers and Takers: To Be a Leaver or Not, that is Never the Question!

To Be a Leaver or Not, that is Never the Question!

Cultural survival means resurrecting tribal thinking and the way humans thought a million years ago up to the Great Forgetting

by Paul Haeder / January 9th, 2016

There’s a real sense that we are past staying this mono-cultural collapse, and a book that came out 20 years ago, enlightens now more than ever, with the multiple forces of environmental, economic and societal collapses occurring under the weight of an elite and the barbarity of capitalism and extreme ecosystems and social systems exploitation.

This concept is what the subtitle suggests – An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. A book that ties into an earlier one, Ishmael, where writer Daniel Quinn gives us a gorilla with the power of human history locked up inside his brain, whereupon he communicates through the life stream of extra sensory perception.

The ideas are deep in The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, but in reality the understory of the magnificent storytelling is a simplicity that can cause anyone to pause – how it is, now in this totalitarian and singular culture of takers, those in the agency capitalism, unfathomable plundering of ecosystems, and unbridled consumerism, that more and more people are listless, brutalized by media, drugged or boozed out, looking for the pornography of emptiness, suicidal, feeling worthless, and counting on some redemption in a singular god with big G afterlife.

Leavers, as outlined in Ishmael, are tribal people, tied to community of place and the geography of time, embedded in nature, as one community, that is, a single small species in the entire web of millions of others. Hunting and gathering is a determining process that keeps clans small – 30-ish – and people with song and stories and art and language who understand the scheme of things — a culture based on all species webbed and interconnected with everything else, each blade of grass, grub, predator, prey.

The leaving part of the leaver culture is in knowing we are one inside a natural world, an element among other elements, part of nature, not here to subdue it, tear it, control it, and wipe out all other parts of it to reign as King of the Jungle. Quinn emphasizes that the natural world, which includes “Leaver” cultures, sustains itself through what he calls the law of limited competition. Under this peace-keeping law, he says, you may not hunt down competitors or deny them food or access to it. You also may not commit genocide against your competition.

With that, and in the The Story of B, Quinn goes into a deeper history of humans, looking at the 200,000 years as Homo Sapiens, with that big shift 12,000 years ago adopting a taker thinking; i.e., agriculture. It’s something I’ve been teaching for forty years, and Quinn refines it in a book about B, first a man in Germany who meets with anyone, in theaters and out of the way places, to talk about the Great Forgetting. B (Charles) gets assassinated on a train, and his role is subsumed by a woman named Shirin, the new B. Eventually, she and others are inside a theater when a bomb goes off, survive, and then the priest is now enlisted — he disavows his Christ and his religion — to be B. But the Great Remembering clan is on the run, fearful of the forces of religion and militarism.

Jared is that Laurentian priest, given the gold master card by his boss to investigate B, which the priesthood hierarchy suspects is the AntiChrist because of his heretical teachings about human life way past the date of first town and farm. It’s a look at civilization’s greatest minds drawing humanity’s very birth from the city and farm — forgetting that we are from a lineage 4 million years old, and several hundred thousand years as Homo sapiens in that hunter and gatherer role, comprising thousands of distinct and diverse cultures. That is the antithetical nature of the story, how what we were then, for a million years or more, that those principles and ways, that we were born from that, and our humanity comes from that space and time.

To think humanity is rooted from that past into what we are now, or that we are defined by the advent of armies and machines, religions and famines, and pestilence, politics and kings, despots and consumer insanity, is to erase millions of years of history — a time that even modern thinkers see as pre-history, an insignificance, savages!

That valuable wealth of knowledge and action, those terms of human exchange and how we knew our role in nature, what nature was, how the planet was made up of millions of great brothers and sisters with fins, wings, claws and fur, it has been marginalized and demolished. Leavers were wiped out by disease, the ax, the gun, the poisons, the bombs of Taker society.

I find that this readjusting in my students, to understand what it means to be of one rotten, eating from the inside out culture, is so hard for them, almost like signs from Mars . . .  and as blind as anything we as supposed thinker species could have believed, and continue to believe in our hubris of forgetting the elements of power in being and intuitive knowing our place in nature, not outside it, ready to slash and burn and pollute it into oblivion.

In Ishmael, the gorilla says: “And only once in all the history of this planet has any species tried to live in defiance of this law — and it wasn’t an entire species, it was only one people, those I’ve named the Takers. Ten thousand years ago, this one people said, ‘No more. Man was not meant to be bound by this law,’ and they began to live in a way that flouts the law at every point.”

That way is totalitarian agriculture, which pushes all other species and systems to the brink of collapse in order to satisfy this Taker mentality of wiping out all competitors to satisfy a bizarre aim at growing more and more food, way past any clan’s needs. Surpluses have added to human population in incredible numbers, where for 150,000 years there probably were 10 million of us, and then, as the grain and legume were planted, civilizations sprang

Our totalitarian system is all about toiling, and famines, plagues, masters and slaves, disease, insanity, punishment, laws, politics – and B talks about the millions, tens of millions and hundreds of millions over the course of 5,000 years of history who died of starvation even as food production bulldozed more land, more water was poisoned, and bigger and uglier cities were built. Imagine, those great numbers dying in what was supposed to be the civilized cultures, without the savage tie to earth and sky, even though food growing increased and increased. Population grew along with food growing: amazing doubling of the population and doubling more and doubling and doubling, until we now have 7.1 billion, going for 9.2 billion by 2050 (or is it 11 billion?).

Famines throughout history — not beginning with the Irish potato famine of 1848, 1.5 million dead; Vietnamese of 1945, 2 million; Bengal famine of 1770, 10 million dead; Soviet famine of 1932, 10 million dead; Chalisa Famine of 1783, 11 million dead. Famines go back to Greece and Egypt and Spain and Italy . . . thousands of years ago. What accounts for this, when our population goes up and farming goes up with it?

B explains this and more in his Great Remembering talks, a way to reframe who we are, since Homo-something (I call us today, Retailopithecus or Consumopithecus Sapiens, here and here). So we, thousands of cultures, Leavers, have been around for 4 million years, and we worked well in those gene pools and behavioral suits, until around 12,000 years ago.

Growing crops by clearing the land, killing the species, mucking the waters, it became a way to control people – power – and great abundance of food propelled armies and made wars and greater wars possible. But simply put, as B states in the book,

Totalitarian agriculture is based on the premise that all the food in the world belongs to us, and there is no limit whatever to what we may take for ourselves and deny to all others. (Story of B, Chapter 26, Page 260)

These ideas are those that we were supposed to talk about with youth, K12, and in college, and understanding how wrong this mono-culture is, and how we have to change our total thinking, our mindset, our emotional attitudes, to survive . . . .

Quinn, in an interview, says,

According to the mythology of our culture, the world was made for Man to conquer and rule–and Man was made to conquer and rule it. Man is eminently fit for this job, and “humanizing” the world (for example, by clearing a formerly untouched habitat and putting it to the plow to produce human food) is a blessed thing to do. According to our mythology, humans represent a separate and higher order of being from the rest of the living community (which of course Christianity confirms). According to our mythology, the world is a human possession, to be used as suits us; it has no intrinsic value, no value outside the human frame of reference. Songbirds exist to provide us with musical entertainment, and if we decide we can do without that entertainment, we’re free to dispense with songbirds. Faced with a stand of trees, the only question to be asked is, “Would we rather leave it as it is and have a park or level it for a shopping mall?”

According to our mythology, we are humanity itself, and those who lived before were merely “savages” (like the Yanomami and Gebusi), which is to say, something less than human. We live the way people were “meant” to live from the beginning of time, and everyone in the world should be made to live the way we do. According to our mythology, there is one (and only one) right way for people to live, and we have it (which is why it must be imposed on all others). Because we live the way people are “meant” to live, we must cling to it even if it kills us. At the same time, according to our mythology, humans are deeply and irremediably flawed, and this accounts for the fact that so much of what we do turns out badly. The fault is not to be found in the way we live, therefore, but in human nature itself. And since we are the ONLY true representatives of humanity, we need only look at ourselves and our own history to discover what “human nature” is.

Chilling, how out of balance our species has become, and for evolutionary minds, it’s tied to farming, to the big project of plowing earth and exploding rivers and killing species to grow more and more stuff for more and more armies so fewer and fewer kings and bankers and rulers will control the masses.

For one million years before now, there were 125,000 of us, and 300,000 years before now, 1 million, and we sit on our thumbs and think that our populations can keep growing, and growing, and that technology and machines and chemicals and homogenized culture will get us out of this dilemma of many snake heads — climate change, perpetual war, environmental pollution, toxicity, unending pain and exploitation of fellow humans, and the extinction of 200 species a day.

Any culture will become an obscenity when blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong.

— Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit,  Chapter 10, Page 82

Paul Kirk Haeder has been a journalist since 1977. He's covered police, environment, planning and zoning, county and city politics, as well as working in true small town/community journalism situations in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mexico and beyond. He's been a part-time faculty since 1983, and as such has worked in prisons, gang-influenced programs, universities, colleges, alternative high schools, language schools, as a private contractor-writing instructor for US military in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Washington. A forthcoming book,Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber, looks at 10 years of his writing at Dissident Voice, and before, to bring defiance to the world that is now lobotomizing at a rate never before seen in history. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.

This article was posted on Saturday, January 9th, 2016 at 1:22am and is filed under Book Review, Capitalism, Education, Environment, Life/Animal Rights,Original Peoples, Philosophy.

How Would the Buddha Handle North Korea? Mindfulness in Diplomacy

How Would the Buddha Handle North Korea? Mindfulness in Diplomacy

Seok-Hyun Hong Become a fan 

Chairman and CEO of the JoongAng Media Network

Today's diplomacy is dysfunctional, and it seems as if the more we try to fix things without negotiations, the more serious the problems become. Recently the challenges in places like Iraq or Syria have grown so dire that we have to wonder whether we simply have the fundamentals wrong.

It may seem odd that this age of global integration would give birth to serious diplomatic tensions and occasionally to brutal conflicts. Part of the problem can be traced back to fundamental assumptions in the Western diplomatic tradition that have dominated international strategy since the seventeenth century.

The Western frame of mind that informs international relations assumes rivalry to be an essential principle. Throughout Western diplomatic history it has been assumed that one side must win over others through a winner-take-all struggle for hegemony.

But is such a vision appropriate for this age of the global community and of shared concerns such as climate change? Do all our exchanges have to take place in a Hobbesian world of all against all?

My experience in diplomacy suggests that the Eastern philosophical traditions of Daoism, Hinduism and above all Buddhism offer alternative approaches to diplomacy that have come of age. Buddhism places emphasis on harmony, rather than rivalry, and offers concrete strategies for engagement that help us to respond to the diplomatic challenges of an interconnected world.

The Buddhist approach does not naïvely assume that humans will always cooperate. Rather, it provides insights into the potential for true progress in all circumstances, a potential one can only grasp when one sees the duality and complexity of relations. There are deeper patterns in human relations that go beyond the simplistic impressions of good and evil that we find everywhere in the media, depictions that often apply and exploit an unstated religious framework in a Judeo-Christian interpretive matrix.

Many assume that diplomacy is a ruthless game of hegemony in which one just gives lip service to harmony as a strategy for justifying one's actions. But what if harmony was actually the goal of diplomacy?

To be sure, the concept of harmony among nations is not foreign to the Western diplomatic tradition. The historical diplomatic aim of achieving a "concert of Europe" would seem to appeal to just such a longing for peaceful, cooperative order. Despite the appealing metaphor, though, we would better understand this term as a euphemism, a pleasant name for the disposition of the affairs of small countries by the great powers, to the advantage of the latter. In the words of one historian, the "concert of Europe" implied a harmony that "really meant that the smaller nations were coerced into carrying out what the great powers had agreed upon among themselves."

Buddhism regards such hegemonic approaches to international relations as simply less effective in assuring security than simple dignity and a commitment to harmony. There is a deeper order beneath the surface of things and our sense of harmony, played out through small symbolic steps, can change the very nature of the debate in a positive direction.

The game of chess has come to symbolize diplomacy in the Western tradition. Just as in the game of chess, the Western strategist assumes a zero-sum framework wherein you must take the opponent's pieces and eventually checkmate his king. (Tellingly, the English word "checkmate" derives ultimately from a Persian expression that means "the king is dead.")

But the more dignified approach to game-play in the East is based on the assumption of the possibility of co-existence and co-prosperity. Asian games like weiqi (Chinese chess) or baduk(known as go in Japanese) differ from Western chess fundamentally in that the game assumes a mutual harmony even in competition, rather than ruthless elimination of the enemy.

Western chess assumes only one simplistic victory based on hegemony: you go after the king and destroy him, at which point the game ends. But in weiqi, there are millions of ways of winning the game. You can win with a half-house, or you can win by several hundred houses. There is a winner, but the myriad of potential games unfolds like a dance, without an assumption of total domination. Success in weiqi comes from harmony and balance.

The metaphor of balance, like that of harmony, has long had a place as a term of art in the Western tradition of diplomacy. From the eighteenth century through the early twentieth, the concept of a "balance of power" guided the conduct of international relations among the European great powers. Acting in accordance with this principle, diplomacy wove shifting alliances and international understandings in an effort to prevent the rise to hegemony of any one power or bloc. Yet the nature of the balance sought was curiously limited. This approach recognized and served only the aims and interests of the established club of the great powers; other nations and peoples often played the role of pawns, or of the stakes of the competition, in the scramble for domination and colonial mastery.

Also, the constant need to reestablish equilibrium among the powers was made necessary by the very fact that no nation regarded the principle of balance as, in itself, a desirable goal or guiding principle. Rather, it was the means available to prevent rivals or enemies from achieving the unstated goal privately maintained by each participant in the game, namely that of reaching the top of the hierarchy of relative status and power and of exerting a determining influence in the affairs of the other competitors. In this light we see that the balance maintained by this system of relationships was of an unstable sort that could last only so long as circumstances did not allow one side to upset the balance to their own advantage: there was no commitment to balance, or to the benefits that could follow from it, as worthwhile ends in their own right. The dangers inherent in this unstable equilibrium can hardly be overstated, as clearly shown by the outbreak, one hundred years ago at this writing, of the First World War.

Balance is an essential value in Buddhism, and that approach to human affairs has an immediate application with regards to North Korea. Many Western strategists approach Pyongyang with a hegemonic way of thinking. They simply assume that you "go after " North Korea and win by changing the regime, or by getting rid of the top person. But, as we know from experience, such an approach does not necessarily lead to success. Decades of US intervention in Latin America and the Middle East have shown that each unilateral intervention carries with it the threat of later "blowback," the unforeseen consequences that complicate and escalate conflicts. Although you may achieve your short-term goal, you will so disrupt the harmony as to create new problems, especially for ordinary people. After all, where North Korea is concerned, eliminating nuclear armaments is important, but if that process is disruptive, it will lead to only greater problems.

In my own diplomatic career, I have constantly fallen back on the wisdom of Buddhism, finding uses for mindfulness, balance and awareness in all aspects of international relations.

It is essential that when one is distressed by a diplomatic situation, when the situation seems hopeless, to take time out and return to one's inner self. I find that taking time to meditate, to feel at peace with oneself and regain composure, can do wonders for one's perspective. One should not make a serious decision until one has been centered.

Whomever I may be working with, I want to imagine a win-win situation, rather than fantasizing about destroying my opponent. The act of seeking harmony as an end in itself can lead one to discover previously unimaginable solutions. And in today's interconnected world, we have no choice but to think about harmonious solutions that avoid dangerous confrontations.

One valuable concept in Buddhism is "mushim" which is an important part of my personal practice. Mushim means something like "no mind," or more precisely "no fixed thinking." It is a state in which the mind is open to all things and is not occupied by a thought or an emotion. In such a state, one is always neutral and calm, with a perspective from outside of one's self. In such a state one can move beyond one's prejudices and see one's counterpart as he is.

Step one is taking the emotions out of diplomacy. There is no reason to lose your temper at the remarks or the actions of your counterpart. They are not part of you. You should be like a mirror that reflects back those comments and actions. A mirror does not become irritated by the images that it reflects back. They come and go. But of course one should be aware of those images, those shifts in message and in direction. And one should be aware of one's own emotional responses. If one can keep up that detachment, can be aware of what is happening and of one's emotional responses, then one reaches a state of mushim.

An analogy to the ocean is useful. Your mind is like an ocean rocked by waves throughout the day. Shocks and insults cloud your thinking. But if one achieves an even, level state with few disruptions, the ocean can reflect the sky perfectly. So also can the mind reflect on the world with remarkable accuracy if it is not churned by emotions. Things come and go. When you can let things come and go, you catch the essence. You become a more objective observer of yourself and your counterpart as your ego fades from the dialogue.

The most common error we make is to mistake our obsessiveness, our fascination with events and images, with true mindfulness.

Buddhism suggests that meditation helps in any profession. Even thieves will do a better job if they meditate! That is to say that meditation is not a matter of value judgments. It is rather about focus and awareness. For the same reason, Buddhist practice does not conflict with any particular religion. Mindful practice mixes well with Christianity or Islam.

After all, moral judgment is a matter of perspective. If you think in terms of history on the scale of thousands of years, you can come to a judgment of an event or actor with some detachment. But you will be far away from the actual moment. But if you focus in on the moment and make a value judgment, what you thought was right may prove to be the opposite in a month, a year, or a decade.

Thus I once met an American who spoke about the North Korean regime and said to me, "We cannot trust North Korea, we should attack the WMD sites and push for a regime change."

In response, I started out by expressing my agreement with the goal in a general sense of transforming North Korea and eliminating nuclear weapons. But I then continued his logic, asking about what the consequences of our actions would be for ordinary North Koreans. I kept coming back to the ultimate purpose of change in North Korea, suggesting that co-prosperity and coexistence, in whatever form, was the goal. I also suggested that, although not everything is possible at one time, there is a win-win out there. I never denied the validity of his position. I only suggested that there were other approaches that needed to be exhausted first.

I sensed that he was obsessed with one goal without thinking out the variety of paths by which that goal might be reached. I tried to get him to focus more on process, on the issues faced by specific people in the North, in the South, in surrounding nations.

While I was ambassador to the United States during the regime of the Roh Moo-hyun government, I received many comments to the effect that Korea is not sufficiently concerned about human rights in North Korea. My response then was to say: I'm very concerned with the human rights issues, in a big sense. I fully understand the tragedies that the people from the North suffer through.

I then explained that if we become obsessed with the images we see in the media, and fail to understand the larger institutional and cultural issues behind these injustices, then we are likely to respond impulsively and will inadvertently make human rights issues worse for the short and medium term.

In this sense, mindfulness means a true awareness of human rights as something more than just the right to vote or freedom from arbitrary arrest. We need to consider the millions of people who are undernourished or starving to death. How are we bringing human rights to them? That is an essential question for us.

Buddhism offers to diplomacy a focus on the long term and on balance in all relations. Progress can be made in international relations, but we must consider always the Buddha's middle way. To the degree that we can create a win-win for all players, and avoid extremes, we can go forward in a meaningful way. If we try to force the issue by insisting on one perspective and by falling back on military strikes, we are unlikely to get more than a temporary result that will soon be reversed. Action undertaken in this spirit could easily lead to a worse result than doing nothing.

Only by remaining mindful of how our impulsive reactions, winner-take-all outlook, and shifting policy objectives can undermine our deeper commitment to the common causes of humanity can we establish a balance, not of power, but of perspective, and in the process aspire to a harmony among nations worthy of the name.

The author is chairman of JoongAng Media Network -- one of South Korea's leading media groups, including the prestigious JoongAng Ilbo daily and a former South Korean ambassador to the United States.

What We’re Afraid to Say About Ebola

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

What We’re Afraid to Say About Ebola

By MICHAEL T. OSTERHOLMSEPT. 11, 2014

Photo

Credit Jonathon Rosen

MINNEAPOLIS — THE Ebola epidemic in West Africa has the potential to alter history as much as any plague has ever done.

There have been more than 4,300 cases and 2,300 deaths over the past six months. Last week, the World Health Organization warned that, by early October, there may be thousands of new cases per week in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria. What is not getting said publicly, despite briefings and discussions in the inner circles of the world’s public health agencies, is that we are in totally uncharted waters and that Mother Nature is the only force in charge of the crisis at this time.

There are two possible future chapters to this story that should keep us up at night.

The first possibility is that the Ebola virus spreads from West Africa to megacities in other regions of the developing world. This outbreak is very different from the 19 that have occurred in Africa over the past 40 years. It is much easier to control Ebola infections in isolated villages. But there has been a 300 percent increase in Africa’s population over the last four decades, much of it in large city slums. What happens when an infected person yet to become ill travels by plane to Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa or Mogadishu — or even Karachi, Jakarta, Mexico City or Dhaka?

The second possibility is one that virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. You can now get Ebola only through direct contact with bodily fluids. But viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next. The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice.

If certain mutations occurred, it would mean that just breathing would put one at risk of contracting Ebola. Infections could spread quickly to every part of the globe, as the H1N1 influenza virus did in 2009, after its birth in Mexico.

Why are public officials afraid to discuss this? They don’t want to be accused of screaming “Fire!” in a crowded theater — as I’m sure some will accuse me of doing. But the risk is real, and until we consider it, the world will not be prepared to do what is necessary to end the epidemic.

In 2012, a team of Canadian researchers proved that Ebola Zaire, the same virus that is causing the West Africa outbreak, could be transmitted by the respiratory route from pigs to monkeys, both of whose lungs are very similar to those of humans. Richard Preston’s 1994 best seller “The Hot Zone” chronicled a 1989 outbreak of a different strain, Ebola Reston virus, among monkeys at a quarantine station near Washington. The virus was transmitted through breathing, and the outbreak ended only when all the monkeys were euthanized. We must consider that such transmissions could happen between humans, if the virus mutates.

So what must we do that we are not doing?

First, we need someone to take over the position of “command and control.” The United Nations is the only international organization that can direct the immense amount of medical, public health and humanitarian aid that must come from many different countries and nongovernmental groups to smother this epidemic. Thus far it has played at best a collaborating role, and with everyone in charge, no one is in charge.

A Security Council resolution could give the United Nations total responsibility for controlling the outbreak, while respecting West African nations’ sovereignty as much as possible. The United Nations could, for instance, secure aircraft and landing rights. Many private airlines are refusing to fly into the affected countries, making it very difficult to deploy critical supplies and personnel. The Group of 7 countries’ military air and ground support must be brought in to ensure supply chains for medical and infection-control products, as well as food and water for quarantined areas.

The United Nations should provide whatever number of beds are needed; the World Health Organization has recommended 1,500, but we may need thousands more. It should also coordinate the recruitment and training around the world of medical and nursing staff, in particular by bringing in local residents who have survived Ebola, and are no longer at risk of infection. Many countries are pledging medical resources, but donations will not result in an effective treatment system if no single group is responsible for coordinating them.

Finally, we have to remember that Ebola isn’t West Africa’s only problem. Tens of thousands die there each year from diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea have among the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. Because people are now too afraid of contracting Ebola to go to the hospital, very few are getting basic medical care. In addition, many health care workers have been infected with Ebola, and more than 120 have died. Liberia has only 250 doctors left, for a population of four million.

This is about humanitarianism and self-interest. If we wait for vaccines and new drugs to arrive to end the Ebola epidemic, instead of taking major action now, we risk the disease’s reaching from West Africa to our own backyards.

Michael T. Osterholm is the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 12, 2014, on page A31 of the New York edition with the headline: What We’re Afraid To Say About Ebola. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe

Why Is Pope Francis Throwing Nuns Who Share His Beliefs Under the Bus?

  BELIEF  

The Guardian

by Sadhbh Walshe

Why Is Pope Francis Throwing Nuns Who Share His Beliefs Under the Bus?

Not a peep from the Pope as nuns are censured for not focusing on abortion and gay marriage.

May 8, 2014

In the earliest days of his tenure, Pope Francis became one of the world's most admired religious figures – due in large part to his vocal support and actions on behalf of social justice. So, to many Catholics, there is more than a little disappointment that he is turning a blind eye to the Vatican's ongoing crackdown on America's nuns.

The really disheartening thing about the pope's unwillingness to end the nuns' censure – indeed, about his unwillingness to openly support them – is that his stated values are no different than the ones the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) is being punished for carrying out. 

Instead, the church has scolded a group of highly-educated, highly-accomplished and forward-thinking women like a bunch of errant school girls.

The first time was in 2012, when the nuns got accused of undermining the church's hierarchy by "promoting radical feminist ideology". Yes, the Vatican officially censured the LCWR – with no apparent irony – for spending too much time on poverty and social justice concerns, and not enough time condemning abortion and gay marriage.

A year later, when the more liberal Pope Francis took over, the nuns and their many supporters were hopeful that the censure would be lifted. But last week's rebuke by Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, the head of the the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog, dampened those hopes.

In this latest knuckle-rapping, Mueller took issue with the LCRW's plans to honor a feminist theologian, Elizabeth Johnson, whose writings on conscious evolution and other matters have been criticized by US bishops. He went on to remind the "misbehaving" nuns in the strongest possible terms that their organization held its status within the church only through Vatican approval – and that if they wished to retain that status, they would have to toe the church line and focus more of their work on issues like abortion and less on social justice.

I spoke this week with Sister Simone Campbell, the executive director of Network (a Catholic social justice lobby) and the driving force behind the Nuns on the Bus tour. Sister Campbell's group was singled out as one of the trouble-makers in the Vatican's 2012 assessment, mostly because it came out in support of the Affordable Care Act, which the US Catholic bishops opposed. "The Catholic sisters in the United States keep getting caught in the middle of the Vatican's infighting over political resistance to reforms," she told me. "Calming the concerns of conservatives is still a priority for the church."

Still, Campbell says she believes the pope does support the sisters' goals, even if he can't (or won't) come out and say it directly. She pointed out that Cardinal Kasper, who is generally known as the pope's theologian,came out in support of the LCRW's work during a speech at Fordham University in New York this week. Kasper told the crowd that he highly esteemed the work of Elizabeth Johnson, and joked that he, too, is considered "suspect" by the Vatican. Given Kasper's close relationship with the pope, it's not unreasonable to assume that he spoke with the Pontiff's knowledge – if not approval. But is this indirect endorsement really the most that women in the church can hope for from a pope who's supposed to speak their language?

At the very least, women in the church – and women everywhere – should not have to question whether a pope who can speak so eloquently about the scourge of inequality is incapable of recognizing the very unequal treatment of women and men by his own church. Last year, 60 Minutescompiled a comprehensive report on the Vatican's standoff with the nuns. Among the many issues raised in the segment, the program noted the incongruity of the women's alleged doctrinal misdemeanors being treated as a "crisis" that required swift action, while it took decades for the church to seriously address the infinitely more serious crimes of pedophile priests – about which the Vatican only this week began issuing comprehensive data. For example, in 2007, when the church finally faced up to the sex-abuse scandal and began making reparation payments to victims, some archdiocese tried to evict nuns from their convents to fund the out of court settlements.

When women sin, they are made to pay the price. When men sin ... not so much.

Pope Francis has repeatedly stressed the importance of mercy over morals, while insisting upon the need to focus more attention on social justice. Last September, when the pope was asked by a fellow Jesuit what kind of church he dreamed of, he replied:

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods.

Whatever this week's censure of nuns – who are in trouble precisely for stressing social justice issues over abortion, gay marriage and birth control – says about the pope's dedication to his stated mission, one thing is more clear than ever: if the church continues to pressure an already-dwindling population of nuns to abandon its social justice work, Pope Francis may undermine his own agenda, just as much as some power players at the Vatican hope to undermine the nuns on and off the bus.

Sadhbh Walshe is a film-maker and former staff writer for the CBS drama series The District. Her opinion pieces have also been published in the Chicago Tribune and Irish Times.

8 Ways Magic Mushrooms Explain Santa Story

By Douglas Main, Staff Writer   |   December 18, 2013 04:22pm ET

Santa and his bag of... magic mushrooms?
Credit: Kiselev Andrey Valerevich | Shutterstock.com                                                                        
The story of Santa and his flying reindeer can be traced to an unlikely source: hallucinogenic or "magic" mushrooms, according to one theory.
"Santa is a modern counterpart of a shaman, who consumed mind-altering plants and fungi to commune with the spirit world," said John Rush, an anthropologist and instructor at Sierra College in Rocklin, Calif.

Here are eight ways that hallucinogenic mushrooms explain the story of Santa and his reindeer.


1. Arctic shamans gave out mushrooms on the winter solstice. 

According to the theory, the legend of Santa derives from shamans in the Siberian and Arctic regions who dropped into locals' teepeelike homes with a bag full of hallucinogenic mushrooms as presents in late December, Rush said.

"As the story goes, up until a few hundred years ago, these practicing shamans or priests connected to the older traditions would collect Amanita muscaria (the Holy Mushroom), dry them and then give them as gifts on the winter solstice," Rush told LiveScience in an email. "Because snow is usually blocking doors, there was an opening in the roof through which people entered and exited, thus the chimney story."

2. Mushrooms, like gifts, are found beneath pine trees.

The Amanita muscaria mushroom, which is deep red with white flecks.
Credit: USGS

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That's just one of the symbolic connections between the Amanita muscaria mushroom and the iconography of Christmas, according to several historians and ethnomycologists, or people who study fungi's influence on human societies. Of course, not all scientists agree that the Santa story is tied to a hallucinogen.

[Trippy Tales: History of Magic Mushrooms & Other Hallucinogens]

In his book "Mushrooms and Mankind" (The Book Tree, 2003) the late author James Arthur points out that Amanita muscaria, also known as fly agaric, lives throughout the Northern Hemisphere under conifers and birch trees, with which the fungi — which are deep red with white flecks — have a symbiotic relationship. This partially explains the practice of the Christmas tree, and the placement of bright red-and-white presents underneath it, which look like Amanita mushrooms, he wrote.

"Why do people bring pine trees into their houses at the winter solstice, placing brightly colored (red-and-white) packages under their boughs, as gifts to show their love for each other …?" he wrote. "It is because, underneath the pine bough is the exact location where one would find this 'Most Sacred' substance, the Amanita muscaria, in the wild." (Note: Do not eat these mushrooms, as they can be poisonous.)

3. Reindeer were shaman "spirit animals." 

Reindeer are common in Siberia and northern Europe, and seek out these hallucinogenic fungi, as the area's human inhabitants have also been known to do. Donald Pfister, a Harvard University biologist who studies fungi, suggests that Siberian tribesmen who ingested fly agaric may have hallucinated that the grazing reindeer were flying.
"At first glance, one thinks it's ridiculous, but it's not," said Carl Ruck, a professor of classics at Boston University. "Whoever heard of reindeer flying? I think it's becoming general knowledge that Santa is taking a 'trip' with his reindeer." [6 Surprising Facts About Reindeer]

Were Santa and his reindeer on a magic mushroom-induced trip?
Credit: Nomad_Soul | Shutterstock

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"Amongst the Siberian shamans, you have an animal spirit you can journey with in your vision quest," Ruck continued. "And reindeer are common and familiar to people in eastern Siberia."

4. Shamans dressed like … Santa Claus.
These shamans "also have a tradition of dressing up like the [mushroom] … they dress up in red suits with white spots," Ruck said.

5. Mushrooms abound in Christmas iconography.
Tree ornaments shaped like Amanita mushrooms and other depictions of the fungi are also prevalent in Christmas decorations throughout the world, particularly in Scandinavia and northern Europe, Pfister pointed out. That said, Pfister made it clear that the connection between modern-day Christmas and the ancestral practice of eating mushrooms is a coincidence, and he doesn't know about any direct link.

[5 Surprising Facts About Christmas]

6. Rudolph's nose resembles a bright-red mushroom.
Ruck points to Rudolph as another example of the mushroom imagery resurfacing: His nose looks exactly like a red mushroom. "It's amazing that a reindeer with a red-mushroom nose is at the head, leading the others," he said.

Many of these traditions were merged or projected upon St. Nicholas, a fourth-century saint known for his generosity, as the story goes.
There is little debate about the consumption of mushrooms by Arctic and Siberian tribespeople and shamans, but the connection to Christmas traditions is more tenuous, or "mysterious," as Ruck put it.

7. "A Visit from St. Nicholas" may have borrowed from shaman rituals. 

Many of the modern details of the modern-day American Santa Claus come from the 1823 poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (which later became famous as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas"). The poem is credited to Clement Clarke Moore, an aristocratic academic who lived in New York City.

The origins of Moore's vision are unclear, although Arthur, Rush and Ruck all think the poet probably drew from northern European motifs that derive from Siberian or Arctic shamanic traditions. At the very least, Arthur wrote, Santa's sleigh and reindeer are probably references to various related northern European mythology. For example, the Norse god Thor (known in German as Donner) flew in a chariot drawn by two goats, which have been replaced in the modern retelling by Santa's reindeer, Arthur wrote.

Reindeer, which aren't usually known to fly.
Credit: Stockxpert

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Other historians were unaware of a connection between Santa and shamans or magic mushrooms, including Stephen Nissenbaum, who wrote a book about the origins of Christmas traditions, and Penne Restad, of the University of Texas at Austin, both of whom were contacted by LiveScience.

8. Santa is from the Arctic.

One historian, Ronald Hutton, told NPR that the theory of a mushroom-Santa connection is flawed. "If you look at the evidence of Siberian shamanism, which I've done," Hutton said, "you find that shamans didn't travel by sleigh, didn't usually deal with reindeer spirits, very rarely took the mushrooms to get trances, didn't have red-and-white clothes."

But Rush and Ruck disagree, saying shamans did deal with reindeer spirits and the ingestion of mushrooms is well documented. Siberian shamans did wear red deer pelts, but the coloring of Santa's garb is mainly meant to mirror the coloring of Amanita mushrooms, Rush added. As for sleighs, the point isn't the exact mode of travel, but that the "trip" involves transportation to a different, celestial realm, Rush said. Sometimes people would also drink the urine of the shaman or the reindeer, as the hallucinogenic compounds are excreted this way, without some of the harmful chemicals present in the fungi (which are broken down by the shaman or the reindeer), Rush said.
"People who know about shamanism accept this story," Ruck said. "Is there any other reason that Santa lives in the North Pole? It is a tradition that can be traced back to Siberia."

Editor's Note: This is a repurposing of a story published on Dec. 20, 2012, which can be found here.
Email Douglas Main or follow him on Twitter or Google+. Follow us @LiveScience, Facebook or Google+. Article originally on LiveScience.