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| ISBN-13: | 9781555917661 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fulcrum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Metaphysics of Modern Existence
By Vine Deloria Jr.
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Vine Deloria Jr.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55591-766-1
CHAPTER 1
A Planet in Transition
Throughout most of human history, people have lived as tribal groups in small villages in relatively isolated areas. They have been born, have married, given birth, grown old, and died unaffected by events, beliefs, and developments of other groups of human beings on other parts of the planet. Even the great empires of ancient times — Chinese, Assyrian, Egyptian, Persian, and Roman — hailed as magnificent and world encompassing in their heyday, did not affect a significant number of human societies, and they enjoyed decades of prosperity without exploiting more than a tiny percentage of earth's natural wealth. There was no concept of world history aside from the local interpretations of small nation-empires, which saw in their origin and rise to prominence a paradigm for understanding the meaning of human existence. But each in turn suffered a decline and collapse, leaving little more than exotic pottery and massive ruins.
A radical transformation of all human societies occurred when the European explorers discovered the Western Hemisphere. Suddenly the scope of planetary existence began to take shape, and the people of Western Europe spread over the globe exploring, colonizing, and finally exploiting the lands and peoples that had formerly lived in relative isolation. European languages replaced tribal languages in many lands, and first French and then English became the tongue of the civilized world, of diplomacy and trade, and finally of the accepted expressions of civilized values. Through the establishment of colonial administrations, Western European political forms were thrust upon non-Western peoples, and Western economic interests came to dominate the economies of other continents. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Earth was conceived as a gigantic garden designed exclusively for the benefit and entertainment of Europeans. Other peoples existed as much for the sake of European tourist visitations as for themselves, and the quaint and exotic seemed to be the only acceptable characterizations of non-Western societies.
Because the business of Western Europeans was business, their technology and industrial capabilities became the dominating influences in social and political change throughout the world. Their standard of living became the goal toward which the other peoples of the globe aspired, and their forms of entertainment and relaxation became universally accepted as expressions of luxury. European political ideas were thrust upon non-Western nations in varying degrees, and while democracy was extolled as the ultimate human virtue, European nations were reluctant to grant any measure of self-government, even in a democratic sense, to the colonized nations they controlled. In those areas where the European nations became weak and lost colonies, particularly in South America, the former colonies instituted their own brand of European economic and political forms, which were as oppressive and dominating as any European institutions.
The Second World War brought an end to the period of colonization. It was the first truly planetary struggle, and although it began as a quarrel among European neighbors over the expansion of German "living room," it soon embroiled the colonies and trust lands controlled by European nations. The alliance between Germany and Italy, when expanded to an Axis coalition to include Japan, ensured that the struggle would be waged from pole to pole and in all continents. Calling on their colonial peoples to resist Axis domination, the Allied forces justified their military expeditions and atrocities on their alleged support of four basic human freedoms, which Axis totalitarian theories seemed to deny. And with the assistance of colonial armies, the Allied forces were victorious, forcing the total collapse of the Axis powers and their surrender.
Following the war, the victorious Allied powers attempted to rejuvenate their faltering colonial empires, but with little success. The cry for freedom that had inspired diverse peoples to resist the German and Japanese armies now inspired them to seek political and economic freedom from their colonial masters. For many smaller nations, the Second World War was not a struggle to keep from learning German or Japanese but the beginning of a long and bitter effort to free their lands from all foreign domination. In some instances the European nations saw little to be gained by continued colonization of remote lands. Pretending that independence was a reward for faithful services rendered during the war, they granted a form of freedom that ensured strong economic ties but allowed a measure of political independence.
Not all nations received such a gratuity, however, and particularly in Southeast Asia and Africa, the European nations made every effort to retain their colonial possessions. Thus France, Belgium, and Portugal struggled with wars of liberation conducted by patriots in their colonies in the decades following the war, and these powers surrendered their claims only when the war became so costly as to threaten the collapse of the mother country's economy. The decolonization process is hardly concluded, but at present it seems inevitable that European political control over all lands will be eliminated, except in those where European immigrants have totally settled, such as New Zealand and Australia.
In three decades of decolonization, eighty new nations were established from the ruins of old colonial empires. For the most part, this was a peaceful process in which the European nation assisted in founding a democratic form of government often modeled on its own. Today, only eleven of those democracies survive; the rest have fallen victim to revolutions and political coups, often choosing some form of dictatorship that guaranteed social and economic stability over the chaos of a democracy in which the basic economic foundations were still controlled by foreign interests. Seven of the eleven are today little more than island republics, isolated for the most part from important developments in world affairs and content in their limited relationships with larger powers. This transitional process from democracy to totalitarian governments has been interpreted by Western leaders as an indication of the decline of Western humanistic traditions, and some American political leaders have privately admitted that their goal for foreign policy is to secure a guaranteed second-best status for Western nations in a world increasingly hostile to the Western way of life.
The United States emerged from the Second World War as the leading nation on the planet and as the sole possessor of atomic weapons. But American governmental officials understood the world as a Western possession, and postwar American foreign policy was designed to prevent the decline of colonial empires by the strange device of seeing liberation movements as part of a gigantic planetary Communist conspiracy. Regarding European culture, values, and institutions as the highest expression of human civilization, American governmental leaders saw in divergent movements for political freedom a threat to the very existence of civilization itself. The United States frequently found itself supporting puppet governments that sought neither political freedom nor justice for their people but simply their continuation in power. Acting as a global policeman, the United States became embroiled in a substantial number of military adventures as it attempted to bolster the institutions of a world that had long since vanished.
The drive for liberation was a planetary phenomenon, however, and manifested itself inside nations as well as within their colonial possessions. Dissident racial and ethnic groups within the Western nations saw the movement of Third World countries as being similar to their own aspirations for more social, political, and economic freedom, and reform movements began to express these concerns. The most important domestic movement within the Western democracies was the civil rights movement in the United States, which had strong ideological links with new political crusades around the globe. During the Second World War, Nazi theorists had advocated racial supremacy, which was not ideologically different from the racial theories held by most Americans. In opposing Nazism on egalitarian grounds, the United States had undercut the ideological basis for its own racial practices. The Allied triumph over the Axis powers was thus a direct motivation for internal reform in race relations in the Western countries. It seemed unreasonable to deny one's own citizens those rights the Axis powers had tried to deny to all humanity.
But internal reforms were not initiated by US political leaders. The representatives in Congress were a timid lot who acted only after the rest of society had long since adopted new forms of understanding. Reforms became necessary when protesting groups had so disrupted the tranquility of the domestic scene that to do otherwise seemed disastrous. Protests and demonstrations thereby became the format for social and political change in the United States. In the mid-1960s, when the energies of the reform- minded were directed toward American participation in the Southeast Asian war, American foreign policy became a function of internal debate and protests, indicating that even American institutions had become outmoded in the postwar world. The antiwar movement persisted for nearly a decade as Americans of all persuasions attempted to change the course of their nation's foreign policy. And the antiwar energies soon found themselves directed to peripheral but related fields of reform such as women's rights, consumers' rights, and conservation and ecological concerns.
In the early 1970s the antiwar movement reached a fever pitch. Demonstrators, frustrated by their inability to change the direction of foreign policy, began predicting a violent revolution in the United States unless basic reforms were instituted. Such rhetoric seemed to confirm the worst fears of the conservatives who saw every demand for change as a Communist plot. When Martha Mitchell interpreted the May Day demonstrations against the Cambodia invasion as similar in intensity and design to the Russian Revolution, the nation braced for a violent confrontation with the forces of change.
Among the many voices predicting such a fundamental change was the French Marxist philosopher Jean-François Revel. His book Without Marx or Jesus was translated into English and published in 1971 with the subtitle The New American Revolution Has Begun. Rather than advocating a violent revolution in American society, Revel described a process of planetary transformation. According to his analysis, the United States was the nation with the most beneficial aspects to assume a role of planetary leadership. Unfortunately, Revel used the word revolution to describe the process of change he detected. The important insights he offered were thereby lost in general fear over the possibility of violent revolution that Americans felt might engulf them. The book did not receive the serious attention it merited. American critics, cynical over the Left's failure to influence American foreign policy, chided Revel for his optimism, and Mary McCarthy, noted social critic, in an afterword to his book, wrote that "his 'revolution' is only a metaphor."
The failure of American thinkers to come to grips with Revel's thesis was predictable. Americans seem to visualize things in a practical, concrete sense. Discussions of revolution evoke images of farmers grabbing guns and pitchforks to rush to Concord Bridge or French peasants storming the Bastille rather than the radical transformation of the manner in which people view the world. Insofar as some Americans were expecting a violent exchange of ruling classes to occur as an empirical validation of Revel's concept, they were disappointed. But insofar as his analysis records the passage of understanding from one view of reality to another, his thesis remains valid and prophetic.
Revel suggests that a first revolution had occurred in Western culture in the fundamental changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during which a shift in viewpoint rather than a replacement of social classes took place. This reorientation of ways of understanding reality, according to Revel, while not fundamental, kept more promises than it broke and became irreversible. It was, in this sense, profoundly revolutionary. Describing this shift in outlook Revel noted:
Authority henceforth found its source in those subject to authority, or rather in those who delegated authority; the contractual concept replaced that of divine right, or of the right of the strongest; the power of the law took the place of personal power; an egalitarian society replaced a hierarchical society; a separation was effected between state and church; knowledge and, in general, culture were freed from political and ecclesiastical control.
This fundamental change from inherited authority, no matter how derived, to inherent democratic rights gathered to create and allocate authority has become so commonplace to us today that it is regarded as a natural condition of human society and not the revolutionary change it really was. That it should have occurred so recently remains a shock to many people who accept these propositions as part of the reasonable structure of human existence. We wonder why it was so difficult for such self-evident truths to achieve universal acceptance. That they are not yet acceptable to most human societies indicates the rate of change we are experiencing.
The collapse of embryo democracies hastily devised as an answer to demands of decolonization, when seen from a more comprehensive historical perspective, is not as disastrous as one would initially suppose since democracy is itself such a relatively new concept. The flirtation with totalitarian forms of government now indulged in around the globe may be an even more transitional form to a new universal conception of human existence that transcends all previous forms of political, social, and economic organization. Revel pointed out that "just as the first world revolution consisted in substituting institutions for the despotism of rulers in the domestic affairs of the state, so, too, the second world revolution must consist in replacing despotism with institutions in the area of international relations; or, more accurately, it must consist in the abolition of international relations." The two revolutions, therefore, taken together, must be understood as a centuries-long process of fundamental change in which the triumphant Western worldview of colonial days is replaced by a planetary understanding of the meaning of human existence that so transcends particular national differences as to enable the human species to create a planetary peace in the absence of an imperial power to enforce its particular institutions on anyone. In short, a coming to maturity of the human species.
A transformation of this profound a depth must necessarily take form in the actions of the most capable nation on the planet, and Revel, after surveying the various claimants to leadership, decided that the United States fulfilled the basic requirements such a role entailed. He acclaimed the United States as the prototype nation in a process of world transformation. He cited many factors present in the United States but absent or improperly developed in other nations as justification for his choice. The United States had a continuing pattern of growth and economic prosperity unmatched by any other nation, a technological excellence unrivaled by anyone else, and a high level of basic research that would continue to provide increasingly sophisticated insights into the nature of basic scientific and social problems. Revel also felt that the United States was culturally oriented toward the future, whereas the European countries were directed toward the past, and the Communists were mired in theoretical and doctrinal considerations, rendering them incapable of confronting rapid and continued change.
The multiple and dissident lifestyles emerging in the 1960s also indicated to Revel that the United States had more internal flexibility to tolerate change than did any other country and that this diversity would produce sufficient human vitality to make the United States a society of experimentation in new expressions of human experience. But the most important quality Revel found in Americans was their willingness to admit collective guilt in the treatment of racial minorities. Pointing out that the educational system of the Western nations from the time of the Greeks until the present had been designed to justify crimes committed against humanity in the name of national honor or religion, Revel noted that "the Germans refused to admit the crimes of the Nazi; and the English, the French, and the Italians all refused to admit the atrocities committed during their colonial wars." The United States, as Revel saw it, was the first nation in history to confront seriously its own misdeeds and to make some effort to change national policy to make amends for acknowledged wrongs. This manifestation of a collective conscience indicated a greater sensitivity to human needs and an ability to empathetically deal with foreign cultures and values. This was the vital characteristic needed to provide a stance of moral leadership to support a planetary transformation of cultures.
Rather than dwelling on the series of political upheavals then plaguing Western societies, Revel transcended the traditional Cold War ideology to interpret the world situation as planetary transformation in five basic areas. He listed essential conditions under which the human species could achieve a form of maturity necessary to bring stability to the planet: In order for this revolutionary process to exist in reality, five basic conditions must be met; that is, critical work must have been done in five distinct, but complementary and convergent areas. ... Those conditions and areas are as follows:
1. a critique on the injustice existing in economic, social, and racial relationships.
2. a critique of management, directed against the waste of material and human resources....
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Metaphysics of Modern Existence by Vine Deloria Jr.. Copyright © 2012 Vine Deloria Jr.. Excerpted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Contents
1. Foreword,2. Introduction,
3. A Planet in Transition,
4. Transforming Reality,
5. A Divided Vision,
6. Space-Time,
7. The Process of Life,
8. Whither Evolutionists?,
9. The Structure of Life,
10. Transforming Instincts,
11. The Human Mind,
12. The Quickening Pace,
13. Our Social Groupings,
14. Our Transforming Institutions,
15. Expanding the Legal Universe,
16. The Charismatic Model,
17. Tribal Religious Realities,
18. The Traumatic Planetary Past,
19. Theologians and Scientists,
20. The Future of Theology,
21. The Transformation of Science,
22. The Metaphysics of Modern Existence,
23. Afterword,
24. The Emerging Dissident Literature,
25. Notes,
26. Bibliography,
27. About the Author,