The Breaking Time

First they came for the libraries

By Damien Williams

Photo by Gregory Maxwell

News came yesterday that radical Islamists have burned the ancient library of Timbuktu.

When I was twelve years old, one of the most important resources for my family was our local library: RL Christian Public Library, on H Street in Washington, DC. Though the area has changed, quite a bit, as any DC Metro-area resident can tell you, it's certainly not the best part of town. Nineteen years ago it was even rougher around the edges.

As funding for city libraries was cut, the operating hours of R.L. Christian were some of the first things on the chopping block. My sisters and I, along with other children from our neighbourhood, wrote essays and went before the DC City Council and explained to them —clearly but forcefully — what this library represented to the neighbourhood.

RL Christian Public Library had free after-school programs for children whose parents worked late. Study resources for those who would need them. A place to be off the street, later in the evening, in a part of town then still coping with regular gang violence. We, the children most affected by this, not our parents, made this case. And they shortened the hours anyway. Eventually RL Christian Public Library closed its doors.

People who know about but don’t fully understand history may ask, "Why do conquerors and fanatics always go for the Libraries?" Our most famous example has always been the Library of Alexandria, but it is by no means the sole instance. And if you take a look at that list, you can see something of a distinction: sometimes invaders burn libraries and loot them, and sometimes they just burn them. Why is that?

It's because a library, more than any other thing humans have ever made, is the physical promise of a wider, more inclusive world.

Scientology hits schism time

Disorder in the House of Hubbard.

Fascinating piece from Alex Klein on the looming schism in Scientology, specifically over a real-estate scam involving the construction of its "Ideal Org" local headquarters:

But inside the church, the Ideal Orgs are sparking insurrection. Across the country, donors and high-ranking executives say that the aggressive fundraising and construction scheme is used to enrich the central church at the expense of the rank and file, helping to grow the Scientology war chest to over a billion dollars. Two former members, Mike Rinder and Mark Elliott, went so far as to call the project a "real estate scam." To some of these defectors, the structures are metaphors for the religion itself: garish on the outside, empty on the inside. The irony is that the very expansion that Scientology lauds as its renaissance is actually a symbol of internal dissent and decline.

One of the most interesting parts of the article is the dissidents' repeated references to L. Ron Hubbard's intent or original teachings. While some who've split from Scientology have ditched the whole thing, others have set up their own splinter groups.

That's a natural reaction. If people are attracted to a set of ideals and then the institution that supposedly represents them becomes corrupt or goes in a different direction, it's psychologically easier to find that the original goals were betrayed by the current leadership rather than abandon the whole structure.

The process of schism has happened in every creed from Christianity to Marxism, but this is a fascinating up-close glimpse at how it plays out. Hubbard's still within living memory, and people are already sharply disagreeing over what his intent really was. It's easy to see "Scientologists" in a century encompassing all swaths of ideologies.

This also highlights that arguing over whether a given creed, especially a large and old one, is good or evil somewhat misses the point. On a long enough timeline, multiplying sects will use the same founding mythology to justify every position.

Someday this will all be yours

by Damien Williams, a follow-up to Life in the so-called space age

The Last Judgment, Heironymous Bosch

Come close and I'll tell you a secret.

The Breaking Time is really just the continual state of the post-Lapsarian condition. Everything we are and everything we do is a result of the Fall of Man, and that Fall makes itself evident in everything we ourselves create. All decay, all rot, all moral failures and lawlessness, all attempts by mad to trespass into God's domain with works like artificial intelligence, artificial life, and genetic manipulation are just the side-effects of humanity's experience and expression of evil; today is God's Judgment.

This is what I would tell you if I were a fundamentalist Christian-- that we are all sinful in some basic fashion (because of some basic action), and that nature has infected everything we do. But I'm not a fundamentalist Christian, so let's try something else.

The Breaking Time is just the precursor to the coming of the Messiah, and the fulfilling of YHVH's ultimate covenant with Man. We must strive through, as best we can but also spur on progress toward the time when this Messiah will make itself known. As such, we tolerate lawlessness, immorality, and decay, as we know that it will bring us closer to the time of Messianic Fruition.

 No? Okay, how about this:

That which we call "evil" is really just the effect of the workings of evolutionary biological processes, selfishness, procreative need, tribalism, and the insular nature of the preferred size of human social groups. The only thing that exists which can rightly be called "evil" are those forces of ignorance which lead us away from inquiry and scientific understanding, and those forces must, indeed, be stamped out and shown as false, broken, harmful, and dangerous, at all costs. Only then will the true nature of the universe be able to be known, free of antiquated moralising and repression.

What about this: The return of Maitreya has meant that there will be a world-wide awakening of consciousness, and His work must be helped along by those willing to make the world over in fire, and who are willing to do whatever it takes to survive these end times.

If you don't see your particular flavor of armageddon above I could go on, if you'd like.

Coptic saints and old bargains

An Egyptian Coptic monk before a 2009 Easter Mass. Photo via Getty Images.

There's a bleak, interesting piece over at NSFWCorp (to which you should subscribe) by Gary Brecher on how a Coptic emigre came to cooperate with Protestant fundamentalists in turning a YouTube video into a weapon. It's a glimpse to the absolutely fucked-up mentality that a history of pogroms and capricious authority inflict.

But there's a part I have issues with (I also disagree that the region's swinging towards jihad, but that's another post), when Brecker talks about the Arab Conquest of Egypt, way back in the grand 'ol seventh century:

Egyptian Christians have been trying the other way, the turn-the-other-cheek way, from the beginning. When the Arab horsemen took on the few Greek garrisons in Egypt in the 7th Century, the Egyptian Christian civilians reacted the way peasants everywhere react to kings hacking at each other: They stayed out of it and figured it didn’t make much difference whether it was a Greek or Arab profile on the coins, since they weren’t likely to have any either way.

What the fellahin (peasants) found out too late is that this was one of those invasions that really does make a difference. That’s one of the hardest judgment calls anyone has to make: a peasant deciding whether to fight or let the guys who can afford swords use them on each other. Most times, the right answer is “stay the Hell out of it,” but there are times it’s worth helping your local vampire lord, because something worse is coming over the horizon. For Egyptian Copts, there were about 1370 years of bad times—and counting—in the dust cloud behind that Arab cavalry.

This is not exactly how things played out. The Copts actually had really good reasons for not helping out the Byzantine Empire and equally sensible reasons for not just turning the cheek but actively cooperating with the Arabian invaders. It actually worked: the Copts got a much better deal from the Caliphate than from the Byzantines.

For awhile, anyway. It's an interesting story, and a reminder of how much of the world is littered with the consequences of old bargains.

All Times Break

I was extremely happy when Damien Williams agreed to become a contributor here and submitted this piece for our relaunch. In his own wonderful style, it pulls together classic lore, poetry, mysticism, and pop culture for a fascinating meditation on this blog's core theme.

They tell you never to start a story with a quote, so I won't. I'll start with two. Here we go:

“It is said that what is called 'the spirit of an age' is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.” - Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, 1716

“. . .The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand. . .” — "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats, 1920

And then there is, of course, the ever-popular I-Ching Hexagram 23 (~1,000 BCE), aptly titled Breaking Apart:

This pictures a time when inferior people are pushing forward and are about to crowd out the few remaining strong and superior men. Under these circumstances, which are due to the time, it is not favorable for the superior man to undertake anything.

The right behavior in such adverse times is to be deduced from the images and their attributes. The lower trigrams stands for the earth, whose attributes are docility and devotion. The upper trigram stands for the mountain, whose attribute is stillness. This suggests that one should submit to the bad time and remain quiet. For it is a question not of man’s doing but of time conditions, which, according to the laws of heaven, show an alternation of increase and decrease, fullness and emptiness. It is impossible to counteract these conditions of the time. Hence it is not cowardice but wisdom to submit and avoid action.

 We have always lived in the breaking times. We have always felt that every period of major upheaval is the end of the world, the final days, the utter Apocalypse, come at last. And we're right. Every major shift of perspective ends the world in which we lived, and brings to bear a completely new perspective. In fact, most often that perspective is necessarily new, because the only ones who survive the shift (or collapse, as some would have it) are those who can adapt to the radically altered contexts in which they find themselves.

As ever, we must adapt, or we will perish, and this isn't news.

Textbook coups

If you haven't already, Mariah Blake's Washington Monthly story on the attempts of the Texas State Board of Education's ultra-right faction to rewrite the nation's textbooks is a must-read.

This would seem to be a state or local matter. It's not:

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters. Then McLeroy cracked the book open. The margins were littered with stars, exclamation points, and hundreds of yellow Post-its that were brimming with notes scrawled in a microscopic hand. With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

Views like these are relatively common in East Texas, a region that prides itself on being the buckle of the Bible Belt. But McLeroy is no ordinary citizen. The jovial creationist sits on the Texas State Board of Education, where he is one of the leaders of an activist bloc that holds enormous sway over the body’s decisions. As the state goes through the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting the standards for its textbooks, the faction is using its clout to infuse them with ultraconservative ideals. Among other things, they aim to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, bring global-warming denial into science class, and downplay the contributions of the civil rights movement.

Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

It gets worse. Much worse. At the very end, McLeroy, though he's encountered some setbacks, is bragging that "sometimes it boggles my mind the kind of power we have."

This is, of course, an outrage. While I'm not particularly fond of the textbook style of learning, when trying to insure some basic level of free education for huge numbers of people, they're probably a necessity. If written well, they can provide a useful summary so students can pursue their own researches into more specific works, experiments and primary sources (sadly that's rarely how education works, but that's a rant for another day).

One interesting thing this illustrates is a fact of power that the far-right has grasped, but that their opponents generally have not. We wrongly associate power with high offices, big wins. Witness, for example, how third parties have disproportionately concentrated on quixotic runs for the Presidency instead of more useful organizing (imagine how their fortunes might have changed if the US' Green Party had, beginning in the '80s, concentrated first on securing the Northwest and Northeast at the local and state levels).

While the high posts are important, we live in a society vast and complex enough that there are all sorts of hidden pressure points such as, for example, the Texas State Board of Education. While Texas is generally a conservative state, the article makes it clear that the ultra-right faction has plenty of opposition, including from other conservatives, but got entrenched because they followed one of the oldest rules of conflict: attack where your opponent isn't.

So if you support science, sanity and the critical thinking necessary to a free society, the productive reaction isn't "It's an outrage that right-wing extremists control the country's textbooks!" but "why don't we?"

The fierce urgency of now

A Time to Break Silence is a speech that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave exactly one year before his death. It's long, focuses in part on details of the Vietnam War and less well-known than some of his other oratorical masterpieces. I posted this (albeit with less complete video) last year too, and will probably post it again in 2011 too.

So why this speech in particular, and not I have a Dream?

For one, it represents a side of him not seen in much of the popular narrative. King connected his fight against racism to a much larger struggle for justice. Too often, in popular representation King is a figure who played a decisive role in winning a conflict long gone and can now safely recede into the national pantheon to look down in wisdom upon America. 

That needs to be shaken up, the struggle is not over, and King stood for a lot more than just the specific civil rights battles of the day. His words about "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism" make a much larger — and for many, still uncomfortable — point.

Then there's this:

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

 

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

That's why.

The blood stays on the blade: Gangs of New York as political primer

"Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function."

-George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism

When the End of the Decade best movie lists were compiled recently, one of my personal favorites was mostly absent. Gangs of New York, Martin Scorcese's 2002 epic of operatic bloodshed and political corruption, got little love (with some notable exceptions) from the critics in their final wrap-ups, and failed to realize its grand ambitions at the box office when it was released.

It was further harmed by a lame DVD release that inexplicably split the film over two discs. That's a shame because, as well as being a damn good movie, this remains one of the most visceral tales of power and politics I've ever seen on the big screen.

The stunningly brutal opening scene has come to my mind more than once in the past few months, whenever people complain about the venality of politics or yearn for a more civilized time. Take note: these were the days of our forefathersThat's politics or, rather, a handy metaphor for what lies at its heart. Whatever myths we paste over it, this is how a social species decides power. It's not pretty.

Transfer the over-the-top bloodletting and grudges above to legislative chambers, hide them in prettier words and you have politics. Even non-violent movements often succeed because they turn out such numbers, and create such disruption, that it's made clear their enemies are about to lose the monopoly on force.

That is one thing Gangs of New York never shies away from. As Liam Neeson, in his brief I'm-a-badass-father-figure-who-gets-movingly-killed turn, says: "the blood stays on the blade." That makes it an unusual movie, especially as it deals with the Civil War era, a time Americans of all stripes love to get self-righteous over. 

But instead of the usual weighty tomes, Scorcese based his work on Herbert Asbury's classic lurid history of New York's rabble. Here, you don't see Lincoln delivering a solemn speech or swelling music accompanying noble sounding generals into the fray. 

Instead, you see rampant poverty, corruption, a clueless upper class and bloodshed. Rather than "a new nation, conceived in Liberty," you see tribes tied to ancient loyalties (and the accompanying prejudice) that seem to transcend any humanity. You see the Draft Riots. Keep telling yourself: this is happening under one of America's greatest Presidents. That'll sober you up.

And at all levels, fear and force rule. The gangs use their blades to carve out territory, the political machines just above them use clubs to drag out voters and finally, the government itself uses guns to turn the streets of New York red when the underclass (who've just committed their own horrors) rises up.

Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis in the role of a lifetime) lays it out perfectly.

That's what preserves the order of things — fear

Until the moment it doesn't ("the Earth moves, but we don't feel it"). I would never in a million years call this an optimistic movie, but for all the nasty struggles it depicts, Scorcese is aware that there are other forces at work too. 

The miracle of politics is that out of the gulf of struggle, better things can and do emerge, and not always at knifepoint. In Bill the Butcher's rampant hatred of the Irish can be heard a strain of anti-immigrant spite that survives to the present day. But watching, we know that the dirt-poor newcomers will become the business leaders and political powerhouses of the next generation. The point isn't that we tear each other apart; it's that we keep on building anyway.

What makes this movie a primer, and not just a badass film I happen to like, is that it remains one of the most honest cinematic looks at politics I've seen. Exaggerated, as all archetypes are, it thrust into one's face what those who prefer to think about government in the abstract often ignore. At the same time, it's not simply a howl of despair. We can create, we can improve.

But first we have to acknowledge reality. Politics is not a rational debate: it is a brawl and always will be. The blood stays on the blade.

We have to deal with that; not turn up our noses in despair the first time the fight gets difficult. We have to understand the foundation if we're to have a chance of transforming it into something better. Gangs of New York remains a masterful reminder of how much we've changed, and how little.

Fuck your apocalypse

You know all that "2012 is The End cause the Mayan calendar says so" rigamarole? Well the Mayans ain't having it:

Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.

 

Or is it?

 

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."

 

It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood's "2012" opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.

 

At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the "Curious? Ask an Astronomer" Web site, says people are scared.

 

"It's too bad that we're getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they're too young to die," Martin said. "We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn't live to see them grow up."

 

Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan ideas.

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And anyway, Mayas in the drought-stricken Yucatan peninsula have bigger worries than 2012.

 

"If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn't have any idea," said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. "That the world is going to end? They wouldn't believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain."

 

This bullshit that doesn't get called out nearly enough. I remember a few years back when psychonaut Daniel Pinchbeck blew through town, touting 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. All of a sudden people who turned up their noses at a Christian apocalypse were all aflutter. There was obviously truth to 2012*, because, well, drugs. Drugs and Mayans. The ancient Mayans, after all, knew shit. Because they weren't from The West, you know.

 

Well yes, the Mayans, like every other civilization, knew many things and believed many more. But they didn't (and don't) believe 2012 is the apocalypse. Other people just believed they believed that. Got it?

The first time I heard the 2012 pitch, I was stunned by the resemblance to the prophecies of Rapture I heard growing up. A marginalized (or so they believe) social group swears that at some point (soon!) mystical forces will remake the world, rendering them powerful and clean. Their enemies (the unsaved/those with insufficiently advanced consciousness) will then get their just desserts. The 2012 prophecy is a way for newer mystical movements to embrace the appeal of apocalypse without the Christian baggage.

And apocalypse is really, really appealing, because after all the destruction, everything is fixed. Not just fixed, but fixed in your favor. You (and your friends) are no longer simply people: the very universe itself is on your side.

Tomorrow is Other (or None)

 

Just in time for Easter, this massive poll from Gallup reveals that the U.S.'s religious "consensus" continues to fractur

 

The relative shrinkage of the Christian percentage of the U.S. population in recent years means that other groups by definition have expanded. The Gallup trend data show that the most significant expansion has come among the group that does not identify with any religion, followed by a more modest expansion of those who identify with another, non-Christian, religion.

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In 1948, 2% of Americans interviewed by Gallup volunteered that they had "no religion." The number stayed in that range until about 1970. By 1972, Gallup had measured 5% with "no religion." Gallup trends show the percentage gradually increasing since that time, with a very modest decline from an average of 8% in the early 1990s to 6% from 1993-1995, and then some fluctuation in the late 1990s, with the percentage settling in the 9% to 12% range since 2002. (Additionally, in 2008, an average of 3% of Americans did not answer the question on religious identity. Whether these people truly do not have a religious identity, or were confused or had several religious identities, is unknown.)

 

The group of Americans who are classified as "Other" includes the less than 1% who are estimated to be Muslim, and small percentages who are Buddhist, Hindu, or other non-Christian religions. The percentage of Americans classified in this Other category was near 0% in 1948, but was at 3% in 1949 and was generally in the 2% to 3% range through the 1950s and 1960s. It has risen in recent decades to as high as 8% in 1997, and is 7% today.

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There are many theoretical explanations for the increase in those with no religious identity at the expense of those identifying with a Christian religion. Two social scientists at the National Opinion Research Corporation, Tom W. Smith and Seokho Kim, contemplating similar data from the General Social Survey in 2004, concluded: "In sum, an array of social forces from cohort turnover, to immigration, to reduced retention rates, indicate that the Protestant share of the population will continue to shrink and they will soon lose their majority position in American society."

 

One of the reasons I've dubbed this blog and this era The Breaking Time is because the old consensus', the old ideas that "everybody does A and B" are fracturing. We increasingly live in a world that has a dizzying array of ideals, possibilities and lifestyles. On that note, I doubt that Christianity is going to disappear, or that a form of Atheism (slippery a definition as that is) will predominate.

 

The idea of a national agreement on matters spiritual, let alone the numbers to back it up, is rapidly dying.

 

Imagine a world (or country) in which no creed has more than 15 percent of the population. What would happen then?