Watership Down corollary: Cowslip's Warren: the warren of the snares, location on map: C4.
Architectural analogy: Take the 54 blocks in a Jenga
set and sprawl them out across the floor. The horizontal exposure
represents facticity (homonomy), and the lack of vertical exposure
represents a lack of transcendence (pattern of vicarious living).
Dogmatic Nihilism
Primary Example: Christianity (the Anointed One)
Doctrine
and Dogma. Monotheistic. Goal: Escape Satan, Sin, and Hell.
Christianity, like Buddhism, seeks to derive its values from the
external world and finds the external world lacking. But unlike
Buddhism, Christianity's facts are derived not from the external world
but from phantasy. "There is no meaning in this world--but there is in
the next! There we find our justification for meaning as well as right
and wrong, and there we find the hope for a better world. But isn't it
strange? Some people don't realize that we live in a fallen, sinful
world. How can we go about convincing them that this life is a mistake so that we can then help them escape?
Other Examples: Kierkegaard, Monotheism in general, Fascism, Totalitarianism in general, Maybe Plato, Kantian moral theory5, the Inquisition, Al-Ghazali, psychopathy, ritualism.
Monotheism
is inherently problematic. Compared to monotheists, polytheists tend to
get along with one another. "You have your gods, we have ours. No
problem. Monotheists don't get along with anyone. They don't get along
with polytheists, and they don't get along with other monotheists.
Genuine peace among monotheists is only possible to the extent that
they don't take themselves seriously (liberal Christianity, for
example). The polytheist methodology is something akin to, "This is
what it looks like from our perspective. How does it look from your
perspective? Okay, how can we work out some common understanding? In
contrast, the monotheist perspective starts out with the assertion, "We
are totally right and everyone else is totally wrong. The reason why
there are bad things in the world is because not everyone does what we
want them to do. Solution: All we have to do is get everyone in the
world to believe exactly what we believe and to do exactly what we tell
them to do. Then everything will be perfect, forever! Even if this
were possible, which it isn't, to the extent that it becomes a reality
it is horrible. It is the very definition of tyranny. It closes down
innovation and turns individuals into slaves. Monotheism, like
totalitarianism, has only ever come into being under the most dire and
unstable of circumstances--as a last ditch effort for some aspect of
life to at least survive in some form. Its maintenance has always come
at the cost of science, social welfare, and individual liberty. The
reason Europe and Canada, for example, are not prone to the same
religious fanaticism (or violent crime, for that matter) as the U.S., I
would hypothesize, is because their social welfare programs prevent
them from yielding a sea of desperate and easily exploitable masses.
(Of course this is merely a hypothesis. Correlation is not
causation--a basic principle of science which is often lost on the
larger populace and which we all need to be steadfast in recognizing.)
Within the U.S. there are certain aspects of the Religious Right who
would like to see the social services that do exist dismantled, so that
their roles can be taken over by churches--something that should give
pause to those that praise them for their love of charity. The
continual splintering that occurs in monotheism should come as no
surprise, given how artificially imposed a perspective it is from the
outset. So really the difference between monotheism and polytheism is
the difference between violent, balkanized, disastrous polytheism and
unified, cooperative, sustainable polytheism.
http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/consequence.html
This structural pattern is exemplified by monotheism on the religious level, totalitarianism on the state level, and psychopathy6
on the individual level. On the cellular level it is called cancer. It
exhibits the appearance of strength--converting or destroying all around
it--but it is fundamentally unstable and ends by destroying itself and
destroying its host. It's a "Lose-Lose scenario. Cancer is of course
the most acute form of this and it runs its course rather quickly. In
the religious sphere this is comparatively very subtle and slow in its
operation--though in the time-table of the human religious experience
monotheism has not been around for very long at all, and within that
time it's done considerable harm. Whatever level it is operating on,
however, its behavior is the same--disregard for its internal components
and external environment.
Dogmatic nihilists often consider
themselves idealists, and the term idealism has traditionally been used
to describe this perspective, but they are not idealists in the sense
that I mean because--well, because they think life is bad. They think life is so bad
that they seek to escape into a fantasy that is its antithesis--as
opposed to dogmatic idealists, whose fantasies are used to reinforce
the processes of life, or pragmatic nihilists, who seek shelter in
knowledge rather than fantasy.
Face Icon: (
Archetype: The Crusader / Inquisitor.
Watership Down corollary: Efrafa, location on map: D15.
Architectural analogy: Take the 54 blocks in a Jenga
set and try to build an upside-down pyramid (with one block as the
base, two blocks on top of that, three blocks on top of that, etc).
This structure has both horizontal and vertical exposure (and thus both
facticity and transcendence), but it has them in the wrong place
(pattern of vicarious living and pattern of noncommitment). Thus it is more structurally unsound, not less. Though it forms an interesting mirror image of pragmatic idealism.
Dogmatic Idealism
Primary Example: Tenrikyo (Divine Reason)
Doctrine
and Dogma. Panentheistic. Goal: Live the Joyous Life. Tenrikyo derives
its facts from phantasy--there is a mother/father God; the universe was
created 900,099,999 years before the year 1838 (not as bad as 6
thousand years ago, mind you, but still wrong); human beings were
created in Japan; the first man was made from a fish; the first woman
was made from a snake; various animals were made into our organs;
Tenrikyo's foundress, Miki Nakayama (yes, a woman), became the Shine of
God the Parent on October 26, 1838, etc etc. But its values are derived
from phantasy as well. What is the purpose of life? "To be happy. And
life is wonderful! They seek to create the Joyous Life here on earth.
Does Tenrikyo, deriving its concept of reality from phantasy, have an
idea of sin? It does, though in that its values are positive, this has
a less destructive incarnation. There are "dusts of the mind that get
in the way of one's experience of joy and that one must brush away, but
the goal is still happiness in this world (in general, everything that
we call "superstition would also fall under this category of cultural
OCD for dogmatic idealists). Christians want to escape to heaven and
have their enemies sent to hell. Buddhists want to escape to Nirvana
and have their enemies reincarnate (in hell, as animals, as hungry
ghosts, etc) where their suffering will either merely continue or
actually increase. But those of Tenrikyo wish only to reincarnate as
human beings in this world forever--and this fate they assign to all
human beings. "And isn't it wonderful! Why would you ever want anything
else? This world is a wonderful, beautiful place. Let's live together
in joy forever!
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Ben Dench graduated valedictorian of his class from The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in the Spring Semester of 2007 with a B.A. in philosophy (his graduation speech, which received high praise, is available on YouTube). He is currently (
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