The normalization of life in the Swat Valley, where the inhabitants are returning to their homes after fleeing the military confrontation between the Taliban and the Pakistani Army, is a happy development. The Taliban have lost their hold on the Swat Valley, where they had managed to carve out an ultra-Islamic republic inside and with the approval of the Islamic republic of Pakistan. Does this prove militant Islam is now on the decline?
Pakistan, born from the refusal of the Indian Muslims to coexist with non-Muslims in a multicultural society, is an Islamic republic. Any Islamic militant who would like to see an uncompromising implementation of the Shari'a, may think that Pakistan is still too soft, but can at least base his campaign for an even more intensive Islamization on the existing Constitution. Islamists in Pakistan don't need revolution, they should be able to realize their goals by working within the system.
Yet, they have repeatedly made the mistake of taking up arms against the Pakistani state. Two years ago, there was the waste in human lives as a consequence of the militants' occupation of the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad. Then the murder of Benazir Bhutto, expected to become Prime Minister, in Rawalpindi. And recently, the military expansion of the Taliban from the stronghold in Swat, that forced the Pakistani Government to reassert its authority and oust the Taliban from the province. The Pakistani Government had practically conceded Swat to them as a fiefdom where they could freely impose Islamic commandments to their heart's delight. That government had always been their closest ally, even through the G.W. Bush years when it had to pretend to side with the US in the "war on terror". And yet they managed to antagonize this best friend by overplaying their hand.
We have witnessed the same phenomenon in Iraq. The militants of "Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia" had American soldiers' lives for the taking. If they had focused on fighting the Americans, they could have humiliated the sole superpower far more deeply than they actually did. Instead, they started attacking Shi'ite fellow Muslims, blowing up mosques and attacking unarmed crowds of pilgrims to Kerbela. Killing Muslims by way of collateral damage in the war on the Infidels was understandable, but the Muslim masses could not tolerate the deliberate and massive killing of fellow Muslims. So, Al-Qaida lost its support base, a vital element in any guerrilla, and Iraqi tribal chieftains went over to the pro-American side.
Islamic strategists with a broad view may not be unduly worried over these lost opportunities. The Taliban may not have retained their hold on Swat, but the state that has reasserted control there, is still an Islamic Republic. Al-Qaida may not have taken power in Iraq, but the Iraqi Government is still made up of Muslims who stand by when the Christian minority is chased out and who openly rejoice at every stage in the retreat of the US Army. Nevertheless, the spearheads of the Islamic revolution have miscalculated and been defeated in their specific local objectives.
What is wrong with Muslims that they waste such golden opportunities? If you can get even the Pakistani state, the biggest sponsor of Islamic terrorism worldwide, to take up arms against you, shouldn't you realize you're objectively acting as an agent of the anti-Islamic world conspiracy of Zionists, Crusaders and Hindu idolaters? The question deserves closer scrutiny.
Meanwhile, it confirms my long-standing position that if ever we lose against the Islamic plans of conquest, it can only be due to slackness in mobilizing our brains against this not-so-talented enemy. I don't do "Islamophobia", I don't fear an impending Islamic world conquest. Not because of the rosy dogma that the whole idea of Islamic world conquest is a farcical and fanciful invention (for there are enough Muslim leaders who have affirmed just such a vision), but because the Muslim world rarely lives up to its potential. Not economically or in cultural production, of course, but not even in political and military confrontations either. Their threatening postures should not intimidate us. We are capable of outwitting them.
Read more!
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
May '68 and the moon landing
Last year's memorial events of May '68 have rarely paid attention to its connection with a development celebrated today, on the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, viz. space travel.
Big anniversaries of the first moon landing on 20 July 1969 always follow the anniversaries of the wave of student revolt known as "May '68". Last year, to my knowledge, none of the numerous write-ups on that outburst of anti-authoritarianism drew attention to the decisive influence of the incipient space age on the generation concerned. Yet few developments ever were more conducive to a questioning of all certainties.
Ever since the genesis of life on earth, heaven was above and earth below. Heaven was what you looked up to, earth what you put your feet on. The natural and ineluctable contrast between heaven and earth was the model for the contrast between man and woman, parents and children, rulers and their people. When people started travelling in space, this ancient model became a bit shaky. To be sure, Newton's physics had already demonstrated that the same natural laws apply to both the heavenly bodies and the earth; that indeed the earth is a celestial body too, as much as sun and moon and stars. But now this theoretical bridging of the abyss between heaven and earth was given physical reality. When a man put his foot on a celestial body the way we have been doing on the earth, he changed many people's sense of heaven and earth. It's only natural that at such a time, they started questioning the old established relations between man and woman, master and servant, parents and children.
The signs are that the May '68 anniversaries will fade out after the 50th, and wil not survive its last participants, while the first moon landing will continue to remain a landmark in human history of the same order as the invention of the wheel.
Read more!
Big anniversaries of the first moon landing on 20 July 1969 always follow the anniversaries of the wave of student revolt known as "May '68". Last year, to my knowledge, none of the numerous write-ups on that outburst of anti-authoritarianism drew attention to the decisive influence of the incipient space age on the generation concerned. Yet few developments ever were more conducive to a questioning of all certainties.
Ever since the genesis of life on earth, heaven was above and earth below. Heaven was what you looked up to, earth what you put your feet on. The natural and ineluctable contrast between heaven and earth was the model for the contrast between man and woman, parents and children, rulers and their people. When people started travelling in space, this ancient model became a bit shaky. To be sure, Newton's physics had already demonstrated that the same natural laws apply to both the heavenly bodies and the earth; that indeed the earth is a celestial body too, as much as sun and moon and stars. But now this theoretical bridging of the abyss between heaven and earth was given physical reality. When a man put his foot on a celestial body the way we have been doing on the earth, he changed many people's sense of heaven and earth. It's only natural that at such a time, they started questioning the old established relations between man and woman, master and servant, parents and children.
The signs are that the May '68 anniversaries will fade out after the 50th, and wil not survive its last participants, while the first moon landing will continue to remain a landmark in human history of the same order as the invention of the wheel.
Read more!
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Funerals hip and classical
Yesterday, Amsterdam and the whole Dutch speech community, as well as the spiritualist network worldwide, said farewell to hippie poet Simon Vinkenoog. Last Wednesday, the Flemish Catholic and the European Conservative communities buried Nucleus publisher Pieter Huys in Bruges. In their respective life's work, they had little in common except my sympathy.
Somehow, the death of good people leaves me with a peaceful feeling. Their deaths first of all draw attention to their persons and the work they have done. Otherwise you take them for granted and don't think of them, eventhough a mere thought of them is beneficial. This past week, I was drawn to reflect on two major influences on my life, though at different stages.
Simon Vinkenoog died at the full age of nearly 81. Indeed, yesterday 18 July would have been his birthday. Born and buried on the same day, that was astrology enthusiast Simon Vinkenoog for you. I guess it must have been his Cancer sun sign that made him so chaotic and so dependent on constant female attention; he married six times. Or in another view of the same data, he ran away from five of them, just as he ran away from the responsibility for his children, as well as from the taxman. Reportedly he was a loving husband as long as a marriage lasted, but not very involved as a father, except when his son had to lead him by the hand through the city of Florence while he was high on LSD.
In the sixties and seventies, he presided over the wave of hippyism that swept Amsterdam. He pioneered the reinstating of poetry as a performing art, and was all over the place in New Age publications almost until his dying breath, displaying in passing his considerable erudition in religion and philosophy. Not being much of a reader, I never read his poetry though I attended some of his performances, and had one conversation with him after his show in my hometown Leuven, ca. 1980.
As a matter of personal impression, he was a very kind man, the kind that seems unable and disinclined to do anyone any harm. Then again, many will hold it against him that he contributed mightily to the mainstreaming of marihuana in the Netherlands. Most marihuana smokers of my generation gave up the habit by age 25 or so, but Vinkenoog kept it up until the end, in spite of renouncing tobacco. He also took LSD trips once every six months, for reaffirming his roots in heaven. It didn't keep him from functioning, at least in his own unique role, nor from making a living and leading a rich family life. Many less gifted people who followed in his footsteps were not so lucky.
From the summerland up there, he may feel a bit puzzled to see himself juxtaposed with Dr. jur. Pieter Huys. This Bruges-based lawyer was a pillar of the Catholic community in his hometown, in Belgium and to some extent even on a wider scale. He certainly was a faithful husband and father of three. He had been a personal friend of Pope John Paul II and had many connections among leading thinkers and dignitaries with serious Catholic and/or conservative convictions. He published the Dutch-language monthly Nucleus, for which I wrote since 1992 till now. He was a very good man, whose strong convictions never stood in the way of an open mind, even for apostates like myself, in whom I suppose he saw at least a sincere seeker.
He also found the solution to a problem most conservative papers face: the inability to pay their contributors. They all complain that they don't have the money for that, and tell writers who expect payment: "If all of you start making demands like that, I'd have to close down this paper and then our beautiful message wouldn't be propagated anymore!" But not Huys. He paid out of his own pocket, and his resources were limited too. So as a rule, he paid those people who make a living by writing. Politicians who wrote by way of personal publicity, or civil servants and professors writing in their salaried working hours, generally contributed without payment, and that way they indirectly supported the professional writers. Equal treatment of people in unequal circumstances would not have been a just equality.
Pieter Huys was the voice of intelligent conservatism in Europe. We cannot do justice to his thought in an obituary, but no doubt we will have opportunities to discuss its relevance on upcoming occasions in the near future.
Vinkenoog's funeral ended on a flowery note with a "celebration" in the hippie colony Ruigoord. By contrast, Huys's was entirely classical, the coffin being carried out of the church under the singing of "In Paradisum". Given his stature in the Catholic community, I only thought that the Cathedral of Bruges would have been a more appropriate location than the Saint Francis parish church. But then the Belgian Church establishment isn't very good at recognizing and fittingly honouring a valuable friend.
Read more!
Somehow, the death of good people leaves me with a peaceful feeling. Their deaths first of all draw attention to their persons and the work they have done. Otherwise you take them for granted and don't think of them, eventhough a mere thought of them is beneficial. This past week, I was drawn to reflect on two major influences on my life, though at different stages.
Simon Vinkenoog died at the full age of nearly 81. Indeed, yesterday 18 July would have been his birthday. Born and buried on the same day, that was astrology enthusiast Simon Vinkenoog for you. I guess it must have been his Cancer sun sign that made him so chaotic and so dependent on constant female attention; he married six times. Or in another view of the same data, he ran away from five of them, just as he ran away from the responsibility for his children, as well as from the taxman. Reportedly he was a loving husband as long as a marriage lasted, but not very involved as a father, except when his son had to lead him by the hand through the city of Florence while he was high on LSD.
In the sixties and seventies, he presided over the wave of hippyism that swept Amsterdam. He pioneered the reinstating of poetry as a performing art, and was all over the place in New Age publications almost until his dying breath, displaying in passing his considerable erudition in religion and philosophy. Not being much of a reader, I never read his poetry though I attended some of his performances, and had one conversation with him after his show in my hometown Leuven, ca. 1980.
As a matter of personal impression, he was a very kind man, the kind that seems unable and disinclined to do anyone any harm. Then again, many will hold it against him that he contributed mightily to the mainstreaming of marihuana in the Netherlands. Most marihuana smokers of my generation gave up the habit by age 25 or so, but Vinkenoog kept it up until the end, in spite of renouncing tobacco. He also took LSD trips once every six months, for reaffirming his roots in heaven. It didn't keep him from functioning, at least in his own unique role, nor from making a living and leading a rich family life. Many less gifted people who followed in his footsteps were not so lucky.
From the summerland up there, he may feel a bit puzzled to see himself juxtaposed with Dr. jur. Pieter Huys. This Bruges-based lawyer was a pillar of the Catholic community in his hometown, in Belgium and to some extent even on a wider scale. He certainly was a faithful husband and father of three. He had been a personal friend of Pope John Paul II and had many connections among leading thinkers and dignitaries with serious Catholic and/or conservative convictions. He published the Dutch-language monthly Nucleus, for which I wrote since 1992 till now. He was a very good man, whose strong convictions never stood in the way of an open mind, even for apostates like myself, in whom I suppose he saw at least a sincere seeker.
He also found the solution to a problem most conservative papers face: the inability to pay their contributors. They all complain that they don't have the money for that, and tell writers who expect payment: "If all of you start making demands like that, I'd have to close down this paper and then our beautiful message wouldn't be propagated anymore!" But not Huys. He paid out of his own pocket, and his resources were limited too. So as a rule, he paid those people who make a living by writing. Politicians who wrote by way of personal publicity, or civil servants and professors writing in their salaried working hours, generally contributed without payment, and that way they indirectly supported the professional writers. Equal treatment of people in unequal circumstances would not have been a just equality.
Pieter Huys was the voice of intelligent conservatism in Europe. We cannot do justice to his thought in an obituary, but no doubt we will have opportunities to discuss its relevance on upcoming occasions in the near future.
Vinkenoog's funeral ended on a flowery note with a "celebration" in the hippie colony Ruigoord. By contrast, Huys's was entirely classical, the coffin being carried out of the church under the singing of "In Paradisum". Given his stature in the Catholic community, I only thought that the Cathedral of Bruges would have been a more appropriate location than the Saint Francis parish church. But then the Belgian Church establishment isn't very good at recognizing and fittingly honouring a valuable friend.
Read more!
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Nietzsche and Mohammed
When Nietzsche started hearing voices, his career as philosopher ended. When Mohammed started hearing voices, his career as prophet began.
Read more!
Read more!
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Heathens stake their claim
Summer Solstice has drawn attention once more to the revival of Paganism, or what the media call "nature religion". Some revived Pagans raise an ancient dispute over the right to sacred sites, but only in theory.
This very morning, Heathens, Pagans, Witches, Druids and other assorted nature-worshippers awaited the sunrise in Stonehenge. And no doubt likewise in Wéris, Carnac and other sacred sites in Europe. A Druid who had freshly bathed his aura in the first sunrays of the new summer, was interviewed and said that people who have witnessed and saluted this unique sunrise would feel its glow all through the coming year, giving them strength and inspiration.
At noon, in De Zevende Dag, the political debating show on Flemish television, Michiel Hendryckx, a famous photographer, was interviewed about his best photographs currently on display in an exhibition in Antwerp. On one, a Christian cross on a hill is seen. He explained that this was a pre-Christian Celtic burial mound, which the first Christian missionaries had christianized by imposing a Christian symbol on it. He said he was opposed to the Islamization of Europe, but that Christians should admit they too only become the hegemonic religion of Europe through a process of conquest. Clever conquest in many instances, notably the policy of inculturation (nowadays tried out in Asian countries): incorporating rituals and festivals and indeed sacred sites of pre-Christian religion. If Pagans felt a sacredness about a particular site, they would come and spend time there even after a Christian symbol had been imposed on it. After a few generations the Christian symbol would be part of their experience of the site's sacrality.
One such ancient sacred site I often visited in my youth is Scherpenheuvel, within cycling distance (ca. 25 km) northeast from my hometown, Leuven. Or walking distance, for every year on the eve of the First of May we would walk all the way like proper pilgrims, to arrive there at sunrise. Long ago, it was just a forested hilltop, the natural Pagan sacred site par excellence. (So was the nearby site in Averbode where a famous abbey was built, but the adjoining "Mary Forest" there is a big hint at the original Pagan usage. Both places always stuck me as deeply wholesome.) The Christian claim on the site goes back to the Middle Ages, when an idol of the Virgin Mary was installed in a tree. In ca. 1580, it was removed, not by Pagan diehards but by Protestant iconoclasts. In 1587, after the Habsburg dynasty reasserted control and Protestantism started losing ground in what was to become Belgium, the Virgin was reinstalled in the tree and became a focus of popular devotion promoted by the Catholic Counter-reformation.
The events were woven into a pious story, as follows. The man who had tried to restore the tree to its natural simplicity and removed the idol, had suddenly found himself paralyzed. Only when a good Catholic restored the idol to its rightful place, could the man move again. Miracle!
Within a few years, the site's popularity rose spectacularly, and the Church intervened. In their attempt to outdo one another in Christian fervour, Catholics and Protestants in their respective countries managed to weed out large vestiges of not only each other' presence but also of the Pagan lore that, as they rightly suspected, had survived the nominally Christian Middle Ages. So in Scherpenheuvel in 1603, the tree was chopped down and the idol installed in a church newly built for the purpose at the site. It's a very pleasant building, octogonal and just the right size. In my childhood, the wall around the entrance door used to sport numerous crutches which handicapped people had supposedly left behind there in gratitude for successful cures.
However, the miraculous powers of the Holy Virgin of Scherpenheuvel were not unlimited. The most common pilgrims' souvenir of Scherpenheuvel shows the then-ruling archducal couple Albrecht and Isabella kneeling down in prayer in front of the Holy Virgin on the tree. Isabella was the daughter of the Spanish king Philip II, a determined enemy of the Protestant heresy. Her and her husband's rule (1598-1621) in what is now Belgium marked the Catholic restoration after decades of religious strife, the victory of the Counter-reformation. A story we were never told is that Albrecht and Isabella went there to pray because Isabella failed to get pregnant. Like millions of Pagans and Christians before and after them, they turned to Heaven for succour in their desperate attempt at begetting offspring. But this is a story without a happy ending: the longed-for heir was never born.
This particular Refusal of Miracle was different from all those other hoped-for miracles that never materialize. When the archdukes came to power, the agreement was that their fiefdom would become a sovereign kingdom if they had a heir to rule over it, otherwise sovereignty would return to the Habsburg dynasty. The latter is what happened: until the conquest by Revolutionary France, Belgium was ruled by the Spanish and then by the Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg. The country missed its chance at becoming a nation in its own right. The Blessed Virgin didn't favour the idea of a Kingdom of Belgium.
At any rate, the one couple whose devotions at Scherpenheuvel have remained famous, never received the heavenly blessing they had prayed for. Perhaps the Virgin doesn't appreciate devotions offered at sacred sites usurped from their legitimate users.
Barely a fortnight ago, a somewhat similar instance made headlines in our dear province of Limburg. For some years, a mighty oak at a lonely site in the village of Lummen has been a favourite meeting-place of a group of Wiccan neo-Pagans called Greencraft. They gather there on full-moon nights sky-clad (= naked) for rituals celebrating the Horned God and the Triple Goddess, or so. One day, to their dismay, they found that an idol of Our Lady had been fixed to the trunk. Pagans have nothing against idol-worship, of course. They will generously allow a hundred Virgin idols to flourish, but not in "their" tree.
Greencraft highpriest René Delaere explained the Pagan position in a TV interview: "This way, Catholics express a claim on this tree." Asked by the interviewer Evi to whom the tree belongs, his prompt answer was: "To the tree itself." He said that merely being a tree confers enough sacredness on the tree, no need for an overlay of cultural symbols. Then he reiterated how the Church had always used this procedure to induct Pagans into Christianity: allow them to worship at their traditional sacred sites, but give these a Christian veneer to accustom them to the new religion and make them identify their sacred sites with Christian themes.
He agreed that things would get out of hand if his community were to reclaim all the Pagan sites on which Christians had built churches. In India in 1986-2002, the (perfectly rightful) Hindu claim to a site in Ayodhya on which the Muslims had forcibly replaced a temple with a mosque led to massive riots killing several thousands, bomb attacks killing hundreds, controversial overhauls of the history textbooks, sweeping changes in the party-political landscape, overthrows of provincial governments and a change of government in Delhi. And that was all about a single disputed site among the thousands of Hindu temples destroyed by Islamic iconoclasm. So imagine what we could get in Europe if the Pagan ghosts rose from their graves to reclaim each one of their places of worship on which Christians imposed a Christian building or idol.
The moderate Pagan position, as per Mr. Delaere, seems to be this: to be generous and leave to the Christians all the churches they built, even if on stolen land and in forcible replacement of Pagan objects of worship. The least the Catholics can do in return, is to leave the hitherto untainted Pagan sites alone. But as a matter of principle, or just as a taunt, the Church may be reminded of the legal principle that a house (even a house of worship), no matter who built it, is strictly the lawful property of the owner of the soil it is built on. At least King David paid an honest price to the native Jebusite landlord when he acquired the property in conquered Jerusalem on which he intended to build a temple. The missionaries who Christianized our part of the world rarely showed this courtesy.
So much for the legal niceties. Of course numerous Christians have innocently felt genuine religious enthusiasm at such theoretically disputed sites and in front of such intruder idols. Nobody wants to deny it to them, least of all the Pagans. In their analysis, the name of the gods worshipped changed but the devotion remained more or less the same. A similar process is going on today in the opposite direction. While Christian polemicists are jubilant that their religion is doing just fine in Africa and Korea, what we witness in Europe is the continued trend of churches closing down and being sold off to serve as concert-halls, restaurants, school buildings (the case of the church where little me sang in the choir) or mosques. Pagan revivalism is one way of filling the vacuum left by a shrinking Christianity.
Read more!
This very morning, Heathens, Pagans, Witches, Druids and other assorted nature-worshippers awaited the sunrise in Stonehenge. And no doubt likewise in Wéris, Carnac and other sacred sites in Europe. A Druid who had freshly bathed his aura in the first sunrays of the new summer, was interviewed and said that people who have witnessed and saluted this unique sunrise would feel its glow all through the coming year, giving them strength and inspiration.
At noon, in De Zevende Dag, the political debating show on Flemish television, Michiel Hendryckx, a famous photographer, was interviewed about his best photographs currently on display in an exhibition in Antwerp. On one, a Christian cross on a hill is seen. He explained that this was a pre-Christian Celtic burial mound, which the first Christian missionaries had christianized by imposing a Christian symbol on it. He said he was opposed to the Islamization of Europe, but that Christians should admit they too only become the hegemonic religion of Europe through a process of conquest. Clever conquest in many instances, notably the policy of inculturation (nowadays tried out in Asian countries): incorporating rituals and festivals and indeed sacred sites of pre-Christian religion. If Pagans felt a sacredness about a particular site, they would come and spend time there even after a Christian symbol had been imposed on it. After a few generations the Christian symbol would be part of their experience of the site's sacrality.
One such ancient sacred site I often visited in my youth is Scherpenheuvel, within cycling distance (ca. 25 km) northeast from my hometown, Leuven. Or walking distance, for every year on the eve of the First of May we would walk all the way like proper pilgrims, to arrive there at sunrise. Long ago, it was just a forested hilltop, the natural Pagan sacred site par excellence. (So was the nearby site in Averbode where a famous abbey was built, but the adjoining "Mary Forest" there is a big hint at the original Pagan usage. Both places always stuck me as deeply wholesome.) The Christian claim on the site goes back to the Middle Ages, when an idol of the Virgin Mary was installed in a tree. In ca. 1580, it was removed, not by Pagan diehards but by Protestant iconoclasts. In 1587, after the Habsburg dynasty reasserted control and Protestantism started losing ground in what was to become Belgium, the Virgin was reinstalled in the tree and became a focus of popular devotion promoted by the Catholic Counter-reformation.
The events were woven into a pious story, as follows. The man who had tried to restore the tree to its natural simplicity and removed the idol, had suddenly found himself paralyzed. Only when a good Catholic restored the idol to its rightful place, could the man move again. Miracle!
Within a few years, the site's popularity rose spectacularly, and the Church intervened. In their attempt to outdo one another in Christian fervour, Catholics and Protestants in their respective countries managed to weed out large vestiges of not only each other' presence but also of the Pagan lore that, as they rightly suspected, had survived the nominally Christian Middle Ages. So in Scherpenheuvel in 1603, the tree was chopped down and the idol installed in a church newly built for the purpose at the site. It's a very pleasant building, octogonal and just the right size. In my childhood, the wall around the entrance door used to sport numerous crutches which handicapped people had supposedly left behind there in gratitude for successful cures.
However, the miraculous powers of the Holy Virgin of Scherpenheuvel were not unlimited. The most common pilgrims' souvenir of Scherpenheuvel shows the then-ruling archducal couple Albrecht and Isabella kneeling down in prayer in front of the Holy Virgin on the tree. Isabella was the daughter of the Spanish king Philip II, a determined enemy of the Protestant heresy. Her and her husband's rule (1598-1621) in what is now Belgium marked the Catholic restoration after decades of religious strife, the victory of the Counter-reformation. A story we were never told is that Albrecht and Isabella went there to pray because Isabella failed to get pregnant. Like millions of Pagans and Christians before and after them, they turned to Heaven for succour in their desperate attempt at begetting offspring. But this is a story without a happy ending: the longed-for heir was never born.
This particular Refusal of Miracle was different from all those other hoped-for miracles that never materialize. When the archdukes came to power, the agreement was that their fiefdom would become a sovereign kingdom if they had a heir to rule over it, otherwise sovereignty would return to the Habsburg dynasty. The latter is what happened: until the conquest by Revolutionary France, Belgium was ruled by the Spanish and then by the Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg. The country missed its chance at becoming a nation in its own right. The Blessed Virgin didn't favour the idea of a Kingdom of Belgium.
At any rate, the one couple whose devotions at Scherpenheuvel have remained famous, never received the heavenly blessing they had prayed for. Perhaps the Virgin doesn't appreciate devotions offered at sacred sites usurped from their legitimate users.
Barely a fortnight ago, a somewhat similar instance made headlines in our dear province of Limburg. For some years, a mighty oak at a lonely site in the village of Lummen has been a favourite meeting-place of a group of Wiccan neo-Pagans called Greencraft. They gather there on full-moon nights sky-clad (= naked) for rituals celebrating the Horned God and the Triple Goddess, or so. One day, to their dismay, they found that an idol of Our Lady had been fixed to the trunk. Pagans have nothing against idol-worship, of course. They will generously allow a hundred Virgin idols to flourish, but not in "their" tree.
Greencraft highpriest René Delaere explained the Pagan position in a TV interview: "This way, Catholics express a claim on this tree." Asked by the interviewer Evi to whom the tree belongs, his prompt answer was: "To the tree itself." He said that merely being a tree confers enough sacredness on the tree, no need for an overlay of cultural symbols. Then he reiterated how the Church had always used this procedure to induct Pagans into Christianity: allow them to worship at their traditional sacred sites, but give these a Christian veneer to accustom them to the new religion and make them identify their sacred sites with Christian themes.
He agreed that things would get out of hand if his community were to reclaim all the Pagan sites on which Christians had built churches. In India in 1986-2002, the (perfectly rightful) Hindu claim to a site in Ayodhya on which the Muslims had forcibly replaced a temple with a mosque led to massive riots killing several thousands, bomb attacks killing hundreds, controversial overhauls of the history textbooks, sweeping changes in the party-political landscape, overthrows of provincial governments and a change of government in Delhi. And that was all about a single disputed site among the thousands of Hindu temples destroyed by Islamic iconoclasm. So imagine what we could get in Europe if the Pagan ghosts rose from their graves to reclaim each one of their places of worship on which Christians imposed a Christian building or idol.
The moderate Pagan position, as per Mr. Delaere, seems to be this: to be generous and leave to the Christians all the churches they built, even if on stolen land and in forcible replacement of Pagan objects of worship. The least the Catholics can do in return, is to leave the hitherto untainted Pagan sites alone. But as a matter of principle, or just as a taunt, the Church may be reminded of the legal principle that a house (even a house of worship), no matter who built it, is strictly the lawful property of the owner of the soil it is built on. At least King David paid an honest price to the native Jebusite landlord when he acquired the property in conquered Jerusalem on which he intended to build a temple. The missionaries who Christianized our part of the world rarely showed this courtesy.
So much for the legal niceties. Of course numerous Christians have innocently felt genuine religious enthusiasm at such theoretically disputed sites and in front of such intruder idols. Nobody wants to deny it to them, least of all the Pagans. In their analysis, the name of the gods worshipped changed but the devotion remained more or less the same. A similar process is going on today in the opposite direction. While Christian polemicists are jubilant that their religion is doing just fine in Africa and Korea, what we witness in Europe is the continued trend of churches closing down and being sold off to serve as concert-halls, restaurants, school buildings (the case of the church where little me sang in the choir) or mosques. Pagan revivalism is one way of filling the vacuum left by a shrinking Christianity.
Read more!
Monday, June 15, 2009
The Book of Changes in Ruigoord
Last Saturday I attended the Yijing Conference, on the Book of Changes and its defining concepts of yin & yang, in Ruigoord, a hippie colony outside Amsterdam. It was a blast from the past in more than one respect.
Amsterdam used to be an attractor of hippie types from all over Europe and North America. I went there several times aged 16 to 20 to pick up the vibrations. It was already a decade past the mildly historic events of the Provo movement, but people kept on coming there to bring to it the very atmosphere that they hoped to find there. I recall visiting the boat of the Lowlands Weed Company where marihuana was selected and improved to turn it into the strong stuff now known as Nederwiet. The Aquarian activities centre De Kosmos had its own "house dealer", quality guaranteed, but its core business was all manner of "spiritual" stuff that was heady back then but today is on offer in every cultural centre in Europe, from Astrology to Zen. Real groovy. That's where I saw an announcement of a visit by Swami Hariharanada Giri who initiated people into Kriya Yoga, the beginning of the end of my seeker years.
A leftover of hippie Amsterdam is Ruigoord, a tiny village lying in a remaining slice of greenery between a line of windmills (for energy generation, not the old pîcturesque ones) and the industries expanding from the harbour. Nobody really wants to live there anymore ever since it found itself in the flight path to the nearby airport. So the place was cheap and accessible for penniless entrepreneurs in the "alternative" sector. One or two decades ago, the Ruigoord crowd had tried to prevent the industries from coming too close, so they used witchcraft rituals to keep the spirit of modernity, exploitation and pollution at bay, but in vain. Nonetheless, once you're inside the village, you could still imagine being in the middle of the premodern Dutch countryside.
But the decoration is not so Dutch. The old church now sports pictures of the Dalai Lama and paintings of Shiva. In the middle of the meadow is a huge totem pole. Gotta think global before you act local. Next to the gate is an inscription of the Vedic Gayatri Mantra, with a few spelling mistakes. No marihuana conspicuously in sight, not even in the herbal-teahouse, but some old T-shirts demanding its legalization. So, it was a good place to spend a sunny day and dig the old spirit. Moreover, I was in the fine company of an Amsterdam-based lady friend of Chinese-Indonesian origin, a teacher of Neijia gentle martial arts splendidly embodying the whole yin-yang thing.
Most speakers told us about their personal experiences with the Yijing oracle. I learned the word "enantiodromia", "change into its opposite", meaning that when yang becomes extremely yang, it turns into yin, and vice versa. Light allows you to see things, but extreme light blinds; cold water cools but ice causes burns. I don't know if practice proves it true, though: if you hate someone hard enough, do you start loving him as a consequence? Some speakers could't keep themselves from bringing in quasi-Buddhist ideas, e.g. that fear, longing and clinging cause "bad energy". But right on the Yijing mark was the lone Flemish speaker who uttered (quoted?) the maxim that "except that everything changes, everything changes". So what doesn't change? The fact that everything changes. And what's absolute? That there's no absolutes.
Simon Vinkenoog, the octogenarian poet and icon of hippie Amsterdam, had to absent himself because of illness. He was to speak about his own Yijing interpretation. He at least called it an interpretation, not a translation. Several of the speakers claimed to have made their own translations of the Yijing or of Laozi's Daodejing, but from their mispronunciation of Chinese words you could deduce some doubts about that claim. What they meant was probably that they had cobbled together some pleasing bits and pieces from existing translations. So this was the problem that I as a trained Sinologist had with this whole scene: after having studied the Chinese classics in the original and in their historical context, I can't reconcile myself anymore with most Yijing users' naive reliance on the existing interpretation, a Han dynasty (2nd c. BC) version of a then 900-year-old non-fixed "text", which in the process of translation got overlaid with Jungian mytho-psychology and feelgood psychotherapy.
Mind you, I have been there too. At 19, I assisted in founding an Aikido association, Seishindo Aikikai Leuven, and we chose as its logo the Yijing hexagram 51, Zhong Fu, "inner truth" (today I would rather translate it as "core sincerity"). Once when we had to take an important decision, we literally swore with our hands on the Book. Hey, even Chairman Mao had consulted the Yijing, so why not us progressive young men? So I really know how it feels, the trust in the Oracle. In my studies of history, this knowledge has served me very well, as omens and astrology have played a central role in numerous political deliberations and cultural-ideological developments in every known civilization. Yet, once a man is equipped with the modern outlook and takes a critical look at the mantic disciplines, he will end up finding it hard to keep the faith. At least I found it hard, e.g. when I saw how a friend of mine was encouraged by the Oracle to pursue a particular woman who nevertheless kept on rejecting him.
In particular, how can anyone put faith in the Yijing oracle once he knows that the text we now use (and I mean the Chinese standard text, let alone the mutually contradictory translations) probably diverges in every chapter from the original intent of its early Zhou dynasty author(s)? Thus, a much-used expression in the Yijing is "li zhen", "favourable (mantic) determination", "auspicious oracle". Already the Han Confucians understood it differently, not as oracular but as ethical advice. Today, it is mostly translated as "constancy is favourable". So when people get this answer when they ask the question: "Should I move to Australia?", they think it means: "Stay where you are!", when in origin it means: "Pursue the course you're contemplating."
Moreover, apart from the meaning of the text, its whole purpose has also changed. Ancient diviners tried to know the will of the Gods, and how to propitiate them. Hence the frequent references to sacrificial rituals in the Yijing, often with details about what and how to sacrifice. To the modern mind, this is doubly irrational: not only do you try to decide a question with a procedure of pure coincidence (toss of a coin, the pattern of cracks in a heated turtle's plate, direction of birds' flight, shapes in the liver of a sacrificed animal), the question itself often concerns the wishes and actions of ethereal beings whose existence remains to be proven.
Finally, the concerns of the Book's original users were very different from the pretty little worries of its modern users, who want an oracular light to shine upon their floating "relationships" and their "spiritual growth". The Zhou family that wrote or patronized the original Yijing ca. 1100 BC, was more interested in justifying its coup d'état against its suzerain, the Shang emperor. What would have made the old Duke of Zhou and his relatives laugh out loud is the modern assumption that theirs is a "Daoist" text favourable to the feminine principle. In would be more accurate to classify it as proto-Confucian (aristocratic, patriarchal, political, ethical) rather than Daoist (rooted in the artisanal classes, more appreciative of the feminine, averse to politics, mystical), and even to call it the Bible of Sexism. Later interpreters started discovering the weakness at the heart of displays of strength and the strength of the weak, the white dot in the black fish and the black dot in the white fish. But the core Yijing's view of these primeval polar opposites is simple and straightforward: the weak should bend before the strong, the woman should submit to the man. It emphatically prefigures the Confucian view that "if man is truly man and woman truly woman, the world is in order". So, ladies, know your place.
Anyway, most people at the conference had no idea of the complex and as yet still partly unclear text history of the Book of Changes. Except for one, Harmen Mesker, and his explanation of his new translation in progress, taking hexagram 48 ("the Well") as example, was thoroughly scholarly and up-to-date with the latest discoveries of the oldest Yijing manuscripts. He replaced characters with other characters attested in manuscripts, changed the division into sentences, and restored old meanings to characters obscured in the 18th-century reading on which Richard Wilhelm based his classical translation. He opined that the title character jing, "well", may have been a mask for a similar-looking character meaning "law", motivated by a need (either for the original Zhou conpirators or for an Yijing commentator/rewriter in the subsequent Zhou period, 11th-3rd c. BC) to cloak criticism of the regime in innocent-looking language. Yet he had not lost faith in the Oracle.
How he solved the problem of the doubts about the intended text? He simply took the best approximation. If two of the three oldest manuscripts give a particular character where the standard version gives another, he prefers the text of the manuscripts and alters the reading accordingly. But on that text, though still seven centuries younger than the Duke of Zhou and beset with uncertainties due to the then non-uniformity of the Chinese writing system, he does base oracle consultations. After all, he argued, people using any of the present translations, though these diverge from each other and from the original quite widely, seem to be satisfied with the results. Someone volunteered the observation that the Bible too is used as an oracle by some of its believers. Yes, he replied, "even Pietje Puk [a Dutch series of children's books featuring a postman] could serve as an oracle".
That's practical, and also likely to be welcomed by most oracle users, who resent criticism and prefer to wallow in the bubble bath of feelgood spirit beliefs. But to such people, the search for the original Yijing would thereby lose its importance: if it's all only subjective, any text that falls into your hand (probably by a benevolent cosmic coincidence) will be good enough to serve as your private guidebook. Yeah, why not? If it's all only "spiritual", distinctions don't really matter.
So that's why I liked this Harmen's work. Though not believing his research necessary for the oracular use of the Yijing, which was its originally intended purpose, his desire for finding out as much of the truth as possible proved too strong to ignore. That gives him a place in an old tradition. During the entire premodern age, oracle consultation was not a pastime of "seeker" types but a highly official matter with political consequences, and many top-ranking Chinese thinkers devoted their best energies to discovering the logic and inner necessity of the Yijing text.
Today, it's a dangerous topic for Sinologists who want to be taken seriously. In the 19th century already, organizers of academic conferences decreed that the voguish topics of "the origin of language" and "the Book of Changes" be disallowed as unfruitful and attractive of sloppy thinking. So don't tell any of my friends in academe that I went to Ruigoord.
Read more!
Amsterdam used to be an attractor of hippie types from all over Europe and North America. I went there several times aged 16 to 20 to pick up the vibrations. It was already a decade past the mildly historic events of the Provo movement, but people kept on coming there to bring to it the very atmosphere that they hoped to find there. I recall visiting the boat of the Lowlands Weed Company where marihuana was selected and improved to turn it into the strong stuff now known as Nederwiet. The Aquarian activities centre De Kosmos had its own "house dealer", quality guaranteed, but its core business was all manner of "spiritual" stuff that was heady back then but today is on offer in every cultural centre in Europe, from Astrology to Zen. Real groovy. That's where I saw an announcement of a visit by Swami Hariharanada Giri who initiated people into Kriya Yoga, the beginning of the end of my seeker years.
A leftover of hippie Amsterdam is Ruigoord, a tiny village lying in a remaining slice of greenery between a line of windmills (for energy generation, not the old pîcturesque ones) and the industries expanding from the harbour. Nobody really wants to live there anymore ever since it found itself in the flight path to the nearby airport. So the place was cheap and accessible for penniless entrepreneurs in the "alternative" sector. One or two decades ago, the Ruigoord crowd had tried to prevent the industries from coming too close, so they used witchcraft rituals to keep the spirit of modernity, exploitation and pollution at bay, but in vain. Nonetheless, once you're inside the village, you could still imagine being in the middle of the premodern Dutch countryside.
But the decoration is not so Dutch. The old church now sports pictures of the Dalai Lama and paintings of Shiva. In the middle of the meadow is a huge totem pole. Gotta think global before you act local. Next to the gate is an inscription of the Vedic Gayatri Mantra, with a few spelling mistakes. No marihuana conspicuously in sight, not even in the herbal-teahouse, but some old T-shirts demanding its legalization. So, it was a good place to spend a sunny day and dig the old spirit. Moreover, I was in the fine company of an Amsterdam-based lady friend of Chinese-Indonesian origin, a teacher of Neijia gentle martial arts splendidly embodying the whole yin-yang thing.
Most speakers told us about their personal experiences with the Yijing oracle. I learned the word "enantiodromia", "change into its opposite", meaning that when yang becomes extremely yang, it turns into yin, and vice versa. Light allows you to see things, but extreme light blinds; cold water cools but ice causes burns. I don't know if practice proves it true, though: if you hate someone hard enough, do you start loving him as a consequence? Some speakers could't keep themselves from bringing in quasi-Buddhist ideas, e.g. that fear, longing and clinging cause "bad energy". But right on the Yijing mark was the lone Flemish speaker who uttered (quoted?) the maxim that "except that everything changes, everything changes". So what doesn't change? The fact that everything changes. And what's absolute? That there's no absolutes.
Simon Vinkenoog, the octogenarian poet and icon of hippie Amsterdam, had to absent himself because of illness. He was to speak about his own Yijing interpretation. He at least called it an interpretation, not a translation. Several of the speakers claimed to have made their own translations of the Yijing or of Laozi's Daodejing, but from their mispronunciation of Chinese words you could deduce some doubts about that claim. What they meant was probably that they had cobbled together some pleasing bits and pieces from existing translations. So this was the problem that I as a trained Sinologist had with this whole scene: after having studied the Chinese classics in the original and in their historical context, I can't reconcile myself anymore with most Yijing users' naive reliance on the existing interpretation, a Han dynasty (2nd c. BC) version of a then 900-year-old non-fixed "text", which in the process of translation got overlaid with Jungian mytho-psychology and feelgood psychotherapy.
Mind you, I have been there too. At 19, I assisted in founding an Aikido association, Seishindo Aikikai Leuven, and we chose as its logo the Yijing hexagram 51, Zhong Fu, "inner truth" (today I would rather translate it as "core sincerity"). Once when we had to take an important decision, we literally swore with our hands on the Book. Hey, even Chairman Mao had consulted the Yijing, so why not us progressive young men? So I really know how it feels, the trust in the Oracle. In my studies of history, this knowledge has served me very well, as omens and astrology have played a central role in numerous political deliberations and cultural-ideological developments in every known civilization. Yet, once a man is equipped with the modern outlook and takes a critical look at the mantic disciplines, he will end up finding it hard to keep the faith. At least I found it hard, e.g. when I saw how a friend of mine was encouraged by the Oracle to pursue a particular woman who nevertheless kept on rejecting him.
In particular, how can anyone put faith in the Yijing oracle once he knows that the text we now use (and I mean the Chinese standard text, let alone the mutually contradictory translations) probably diverges in every chapter from the original intent of its early Zhou dynasty author(s)? Thus, a much-used expression in the Yijing is "li zhen", "favourable (mantic) determination", "auspicious oracle". Already the Han Confucians understood it differently, not as oracular but as ethical advice. Today, it is mostly translated as "constancy is favourable". So when people get this answer when they ask the question: "Should I move to Australia?", they think it means: "Stay where you are!", when in origin it means: "Pursue the course you're contemplating."
Moreover, apart from the meaning of the text, its whole purpose has also changed. Ancient diviners tried to know the will of the Gods, and how to propitiate them. Hence the frequent references to sacrificial rituals in the Yijing, often with details about what and how to sacrifice. To the modern mind, this is doubly irrational: not only do you try to decide a question with a procedure of pure coincidence (toss of a coin, the pattern of cracks in a heated turtle's plate, direction of birds' flight, shapes in the liver of a sacrificed animal), the question itself often concerns the wishes and actions of ethereal beings whose existence remains to be proven.
Finally, the concerns of the Book's original users were very different from the pretty little worries of its modern users, who want an oracular light to shine upon their floating "relationships" and their "spiritual growth". The Zhou family that wrote or patronized the original Yijing ca. 1100 BC, was more interested in justifying its coup d'état against its suzerain, the Shang emperor. What would have made the old Duke of Zhou and his relatives laugh out loud is the modern assumption that theirs is a "Daoist" text favourable to the feminine principle. In would be more accurate to classify it as proto-Confucian (aristocratic, patriarchal, political, ethical) rather than Daoist (rooted in the artisanal classes, more appreciative of the feminine, averse to politics, mystical), and even to call it the Bible of Sexism. Later interpreters started discovering the weakness at the heart of displays of strength and the strength of the weak, the white dot in the black fish and the black dot in the white fish. But the core Yijing's view of these primeval polar opposites is simple and straightforward: the weak should bend before the strong, the woman should submit to the man. It emphatically prefigures the Confucian view that "if man is truly man and woman truly woman, the world is in order". So, ladies, know your place.
Anyway, most people at the conference had no idea of the complex and as yet still partly unclear text history of the Book of Changes. Except for one, Harmen Mesker, and his explanation of his new translation in progress, taking hexagram 48 ("the Well") as example, was thoroughly scholarly and up-to-date with the latest discoveries of the oldest Yijing manuscripts. He replaced characters with other characters attested in manuscripts, changed the division into sentences, and restored old meanings to characters obscured in the 18th-century reading on which Richard Wilhelm based his classical translation. He opined that the title character jing, "well", may have been a mask for a similar-looking character meaning "law", motivated by a need (either for the original Zhou conpirators or for an Yijing commentator/rewriter in the subsequent Zhou period, 11th-3rd c. BC) to cloak criticism of the regime in innocent-looking language. Yet he had not lost faith in the Oracle.
How he solved the problem of the doubts about the intended text? He simply took the best approximation. If two of the three oldest manuscripts give a particular character where the standard version gives another, he prefers the text of the manuscripts and alters the reading accordingly. But on that text, though still seven centuries younger than the Duke of Zhou and beset with uncertainties due to the then non-uniformity of the Chinese writing system, he does base oracle consultations. After all, he argued, people using any of the present translations, though these diverge from each other and from the original quite widely, seem to be satisfied with the results. Someone volunteered the observation that the Bible too is used as an oracle by some of its believers. Yes, he replied, "even Pietje Puk [a Dutch series of children's books featuring a postman] could serve as an oracle".
That's practical, and also likely to be welcomed by most oracle users, who resent criticism and prefer to wallow in the bubble bath of feelgood spirit beliefs. But to such people, the search for the original Yijing would thereby lose its importance: if it's all only subjective, any text that falls into your hand (probably by a benevolent cosmic coincidence) will be good enough to serve as your private guidebook. Yeah, why not? If it's all only "spiritual", distinctions don't really matter.
So that's why I liked this Harmen's work. Though not believing his research necessary for the oracular use of the Yijing, which was its originally intended purpose, his desire for finding out as much of the truth as possible proved too strong to ignore. That gives him a place in an old tradition. During the entire premodern age, oracle consultation was not a pastime of "seeker" types but a highly official matter with political consequences, and many top-ranking Chinese thinkers devoted their best energies to discovering the logic and inner necessity of the Yijing text.
Today, it's a dangerous topic for Sinologists who want to be taken seriously. In the 19th century already, organizers of academic conferences decreed that the voguish topics of "the origin of language" and "the Book of Changes" be disallowed as unfruitful and attractive of sloppy thinking. So don't tell any of my friends in academe that I went to Ruigoord.
Read more!
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Star Trek revisited
One of the formative influences in my childhood was science fiction. Because of my later studies in history and religion, people think I am oriented towards the past, but deep down I am far more interested in the future. Last weekend, I enjoyed watching the latest Star Trek movie together with my teenage son, another early convert to futurism.
The late 1960s, when I was in primary school and already a voracious reader, our parish library stocked a good amount of the output of the science fiction boom. On our first TV set at home, we saw several SF serials, like Orion (German), the Thunderbirds, and of course Star Trek. Fiction mirrored reality, for man was landing on the moon, an event for which my mother woke me up to come and watch it live on TV. Pop singers chimed in too, such as David Bowie with his Space Oddity.
Looking back, I wonder how I could be a devout Catholic and an SF fan at the same time. Religion was totally absent from it. And whenever religion popped up, it was either some imaginary Pagan cult vaguely based on Pharaonic Egypt of Aztec Mexico, or East-Asian religion. Japan was a futuristic country in those days, expected to lead the world in the magic year 2000. In the SF landscape, Christianity and Islam were totally out of the picture.
One character supposed to be a little odd, but who looked totally convincing to me, was Mr. Spock, a native of the planet Vulcan. Then already I found it a little weak that so much was made of his lack of emotions, his solid reliance on "logic". The message was that emotions are what makes us human. Well, three cheers for Vulcanic logic. Emotionalism and lack of self-control have caused a lot of misery in this world. In the new movie, the younger Spock, son of a Vulcan father and a human mother, falls in love and loses his temper. The first is fine with me, the second had better stayed under the Vulcan carpet forever.
Another afterthought on the space age of the late 1960s concerns its political and ideological impact. One of the old certainties of human existence and indeed of life on this planet was the contrast between heaven and earth. Heaven was what you looked up to, earth what you stood on. Science started breaking down this neat contrast by showing that the same laws of motion applied on earth as they do in heaven, or that the same chemical elements found on earth also exist in the stars and planets. In 1969, a man completed this process by setting foot on a celestial body, the moon.
Now, doesn't the wave of anti-authoritarianism characteristic of those years make perfect sense against this background? If the utterly fundamental relation between heaven and earth can change, then why not that between teacher and pupil, between rulers and subjects, between parents and children, between man and woman? A lot of SF literature (I hardly recall specific titles, but this one I do: Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, a vision of utopia centred around a man from Mars adapting to life on earth) explored the sociological and ethical possibilities opened up by the breakthrough to space. In the present wave of conservative rejection of the "May 68" legacy, I would counsel a more positive appreciation for the sense of omnidimensional new possibilities.
The one phenomenon that makes ever less sense is the renewed popularity that the unimaginative ideology of Marx and Lenin then enjoyed, apparently boosted by its political and military successes in less advanced parts of the globe. It didn't fit the space age at all, as also indicated by its subsequent collapse. Its ruthless concept of power was atavistic, dinosauric. Though perhaps "bold", it was not at all the kind of entreprise "where no man has gone before".
Read more!
The late 1960s, when I was in primary school and already a voracious reader, our parish library stocked a good amount of the output of the science fiction boom. On our first TV set at home, we saw several SF serials, like Orion (German), the Thunderbirds, and of course Star Trek. Fiction mirrored reality, for man was landing on the moon, an event for which my mother woke me up to come and watch it live on TV. Pop singers chimed in too, such as David Bowie with his Space Oddity.
Looking back, I wonder how I could be a devout Catholic and an SF fan at the same time. Religion was totally absent from it. And whenever religion popped up, it was either some imaginary Pagan cult vaguely based on Pharaonic Egypt of Aztec Mexico, or East-Asian religion. Japan was a futuristic country in those days, expected to lead the world in the magic year 2000. In the SF landscape, Christianity and Islam were totally out of the picture.
One character supposed to be a little odd, but who looked totally convincing to me, was Mr. Spock, a native of the planet Vulcan. Then already I found it a little weak that so much was made of his lack of emotions, his solid reliance on "logic". The message was that emotions are what makes us human. Well, three cheers for Vulcanic logic. Emotionalism and lack of self-control have caused a lot of misery in this world. In the new movie, the younger Spock, son of a Vulcan father and a human mother, falls in love and loses his temper. The first is fine with me, the second had better stayed under the Vulcan carpet forever.
Another afterthought on the space age of the late 1960s concerns its political and ideological impact. One of the old certainties of human existence and indeed of life on this planet was the contrast between heaven and earth. Heaven was what you looked up to, earth what you stood on. Science started breaking down this neat contrast by showing that the same laws of motion applied on earth as they do in heaven, or that the same chemical elements found on earth also exist in the stars and planets. In 1969, a man completed this process by setting foot on a celestial body, the moon.
Now, doesn't the wave of anti-authoritarianism characteristic of those years make perfect sense against this background? If the utterly fundamental relation between heaven and earth can change, then why not that between teacher and pupil, between rulers and subjects, between parents and children, between man and woman? A lot of SF literature (I hardly recall specific titles, but this one I do: Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, a vision of utopia centred around a man from Mars adapting to life on earth) explored the sociological and ethical possibilities opened up by the breakthrough to space. In the present wave of conservative rejection of the "May 68" legacy, I would counsel a more positive appreciation for the sense of omnidimensional new possibilities.
The one phenomenon that makes ever less sense is the renewed popularity that the unimaginative ideology of Marx and Lenin then enjoyed, apparently boosted by its political and military successes in less advanced parts of the globe. It didn't fit the space age at all, as also indicated by its subsequent collapse. Its ruthless concept of power was atavistic, dinosauric. Though perhaps "bold", it was not at all the kind of entreprise "where no man has gone before".
Read more!
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