On Labor's Heraclitus; or, The Fragments of Socialism

Democritus and Heraclitus

My copy of The Fragments of Heraclitus translates his most famous line as: ‘Into the same river we both step and do not step. We both are and are not.’ We are all part of the economic system of capitalism, but we do not all agree on the role of government in the economy. Using Heraclitus’s statement to signal that we need a ‘new’ type of capitalism is misguided. Here’s why.

Here is my latest article in The Spectator Australia, On Labor’s Heraclitus: the fragments of socialism.

For in this line from Heraclitus, all is revealed about the values-based capitalism being pushed onto voters: flogging the dead horse of #socialism, rolling it over and flogging the other side. Put simply, socialism doesn’t work.https://t.co/CN0J6yHNy1

— The Spectator Australia (@SpectatorOz) February 16, 2023

A Contest of Ideas: Teaching Politics in Australia

House of Representatives in Action [Parliament of Australia, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0]

One of the most challenging aspects of teaching politics in Australia today is the rate of change in societal attitudes that appears to be out-pacing our political institutions. But Westminster-based liberal democracies, supported by the liberal arts tradition, have evolved and proven to be resilient over historical periods of great upheaval. I argue that we should not give up on a liberal education just yet.

Underpinning my views on teaching politics are some classic texts, including Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, John Locke's Two Treatises on Government and A Letter on Toleration, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, and C.B. MacPherson's Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. Each of these texts presents different ideas that have been incorporated into our political system over time.

While prevailing senses of manners, etiquette, and ethics have changed, liberal democracy has been the greatest engine room of ideas in human history. The results include higher standards of living, increased longevity, and greater choice for individuals.

Most importantly, within this system, individual citizens have rights and responsibilities that are central to the system's survival. Balance is achieved not by mandates, but by what former Prime Minister John Howard referred to as "a contest of ideas" that are freely expressed in the public sphere. As John Stuart Mill argued, even bad ideas should be allowed to be aired so that these ideas can be determined to be bad by the body politic. To prevent bad ideas from being aired only enables these ideas to fester and take on a life of their own.

Free speech in a liberal democracy, just like free, fair, and regular elections, provides a safety valve for citizens to let off steam: a form of bloodless revolution if you will. But to understand our rights and responsibilities is not something that suddenly appears from a happy accident. It requires a liberal education. For me, teaching politics in Australia is about teaching students how to think, not what to think. 

Teaching students how to think relies on a long tradition. Much like Sir Isaac Newton standing "on the shoulders of giants", our students will be given a better vantage point to grapple with current and future problems if they embrace this tradition. Even the most radical teacher began at the beginning - while happy accidents can and do benefit our society, it is too speculative an approach to leave our common good to mere chance.

In The Great Conversation, Robert M. Hutchins argued that the great upheaval of the first fifty years of the twentieth century did not invalidate nor make irrelevant the tradition of a liberal arts education. In a liberal democracy, that tradition is still relevant today.

Nonetheless, one of the major challenges to our liberal democracy is not from outside the citadel, but from within. Contemporary politics is awash with calls to silence opposition as if the contest of ideas should be limited to the ideas chosen by one side or the other. In the United States and New Zealand, incumbent political leaders are suggesting that democracy itself is under threat from the contest of ideas that is the very stuff of liberal democracies.

In my own pedagogical approach, teaching students how to think means that I have to overcome my own inherent political biases. I have to step back from the contest of ideas and find a way for citizens to make their own sense of the world we live in. That is no easy task. But as teachers, we ought not to think our students are simple sponges that soak up what we say.

Students bring to their studies their own inherent biases, their experiences, and the ideas they have been exposed to prior to their education. A liberal education challenges those ideas as a matter of course.

I often say to my students that a liberal education is a choice, but a choice between the red and the blue pill as in the movie The Matrix. Take the blue pill and one can live in ignorance, for ignorance is bliss. Or take the red pill, and be exposed to the unsettling and transformative "truth".  For one can never go back once a liberal education begins.

That transformative, life-changing power of a liberal education brings together the best of tradition with the best of the present. By presenting the methods of comparative politics, we bring into sharp relief differences between societies that help us to see beyond our own limited experiences. Bring in the scientific method, and we have an opportunity to remove our biases. Study political history and philosophy, and we can understand ways to live a good life, and so on.

These are just some of the ways that I approach the teaching of politics in Australia. I do not suggest that my approach is the right way, but I hope my words here contribute to the conversation and that some of my more provocative writing contributes to the contest of ideas. 

My slides from the presentation are available below.

The Final Days of Socrates: On Imitating Socrates and Jesus

Death of Socrates [Public Domain]

The Final Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Phaedo by Plato
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Four of Plato's dialogues (a tetralogy), Euthyphro, The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, outline Socrates' final days before he ended his life by drinking hemlock - his sentence for 'impiety' and 'corrupting' Athens' youth. The similarities to the death of Jesus and the underpinnings of Stoic philosophy were not lost on me.

Reading the original works, rather than relying on the snippets of Plato taught through secondary sources, reveals contradictions and oversimplifications of key ideas. For example, 'the unexamined life is not worth living' is a snippet. The important first part of the sentence refers to the 'divine command' that drives Socrates, and that 'the greatest good of man [sic] is daily to converse about virtue' (Apology, p. 49). Hardly the navel-gazing and identity politics approach that is encouraged by the snippet. Indeed, examining one's life against the virtues requires much more than fitting in with the opinion of the many (a problem Socrates warns about in Crito, p. 56).

The parallels with the last days of Jesus include the symbolism of three days before the ship arrives from Delos (signalling the time for Socrates to die), and also Socrates' vision that he will go to the mythical city of Phthia in three days ('The third day hence, to Phthia shalt thou go', Crito, p. 56). This coincides with Socrates' faith in an afterlife, echoing Jesus' death and subsequent resurrection. In Phaedo there are echoes of the Garden of Eden and the captivity in Babylon (p. 99) and of being 'born again' (p. 83).

Ideas that were later captured in Stoicism are evident in Phaedo. For example, not trusting our perceptions to our senses (p. 99), that philosophy is about practising to die well (p. 97), that suicide is an option (Phaedo, p. 74), and one's ruling principle comes from the soul (p. 112).

Key to Stoic philosophy are the four virtues: Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, and Justice. For Socrates, the virtues are Temperance, Justice, Courage, Nobility, and Truth (Phaedo, p.135).

The coinciding themes of Christianity and Stoicism are captured in the closing pages of Phaedo, notably that, for the 'immortal soul' (p. 128):

...there is no release or salvation from evil except the attainment of the highest virtue and wisdom.

This tetralogy left me rather stunned that, despite how far humans have advanced in technology, we owe much of our spiritual development to the ancients. Those currently virtue-signalling in Australian politics would benefit from testing their contemporary sense of virtue with the wise Socrates.

Benjamin Franklin's Virtues Journal suggests that to practice humility, one should imitate Jesus and Socrates. In light of this work, Franklin's comparison is well justified.

View all my reviews

The Great Conversation, not The Great Battle...

 

Physiologie du Flaneur [CC0]

The Great Books of the Western World were the subject of political controversary within the Australian university sector recently when a bequest by the late Paul Ramsay went looking for an institutional home. Instead of selling the intellectual tradition that includes what Harold Bloom referred to as the Western Canon, conservatives talked up a paternalistic, colonising, right-wing culture war waged against, well, against everything that was not considered "Western" I suppose. But why? Here I examine the efficacy of a Great Books degree from the perspective of the political flâneur. My aim is to outline the importance of the liberal arts tradition, but without the populist sentiment of defending an elusive "way of life" that I apparently share because of the geographical and temporal accident of my birth.

When the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation's program went to the university sector, the proponents chose an ideological battleground that ensured any discussion was polarised, ultimately doing a disservice to the liberal arts tradition. By wielding Australia's first Great Books degree program as an apologia for Western thought, as if the West's intellectual history were under attack from some unsympathetic "other", the culture wars raged on. 

I refer to Harold Bloom above because he made no apology to what he regarded as the "School of Resentment". I refer to this group as an unidentifiable echo chamber of left-leaning or alt-left types who fuel and are fuelled by the echo chamber of the alt-right. In Australia, read the opinion columns in The Guardian (ideology: it is free) or the "Commentary" section in The Australian (ideology: you have to pay) and you can visit these populist ideas. (But try not to dwell there for too long or you'll lose your flâneur status.) 

Neither left nor right can agree because their identities are tied up in their approach to the "laden" idea known as "identity politics": the left tends to embrace identity politics whereas conservatives (who staunchly identify as conservative) see identity politics as the enemy. Or to put it another way, identity politics is "simply shorthand for a concept or idea that you dislike". 

This strange view of identity politics was used recently to critique the university sector for its apparent left-leaning world view in teaching history. The Institute of Public Affairs, a right-wing thinktank, recently published some "research" which:

...reveals that history has shifted away from the study of significant historical events and periods to a view of the past seen through the narrow lens of class, gender and race.

This major piece of research demonstrates what we have long known; that in general, the substance of Western Civilisation, which is essential to understanding our present and shaping our future is not being taught to Australian undergraduates studying history.

It was interesting that the "findings" were based on an assessment of university teaching against a normative list of an "essential core" of historical subjects "based on the notion of the canon of significant historical subjects devised by the British historian Professor Niall Ferguson" (d'Abrera, 2017, p. 10). To suggest that historical accounts can change or that our understanding of the past can evolve with new information doesn't rate a mention, but neither does any critique of Ferguson's list.

It is interesting that Niall Ferguson, a well-regarded historian, has been chosen as the baseline for how history ought to (normatively) be taught. Nevertheless, his book titled Civilization: The West and the Rest speaks volumes for where the IPA's version of Western thought is situated in a global context. It's not that there isn't something to learn from Ferguson's prolific works, but the IPA's take on it lacks any sense of sophistication that a liberal arts scholar would "punch full of holes" at a moment's notice (to mix some more clichés about such a clichéd understanding of history).

Tony Abbott's 2018 article in Quadrant argued that the high culture of Western Civilisation was something to be celebrated. While I agree with the idea that the Great Books ought to be celebrated, I am much more inclined to agree with Harold Bloom than I am to agree with Mr Abbott. For instance, Bloom's idea of the West was encompassing. He saw two distinct branches of the Western Canon: one stemming from William Shakespeare (see Bloom's lecture below) and the other stemming from Dante Alighieri.

It is difficult to put into this short space the extent of Harold Bloom's work, but I am his biggest fan. I emailed Harold Bloom after reading his incredible Anxiety of Influence and he replied the very next day. I was saddened when he passed away, but to put his work in ideological perspective, even The Guardian's obituary does poetic justice to this genius who lived during my lifetime. (I don't ever want to lose this email, so here is a screenshot below of my fleeting contact with the great man.)

Vale Professor Harold Bloom. Larger than life and one of my major scholarly influences.

Harold Bloom provided an approach to reconciling what I know of paternalism, colonisation, and all of the so-called culture wars as they relate to "cancel culture" with the best parts of the Great Books. For me, this is what Hutchins referred to as The Great Conversation; he made it a conversation about as opposed to a battle against ideas. It is interesting that the Ramsay program adopts the traditional Oxford/Cambridge liberal arts tutorial as its method while at the same time appearing to resist the very pedagogical approach it has adopted.

Let me digress. I subscribe to Mark Manson's Mindf*ck Monday email. Yes, I know he can be a potty mouth. This weeks' email focused on the concept of "mastery". Manson's second principle of mastery is:

[C]reate feedback loops. That means stop hiding in your basement and show your shit to the world (or a highly qualified teacher/mentor/coach/person/thing.)

It's not an easy thing to do, but my blog has been a way to put my thoughts out there for so for many years now I don't worry about it so much. If you are interested in Mark Manson's approach to mastery, watch his video below:

But let me get back to Harold Bloom and Mortimer Adler (check out this link) and then to Robert M. Hutchin's The Great Conversation, the reason I started writing this article in the first place. Bloom was able to recognise the importance of "other" civilisations without entering into a war against them. Tony Abbott didn't say as much as others claimed he said about the superiority of "The West" in his Quadrant article (see commentary on the NTEU website). But the sentiment was there.

Hutchins' Great Conversation is exactly that - it is not the Great Battle or a Crusade against an imaginary "other" civilisation. It is a collection of books that has elements of the rest of the world in it that happened to coincide with historical events. These events brought it all to the Anglo-centric world in the same way that I was born into this civilisation - by accident. It certainly isn't something to be celebrated as if it were awarded by some meritocratic god.

If we really want to get down to brass tacks then we need to know that if it were not for Islamic scholars, the writings of the ancient Greeks would have disappeared. Or if the Church had succeeded, Western philosophy would not exist. All of these things are as factual as the events described by the IPA's "research".

And the conservatives' views on how to read these books echoes the traditional church's way of reading the bible; not in a spirit of free thinking inquiry but in the way you are told to read them. Adler would never subscribe to such a view. To be sure, neither would Bloom or Calvino.

My point is that the Great Books are certainly great, but by themselves and not in opposition to some other books that might also be considered "great". Bloom argued that Islamic scholarship may rightly have a place in the "West", much like the history of Israel found a normative space in the IPA's "typical" list of historical events.

But scratch the surface and the classification of books that are great that happened to be written in the West are hardly the stuff of right wing conservatism. Karl Marx was German and is clearly a product of the West, but conservatives don't give socialism its rightful place in history, even though Hutchins and Adler certainly did.

It is a shame that the culture wars have interfered in a great idea that could have resulted in a Great Books degree in Australia that followed the liberal arts tradition. I hope it can still happen. But while the culture wars rage on, the best of the West has gone down the proverbial rabbit hole. In the meantime, the sentiments of Hutchins (as echoed by Adler and Bloom) are as relevant today as they ever were.

If I can offer any guidance to students who are attracted to the liberal arts tradition, it is this: Learn to think for yourself. Trust people but don't trust their knowledge. Be curious. Scratch the surface and challenge orthodoxy. Bloom did this; Hutchins and Alder encouraged it, the Enlightenment was about challenging orthodoxy, not about waging war against some other imagined civilisation. And remember these are "great books", not great weapons to be wielded against imagined adversaries. 

Liberal democracy is alive and well, if a little battered. The liberal arts tradition has been flogged by the alt-left and the alt-right, but it survives in the hearts of those who can see beyond the culture wars.

References

d'Abrera, B. (2017). The Rise Of Identity Politics: An Audit of History Teaching at Australian Universities in 2017. Melbourne: Institute of Public Affairs.

Are you a scholar or a subject matter expert? Some thoughts...

Lord Shiva Statue in Murdeshwara (Photo by Vivek Urs / CC BY-SA).

Recently I've been struggling with academic seminars where people are subject matter experts in health or refugees or some other specific topic. Not that there's anything wrong with this, but it struck me how little scholarly content there is now in "academic" presentations.

I have always had an interest in the use of the general versus the particular and how scholars often use these approaches interchangeably to suit their purposes. I am fascinated by such rhetorical tactics but I must admit that I have not seen much of this sort of debate in academic circles for some time. Is it a case of the short-termism that has arisen in academia?

Reading the Siva and Yoga Sutras had me thinking back to the concept of "varieties of particularism" that I developed in my doctoral thesis. Strange as it may sound, the idea came to me in a dream. To explain the concept (and to remind myself), I quote at length from my thesis (de Percy 2012, p. 28, Box 1.3):

A major finding of this research is that, in an era of technological convergence, providing a single technological solution to solve various connectivity problems is slower in addressing the diverse connectivity-related issues associated with various communications technologies in the near term. Similarly, grand, long-term approaches overlook regional and local opportunities and, in the pursuit of standardisation or quality/equality of service, ‘lock-in’ users to a technological solution designed to solve yesterday’s communications problems. Over time, the process of central control prevents the development of community expertise, or cultural capacity (see Hughes 1993), which leaves citizens as passive recipients of communications services, rather than being an integral component of these systems.

In his study of electricity systems in Germany, the US and the UK, Hughes (1993 : 405) found that local conditions resulted in distinct technological styles, defined as ‘the technological characteristics that give a machine, process, device or system a distinctive quality’. Hughes defined the local conditions external to the technology as cultural factors: ‘geographical, economic, organizational, legislative, contingent historical, and entrepreneurial conditions... factors [that] only partially shape technology through the mediating agency of individuals and groups’. However, electricity systems are passive networks where users have limited choices about how the network is deployed or used, whereas modern communications systems provide suppliers and end-users with a variety of choices about the means of delivery and the use of such networks respectively. For the purposes of this thesis, the various ‘cultural factors’ (as defined by Hughes) and the various connectivity requirements of users present particular circumstances which must be taken into account to enable greater penetration of a particular technological function.

In the absence of a term to describe the connectivity problems dictated by the varieties of particular individual, organisational, geographic, demographic and infrastructure situations that policy makers may need to address (while attempting to predict the current and potential uses of communications technologies in such various conditions), the term ‘varieties of particularism’ is adopted here to encapsulate these diverse circumstances. The term is borrowed from moral philosophy where it is used to explain a form of morality where particular circumstances dictate particular approaches to morality, on a case-by-case basis, as opposed to a single moral principle that dictates all action (see Sinnott-Armstrong 1999).

During the present period of institutional disruption (created by technological convergence), attempts to address these varieties of particularism have been referred to elsewhere as technological neutrality, where the technology used to achieve a particular function is left to supplier or consumer choice, rather than being predetermined or directed by the state. In Australia, however, the policy preference for delivering communications technologies over time has been to offer centrally-controlled, limited technologies in an attempt to create a sense of universal, standardised service. Canada, on the other hand, has attempted to achieve universal service through a mix of technologies devised and deployed at the regional and local levels to work within the regional and local varieties of particularism. Further, Canada’s approach provides greater access for citizens to the political process at the provincial and local levels, whereas state and local politicians in Australia have limited ability to influence centrally-controlled communications technology systems. This leaves citizens waiting until the federal government enables the deployment of infrastructure, as is occurring with the NBN today. 

Hughes (1993: x) found that the policy issues in deploying electricity networks were more regional than national in three different national contexts. The present study finds that the same principle applies to communications networks. Therefore, a major explanation for the divergent communications technology outcomes in Canada and Australia, and indeed, for Canada’s faster speed in achieving greater penetration of new technologies over time, is that decentralised institutions are better able to address the regional and local varieties of particularism, hence providing greater citizen involvement in the policy process and faster penetration of new communications technologies.

The above was a major finding, but it was readily dismissed by subject matter experts at the time who continue to provide political explanations for shortcomings of the NBN. Technical experts using politics as an excuse. Where is the scholarly thought in such explanations?

Consider scientific reasoning in the utility of the universal versus the particular (or in this case, local) from Shapin (1998, p. 5):

...post-Popper philosophers were willing to acknowledge that the production of scientific ideas was thoroughly bound up with the psychologically idiosyncratic and the culturally variable, they nevertheless insisted that the context of justification - the transformation of idea into knowledge - was a matter of context-free reason and logic.

Context-free reason and logic. And here is the first issue with being a subject matter expert rather than a scholar. See how I did that? Above I argued that the particular was more important than the universal in communications technologies, but now I am going to argue that the universal is more important than the particular. Let me explain.

This is rather abstract but there's something in the argument by Stilpo of the Megarian School about the universal being separate from the individual and concrete and the Siva Sutra 1.16 about the Great Point and the One Reality which is our consciousness and universal. There's also something from James Allen (2007, p. 24) about our environment being our mirror, whereas Sutra 1.16 admits that environment can help or hinder the process of union with the divine (see Worthington 2016, pp. 27-28).

In my "varieties of particularism" explanation above, I used the techniques of scientific method in a quasi-experimental, most similar systems design comparison of Australia and Canada holding communications technology outcomes as the dependent variable with institutions as the independent variable. I also adopted a consistent method of process tracing to compare the two countries over time. I used context-free reason and logic to arrive at a conclusion. I did not have a preconceived conclusion, although I did have a hypothesis that I tested using the above approach.

Now consider the subject matter expert. All of my work is poppycock and if only the Coalition had kept the original NBN model introduced by Labor then all would be well.

Subject matter experts have their place and some subject matter experts have their place in the academy. But I am increasingly concerned that we are all being forced to become subject matter experts who can provide a simple answer to a complex problem for people who are not subject matter experts.

My point is that the bureaucratic pressures of the contemporary academy are influencing our thinking, and it is hard to resist. The three-minute thesis competition is the antithesis of scholarly behaviour. Three minutes? Please! In an era of complexity, such parsimony, or "Occam's Razor", if you will, is tantamount to the stupidity that we are seeing played out in daily global politics.

There are parts of me that want to excel and other parts that want to rebel against the system. But what am I bucking against? I keep thinking there is no temporal aspect, the past has been forgotten, the classics are but facsimiles of misinterpretations, and that scholars are pretending to be journalists. So what is it to be a scholar?

When I went searching for the "scholarly tradition", all I could find were references to Confucianism. Interestingly, the Scholarly Tradition is what Confucianism ought to be known as, but the European neologism has stuck!

I then turned to the Enlightenment Tradition, and I was surprised to find I have been fooled by the myth of the "hidden hand" (Anchor 1979, p. xii):

This myth assumed that there was a basic harmony of interests among men in the long run, and it was only necessary to release everyone to pursue freely his own self-interest in order to realize a harmonious social order, similar to that which reigned in nature... that unity resulted "naturally" from diversity...

As I tend to do, I favour Rousseau's approach (Anchor 1979, p. xvii): 

...if a man wanted a better life than he had, he could not depend upon some transhistorical agency to provide it for him; he would have to create it himself, in pain and suffering, and on behalf of a morality that honored the inner man as well as the outer.

Here I find myself getting closer to my issue with the bureaucracy. How do I honour my inner self? Is it even relevant if as a political scientist I ought to be using "context-free reason and logic" in my work?

I turn now to Emerson and the Transcendentalists:

They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson’s words, “an original relation to the universe”... The transcendentalists operated from the start with the sense that the society around them was seriously deficient...

This is what I see. In architecture, the gig economy, in medium to high density living, in food production, in having to physically be at work to ensure one's mental health. I see unthinking conformity and unoriginality. 

I went on one of my most comprehensive journeys of self-discovery recently and found three things I value most: love, freedom, and learning (Dilectio Libertas et Doctrina). I think I can honour my inner self using these values as a guide.

But I can also use reason and logic to change, either myself or my perception. If success is being promoted in the current academy, then I will have to stop honouring my inner self. If I want to honour my inner self, then my perception of success must change. I have the freedom to choose!

If I were to be a subject matter expert in, for example, transport and telecommunication policy, then I would not need to travel on this journey of self-discovery. Instead, I choose to use reason and logic to dispel the myth of the "hidden hand" as a justification for the way I choose to work. I can also choose to work in accordance with my own sense of purpose.

Would a subject matter expert need to think through all that? Could a subject matter expert, using their knowledge of a particular subject, encourage transformative experiences in their students? Could they guide a student in honouring their inner self? Or would it be in accordance with their expert opinion?

I would rather be a scholar.

References

Allen, J. (2007/1920). As A Man Thinketh. Mineola, NY: Dover.

Anchor, R. (1979). The Enlightenment Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

De Percy, M.A. (2012). Connecting the Nation: An historical institutionalist explanation for divergent communications technology outcomes in Canada and Australia. Doctoral Thesis, The Australian National University, Canberra. DOI: 10.25911/5d514f57acdb6.

Shapin, S. (1998). Placing the View from Nowhere: Historical and Sociological Problems in the Location of Science. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 5-12.

Worthington, R. (2016). A Study of the Siva Sutras: Finding the Hidden Self. Allahabad: Himalayan Institute India.

Perception in Stoicism, Buddhism, and New Thought: Creating an inner life through imagination

Drinking tea and reading books and enjoying the life of the mind. Photo by Dr Michael de Percy.

Mastering Your Inner World Neville Goddard Explained: Manifesting with Ease by Rita Faith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There will be no more academic snobbishness from here on in. Reading this book, it hit me like a thunderbolt, bringing back a bunch of lessons from earlier readings and confirming so many life experiences. I've noticed the difference already with some simple techniques that make life so much better. Is it the book, the techniques, the confirmation of naturally acquired skills? I don't know. But here is my attempt to explain.

I am at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in early 1993. The ropes test. 6 metres up and down then up and down again in patrol order (rifle and webbing). Not my greatest strength and I am on "sluggers" or remedial physical training until I pass. I am talking with a colleague about it, that last "bite" on the rope that we struggle to make. We decide that we should just do it. Take that last bite. The body won't let us down. Wrong. And the blisters are worse than the thump on the ground from 6 metres up. No shame though, I gutted it out.

That  night, I dream about the ropes. While everyone else is eating dinner tomorrow night, I (along with the other sluggers), will get another crack at the tests we haven't passed. All night I toss and turn and I am up the rope and then down and then up again and then down and it all flows. The dream repeats, repeats, repeats, repeats... zzzzzz.

The next day I pass and I never fail the ropes test again. It was a purely mental issue from an earlier experience with the rope obstacle on an obstacle course and an arsehole I have since cursed and forgiven and now whatever. I was just a boy. A feeling of cowardice and not good enough and immorality in that sense of the bayonet as a moral weapon and I was immoral. So much conservative crap that did more for that arsehole's ego than my motivation. Life experiences have proven the opposite and I have learnt to be much kinder to myself.

Recent experiences with Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) have revealed a bunch of parts of me that I wasn't aware of. I have learnt to recognise the various parts of me, the good, the bad, the evil, the off with the daisies naive kid, the arsehole dirty fighter, the whole shebang. They are all part of me and they won't go away. But my imagination has been fired up to see the Council of Me, the various parts that run riot if the conscious me doesn't acknowledge them and keep them under control.

It all sounds hokey. I felt this recently when I decided that I needed to find my inner compass. I found the website Wanderlust and an exercise by Melissa Colleret to do just that. It felt hokey, but I came up with three of my core values that echo past exercises I have done. Love, Freedom, and Learning: Dilectio Libertas et Doctrina.

I realised that I have been manifesting my entire life. Be an army officer; be a theologian; be a politician (oh no, not for me! Well saved!); be a political scientist; live the life of the mind; live in the country but work in Canberra (my favourite city in Australia); live in a federation house (and other things too personal to mention). I remember after graduating from Duntroon how it struck me: Now what? It makes me think of a quote attributed to the actor, Lily Tomlin:

I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realise I should have been more specific.

I've been trying to practice Stoicism for the last four years, and along with every other endeavour of my idealism, I have trashed my ideals. My enthusiasm for Stoicism has not been able to overcome its shortcomings. Are we really to resign ourselves to our circumstances? Imagine if I'd done that when I was stuck in a job that was so bad, I contemplated the main problem concerning philosophy, a la Albert Camus.

Often, when teaching leadership classes, I get to re-live my shortcomings. For example, James Clawson's work separates the "what do I want to be" from the "how do I want to feel" (the Internal Life's Dream - LDint - versus the External Life's Dream - LDext - otherwise known as "Resonance").

I have found my calling and I am living in accordance with my inner compass (even when I felt I wasn't).  Nothing hokey about any of that.

But the Stoics don't feel too much. And, like Buddhists, they focus on managing their perceptions or impressions. And here is the common ground I have found with Goddard's ideas:

Imagination is God and God is imagination.

And finally I arrive at Rita Faith's book. It isn't hokey. Neville Goddard was an inspiration to Wayne Dyer. So you don't like Hay House? Well Dyer's PhD supervisor was Abraham Maslow. You know, the first theory you learnt at uni and the theory you tried to fit into all your first year essays because it was the only one that made sense? Yeah, him.

As I finished reading Faith's work on Goddard, I was half way through Jack Kerouac's Wake Up, a biography of the Buddha. I've been thinking a lot about Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. (I am still trying to work out whether Hesse was writing about Buddha or a parallel to Buddha. I suppose it doesn't matter.)

The Britannica entry on Herman Hesse's Siddhartha reads as follows:

Despairing of finding fulfillment, he goes to the river and learns to simply listen. He discovers within himself a spirit of love and learns to accept human separateness... As Siddhartha grows older, a fundamental truth gradually becomes apparent both to him and to us: there is no single path to self-growth, no one formula for how to live life. Hesse challenges our ideas of what it means to lead a spiritual life, to strive after and to achieve meaningful self-growth through blind adherence to a religion, philosophy, or indeed any system of belief.

There was my connection. The aptly named Rita Faith tells me that Goddard says I have to die to my former state of mind. I have to imagine not how I will achieve what I want to achieve, but how I will feel (there's that Clawson again) when I have achieved it.

The Law of Attraction and other New Thought self-help books go back to the 19th century. The latest iteration by Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, has some major issues. For starters, Wayne Dyer wanted nothing to do with it. Second, Neville Goddard didn't think it was a secret at all and (apparently) he taught for some forty years never charging for his lectures, only asking for a contribution to his travelling expenses.

And more recently, Mark Manson has called "bullshit" on The Secret. And then it takes an interesting turn:

Call me crazy, but I believe that changing and improving your life requires destroying a part of yourself and replacing it with a newer, better part of yourself. It is therefore, by definition, a painful process full of resistance and anxiety. You can’t grow muscle without challenging it with greater weight. You can’t build emotional resilience without forging through hardship and loss. And you can’t build a better mind without challenging your own beliefs and assumptions.

Call me crazy, but isn't that what Goddard said? Isn't that what Rita Faith says, too? You have to actually DIE to your former self, not think it positively away with other positive delusionals!

Here is the key takeaway from Faith's short book. We can manage our impressions (or perceptions). For the Stoics, events are facts neither good nor bad, only our reaction to our impressions of these events is good or bad. To the Buddhists, as far as my reading takes me, our impressions of the world are the cause of our suffering. What if there was another way? And what if it wasn't a secret?

The Stoics leave out the how of managing our impressions. I still use Stoic philosophy, but as Seneca would have said, if Epicurus tells me something good I should use it. Rita Faith is telling me something good and I'm using it.

For all the times I have dwelt upon negative thoughts, becoming jaded at being overworked or overworking myself out of some sort of fear or self-doubt, or been afraid to be happy about something in case I jinx it, I can finally call bullshit.

There is no single way, religion, or philosophy. Human separateness (from Hesse), and individualism as a reaction to my senses (from Kerouac), versus re-programming my senses, or dying to my former state of mind, has provided me with a way to use my imagination to control my inner world. The Stoics tell me to do this, but they don't tell me how.

It's not the kind of delusional positive thinking that I abhor. It's like the law of attraction but it is also more like the experiences I have had when all of my mind and energies were focused and brought to bear on some purpose. And it can be done with memories, too. The idea of revision is to go back and reimagine the past. Not the events per se but the feelings.

It struck me that during one of my EMDR sessions, I recall an event as a kid in Western Sydney. I am in a fight with another kid. The mother of the kid I am fighting and her friend are standing by, telling the other kid how best to hurt me. 

I had mostly forgotten about the experience, but I remember a moment of clarity that makes me laugh. The mother's friend had mini-fox terriers. I looked at them and thought "wow they are cool dogs!" I have two of my own mini-foxies now! And so the memory is revised. No longer crapping on about a crappy situation, but grateful for my mutts and the revised memory.

And every day I think about how I will feel when I accomplish the things I aim to accomplish. Not how I will accomplish them. And much like giving myself time to think really works, giving myself time to feel works remarkably well, too. I am delighted that this book fills some gaps in my knowledge. Or, in the words of my sister:

Learning is cyclic, not linear. There are never any gaps, just the right timing and prior knowledge to build upon.

And all this from a 46-page page quick-read at AUD$3.99 via Kindle!

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When Philosophy is Not Enough (and other journeys of self-discovery)

Sunrise over Coogee Beach, 18th July 2020.

Reclaiming your Inner Harmony: A Practical Guide by Richard Marazita
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's sad that it's taken me this long to read another book. But it's clear there's light at the end of the tunnel, and reading this book has been inspirational. I've been working with the author of this book for the last few weeks looking at how to get all of my "parts" to work together, instead of having a free run, an experience that hasn't worked at all before.

Some four years of working on Stoic philosophy has been useful but there have been parts that don't work for me. I suspect that Stoicism's physics, stemming from Heraclitus, has an element of sadness in its resignation to fate. Epicureanism, on the other hand, with its focus on happiness, stems from Democritus' physics. Philosophical adversaries, to be sure, but even Seneca would accept the lessons of his rivals if the lessons are useful.

Journalling is my major vehicle for practising Stoicism. I wrote about the approach I have used in the past here. While reinforcing the foundational principle of Stoicism, best captured in the first page of Epictetus' Enchiridion, I also created a chronicle of evidence that continually "stacked up" with a clear message: I wasn't happy. Even though I was much calmer and more at peace with the world, I wasn't happy. The end result was a major crisis that disrupted my otherwise disciplined journalling ritual. 

I don't regret my experience of journalling and practising Stoicism over the last four years, but after the first three years it became a struggle. Only recently have I been able to get back into my journalling practice, but it is substantially different from my previous practice. 

Now, I am learning to incorporate other aspects of Eastern philosophy and religion, especially Buddhism, and more recently, Classical Indian Philosophy in the form of the Yoga and Siva Sutras. 

After a trip to Brunei in May last year the idea of the Chakras opened up a whole new world of healing, especially for my body which has long been neglected over the last twenty years while I pursued study and an academic career. Turning to Stoicism was the first step in a much broader awakening to life outside of the mind.

My first step was to do two Rapid Transformation Therapy (RTT) sessions and then a tarot reading. I had some Bowen, Reiki, and Kinesiology sessions, too. A key theme has been the relationship of the body to the mind. As a former soldier, the only real relationship these two parts of me have had was that my mind pushed my body as far as it could go.

The therapy I have been having with Richard has been useful in recognising the different parts of me that act and react on my behalf. A key part of the technique, known as Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), has been enlightening and brought to light a number of issues I have buried for many years. 

The approach is similar to Napoleon Hill's concept of the Cabinet of Invisible Counselors, except that the counselors are different parts of me, rather than other individuals. I am hopeful that the approach will help me develop a better sense of self and to become better at establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries.

I stumbled upon Reclaiming your Inner Harmony: A Practical Guide while checking out Richard's website. I found the book easy to read and quite practical. The basic approach is that, to achieve inner harmony, one must balance the mind, body, feelings, and gut instinct. Disharmony is caused by one of these parts dominating the others. 

For me, gut instinct is something I have buried for a long time. I think that Stoicism, which is clearly a form of ancient psychotherapy, is much easier to subscribe to for a soldier-turned-scholar. But it doesn't make any connection to the body. In fact, it tends to dissociate the body from the mind, in that it is not something that one can control. This makes sense in terms of illness or injury, but it seems to ignore the fact that my mind exists because of my body. I must admit to a feeling of dissociation which has only recently begun to retreat.

I found this short book useful despite my first attempt at using the tools leading to my gut instinct going for an off-leash run. Like the EMDR therapy, the point is to enable all parts of oneself to "check in". 

Much like Stoic philosophy (and religions, but that's another story), it takes practice to reinforce the habit, through use of the chain method, if you will. And that is where my journalling has found a new purpose.

My journey, which began with my mind before finding practical application in the form of Stoic philosophy, neglected the feelings, body, and gut instinct that I have rediscovered. It has given me a perspective that I think I initially buried, inappropriately in hindsight, and then suppressed further with Stoicism. 

The last time I felt the connection with my body was in training before going to Duntroon. I was practising Tai Chi at the time. Like Seneca, I can choose to use whatever works for me rather than trying to be a purist in everything I do. Given the obvious health and wellbeing benefits, it makes sense. 

And while many things and people have assisted me on this latest stage of my journey, this book has given me a logical framework for connecting with my different parts while also guiding me to develop my own, unadulterated, sense of self.

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Overcoming Self-Doubt: Stillness is the Key

"Sisyphus" by Pietro della Vecchia (Public domain).

I am a fan of Ryan Holiday's work. I tell my students in my leadership and politics classes, "Be like Ryan". Read, write, think about your future. Develop a philosophy - rules to live by. Establish your purpose - what a colleague calls one's ikigai.

Ryan Holiday reads books. He is well-read. He writes books. He lives on the land. He is doing in his early thirties what I am still not quite able to do in my fifties. But that's not the point. 

As Theodore Roosevelt warned, "comparison is the thief of joy". I know all about my own circumstances, not somebody else's. Better to judge myself by my own principles and standards. 

I have read many self-improvement books and I take something away from each one I have read. But I am also conscious of the marketing behind such works. I recall accompanying one of my in-laws to an event. It turned out to be Amway. I bought Dale Carnegie's famous book but I was wary of every time a colleague asked me, "I'd like to talk to you about a business opportunity".

I found myself becoming a little wary of Holiday's approach to this book about one third of the way through. I felt it was formulaic and repeating old ground from his earlier works. But I have been following his work from the early days of the simple Reading List email newsletter, so I acknowledged my concerns and pushed on.

I think it is the way the book builds. The end of each paragraph gives a few short sentences of encouragement. I was experiencing the elevation at the end of each chapter much like one does when reading Carnegie. Frowning often while reading, it wasn't until the last few pages that my faith in Holiday was restored.

In "Act Bravely", one of the final chapters, Holiday discusses Albert Camus' The Fall. I am nodding in agreement and I thought, "I know this story, I've read most of Camus". I had to check my blog and there is was, "La Chute".

It struck me again that Holiday is really well-read. My faith restored, I went back and examined what had been going on for me.

To cut a long story short, I suffer from self-doubt in the way of Steven Pressfield. It can be crippling. Writing this right now is part of my preparation to write something else that I wish would just go away. But it won't and I have a job to do.

Holiday discusses the idea of stillness in the context of looking after oneself. I noted that many of the tips and tricks he mentions for maintaining stillness in one's life, I have used since I can remember.

Albert Camus struck me the same way when he discussed suicide. (I am not advocating suicide but I went through the philosophical exercise as the Stoics do without realising it had been done by others. This is a major reason to read according to Harold Bloom and Italo Calvino.) Ryan Holiday introduced me to the Stoics and they had the same view of suicide as a legitimate philosophical option.

Reading Stillness is the Key revealed to me the extent of my self-doubt. Not only about myself and my academic work, but also about the processes I use and how I defend my inner citadel from nonsense, how I do things like writing this blog post as a hobby and how I might prioritise doing so on this long weekend holiday instead of doing other work that is always there and can take up all my time when I let it.

And there it is - Ryan Holiday has done it again. All writing follows a formula, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is formulaic. Indeed, Aristotle's formula was original once! It brings me back to a quote from Jack London's To Build a Fire on my blog post from last Sunday:

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

To be formulaic in writing is to lack "the significances". In these, Ryan Holiday lacks nothing.

Tennyson: Art imitates life and proves me wrong yet again

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower. Keswick, Gunning 25th December 2018. Photo by Michael de Percy.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Alfred Tennyson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Stoics were happy to be proven wrong so that they might root out their own ignorance. Only recently have I begun to really enjoy poetry, and a visit to the bookstore at a time my mind was open brought me to this selection of poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Tennyson became Poet Laureate of Britain in 1850 following William Wordworth's death. He wasn't the first choice. Not knowing what the position of poet laureate even meant, my class self-consciousness went off on its usual tangent. Typical, an "appointed" artist. State-contrived creativity. What nonsense.

I once felt the same about Hemingway. Americans uber-promoting their own as the best in the world, without considering anyone else, anywhere else. And then I read Islands in the Stream. Wow. And I have since devoured all the works I could find written by Hemingway. He is my favourite author.

So when I purchased this book, I thought I'd give it a go. And then my class-self-consciousness kicked in. Until page 4:

        Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks

of the mouldering flowers:

       Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave i' the earth so chilly; 

Before reading the book, I had been out preparing the garden for the ensuing heatwave. An enormous sunflower had opened up, the biggest I have ever seen. Then it began to droop.

I added a longer stake to keep the flower upright. But after I put the stake in, I realised that the flower was not drooping for lack of water or support. It was solid, bent over in the position shown in the photograph above.

A few hours later I read page 4 of Tennyson's Song. And in it was all the beauty and reason of my broad sunflower in its present condition. A work of God. 

My Damascene moment instantly converted me to Tennyson. Once again, my own bullshit had been called and I was wrong. 

The rest of the works are an absolute delight, and I made an interesting discovery. Tennyson used the phrase "a handful of dust" (p. 48). Evelyn Waugh had borrowed the phrase as the title for his novel, from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

The Waste Land is what got me into poetry in the first place, so the miracle of life continues, the circle of literary learning turns, and I live and learn.

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Logocentrism and Deconstruction: What's the Différance?

Jacques Derrida on Writing and Difference.

Introducing Derrida by Jeff Collins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have a copy of Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to get to it. I also had this introductory text laying around. I am glad I went for the easy option first, as this text saved me from learning the hard way. I am not ready for Derrida - I have to start with Hegel and work my way through to Heidegger first.

I am not averse to reading introductory texts, but this one is a little different, in that it is more like a comic book. Or, indeed, it is very similar to the style Alain de Botton has adopted for The School of Life (but this book predates the YouTube series).

But the book is not too basic. Even after reading this introductory text, I am little the wiser.

I see Derrida's idea of "deconstruction" as an attempt to critique logo-centrism, where Western philosophy tends to privilege one thing over another in a binary either/or paradigm. For example, speech tends to be privileged over writing; philosophy over literature, men over women (traditionally), and so on.

Deconstruction is helpfully explained using the example of a zombie. Zombies are neither dead nor alive - their status is "undecidable" (see also the pharmakon, p. 73):

To embrace the curious logic of this writing, we have to be willing to sign up to it, to subscribe to it the task it takes on: the creation of destabilizing movements in metaphysical thinking.

Had I set out to read Writing and Difference, I would have been lost in Derrida's writing, which this text suggests can be "puzzling, infuriating, and exasperating"(p. 73). It would be better to tackle his three major works on "structuralism and phenomenology" in order: Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, then Of Grammatology.

However, the reading list at the end of the text sets out a reading plan to ease into Derrida's work gradually, beginning with Peggy Kamuf's Derrida Reader: Between the Lines. Sound advice.

It would seem that I must also go right back to Plato for a closer reading of his work so I can engage with Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy.

What all this means is that I am completely out of my depth! Whereas with Albert Camus and even Nietzsche I was able to struggle through, with Derrida I will have to tackle post-modernism (Derrida didn't necessarily think of his work as "post-modern"). I suppose it is time.

This text was a good place to start. I also found the School of Life's video (below) useful. I must admit to being pleased to find an area of my knowledge that is so completely lacking as to require considerable thought - especially in approaching Derrida. At the same time, the task is quite daunting and it may have to wait until some time later next year if I am to do it any justice.

Learning About Values from a Potty Mouth

Echo and Narcissus, 1903, by John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As the end of the year approaches and I am on track to achieve my reading goals, I have been reading some pop psychology books. I do like Mark Manson's work, even though its crassness makes it somewhat less scholarly than most of the books I have read thus far.

Manson writes how I sometimes speak, so I am not taking the moral high ground here, but it does mean that I tend to take his content less seriously. As I approach 50 I can reflect on my own experiences from my twenties and early thirties, and I must say I am impressed by the depth of reading of the likes of Mark Manson, Ryan Holiday, and Paul Colaianni and their ability to explain how they think about values, virtues, and finding the logic to guide their daily practice and actions.

But I have some concerns about what I call "literary entrepreneurship", and whether my time would be better spent on the classics.

I have recently been thinking about the idea of "endlessness". During my long service leave last year, I experienced a sense of endlessness where there were no deadlines (at least until the next semester of teaching began) and I could do whatever I wanted each day. I chose to journal, read, and blog, and this enabled me to establish a daily routine which I maintain to this day. I started with Homer, and I have been slowly working through the great books and works by the likes of Camus, Calvino,  and Nietzsche. I often get nervous about wasting time on contemporary books when I have so much to learn from the past.

Because of my own reading program, Manson's examples from literature were all familiar, including Bukowski, Buddha, Tina Gilbertson's idea of "constructive wallowing", the Milgram experiment, and so on. But I wonder whether these pop psychology books (for want of a better term) have sufficient depth?

Many of the self-improvement books I have read refer to historical and personal examples, and there is much to learn from how others think about the same problems I face. For example, Manson's approach to determining one's values fits well with what I gained from my reading of Paul Colaianni and Tina Gilbertson.

But I also see how these books are commercial products with a particular aim in mind. I often get the feeling that the authors are reading as a form of "mining" for information, much like the approach I might take when writing an academic paper (sans the referencing). 

From my own experience, a complete, cover-to-cover, slow reading of each work brings to light much which is lost through simply mining the content. So I wonder how much value I gain from reading Manson, compared to, say, reading Benjamin Franklin? (Of course, Franklin had his own financial reasons for lecturing and writing.) But when I read Franklin, for example, there was much that escaped me in the detail, and further reading revealed much of what I could not gain from the original text.

When I reflect on my reading of the likes of Manson, I often wonder how much I can gain from such literary entrepreneurs. Not that I don't like the book, but I wonder if I gain as much from this book as I might if I had prioritised my reading of Plato's The Laws, for example. 

So when I sum up the lessons learnt from Manson, much of these are in the reiteration of things I already know: if in doubt, act (p. 157); achieving meaning in one's life requires the rejection of alternatives (p. 165); excess is not good for me (p. 165); but establishing boundaries is good for me (p. 174).

One part I enjoyed is where Manson discusses the idea of endless values (p. 151) and mentions the "honest expression" of Pablo Picasso. The idea of honest expression is to provide a metric (p. 74), or a way to measure the implementation of one's values, in a way that does not "end'. For example, if one wanted to achieve "freedom" through work, once a job that provided such "freedom" had been achieved, then there is a sense that the value is "accomplished" and there is no sense of motivation. An "endless" value such as honest expression  is something that can be achieved repeatedly - it never ends.

However, as I know for a fact that I don't know everything, I did learn some key lessons about defining personal values and better ways to measure (metrics) these values; the paradox of choice (and how this promises the good life, but leads to inconsistency and confusion); and a better relationship with the idea of death (Quoting Mark Twain, p. 202):

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

I also have a better understanding of "unconscious resistance", which often gets in the way of me doing things I believe I actually want to do.

My "struggle" (see "suffering" p. 208) with my reading is best summed up by Harold Bloom (How to Read and Why, p. 21):

It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interest... but eventually you will read against the clock... One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and the final change is universal.

When I read the work of the present generation of literary entrepreneurs, I really feel that clock ticking. But after reading Manson, and despite my "unconscious resistance",  I think there is some value in reading about how others think about philosophy, and then applying that approach to my own thinking. Even if it is an exercise in thinking, rather than a definite plan for action.