Re: Spiritual Covenant

At 01:56 PM 5/21/2006, Pim van Meurs wrote:

>....Janice's comments have led me to some
>excellent resources on spiritual and progressive
>thinking such as the Soujorners' Magazine.
>Thanks Janice. I hope you also better
>understand the concept of the term Marxism, both
>historically as well as it's pejorative use by some. Cheers

@@ You're welcome!! I'm not hopping back in,
but will toss another resource into your boat as
you circle past the shore again. If you haven't
heard of Herbert Marcuse, I'm sure you'll
recognize his teachings -- and may even know some
of the activists and scholars (scroll to bottom)
who have fallen for .. I mean... have embraced
his ideas and are doing everything they can to
see that they are imposed on the rest of us. Here ya go!

Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart
People Fall for Stupid Ideas by Daniel J. Flynn
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400053552/104-9113730-8451131?v=glance&n=283155

Reviews From Publishers Weekly

Flynn (Why the Left Hates America) takes aim at
those he calls "intellectual morons," smart
people who make themselves stupid by letting
"ideology do their thinking"; stock or fanatical
answers, bad logic and lies are all part of their
putative arsenal. To make his case, Flynn
lambastes a series of prominent leftist "gurus"
and the ideological movements they inspired: Herbert Marcuse..."

Marcuse argued in his book "Eros and
Civilization," that by freeing sex from any
restraints, we could elevate the pleasure
principle over the reality principle and create a
society with no work, only play (Marcuse coined
the phrase, "Make love, not war"). Marcuse also
argued for what he called "liberating tolerance,"
which he defined as tolerance for all ideas
coming from the Left and intolerance for any
ideas coming from the Right. In the 1960s,
Marcuse became the chief "guru" of the New Left,
and he injected the cultural Marxism of the
Frankfurt School into the baby boom generation,
to the point where it is now America's state
ideology. http://www.liberallunacy.net/dossiers/HerbertMarcuse.htm

JASA Book Reviews for June
1974 http://www.asa3.org/ASA/BookReviews1949-1989/6-74.html
QUEST FOR REALITY: CHRISTIANITY AND THE COUNTER
CULTURE by Carl F. H. Henry and Others,
Inter-Varsity Press (1973) Paper, 161 p., $2.95.

"....In a philosophical analysis of the counter
culture, Ronald Nash, Head of Philosophy and
Religion at Western Kentucky, selects two
prominent spokesmen, Marcuse and Reich, and
subjects them to severe criticism based on his thesis that:

If the proponent of the counter culture rules out
the possibility of valid inference, he should not
expect us to get excited when he argues for his
views or against the views of others. If the
proponent of the counter culture tells us that
truth is relative, be should not expect us to
accept his truths as absolute. If he tells us
that all beliefs are conditioned by economic and
social matters, he should recognize that this vitiates his beliefs as well.

Concerning Marcuse, "his thesis is self-defeating
in the sense that no one, including himself,
could have obtained knowledge of the thesis. And
even granting that Marcuse's books could be the
result of a miracle, no one else, according to
this theory, could have under stood him." Of
Reich, Nash says, "Surely there are good grounds
for concluding that The Greening of America is a
confused melange of nonsense."

The critiques given by Holmes and Mavrodes are
more sympathetic to Marcuse and Reich, although
they still find problems from a Christian perspective. ~

Bill Lind,
"<http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html>The
Origins of Political Correctness: An Accuracy in
Academia Address." http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html
Variations of this speech have been delivered to
various AIA conferences including the 2000
Conservative University at American University

And, of course, when we hear from the feminists
that the whole of society is just out to get
women and so on, that kind of criticism is a
derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.
Other key members who join up around this time
are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich
Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse
introduce an element which is central to
Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual
element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own
writings calls for a society of "polymorphous
perversity," that is his definition of the future
of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in
particular by the 1930s is writing some very
extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation,
but this runs through the whole Institute.
...
One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It
virtually became the bible of the SDS and the
student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and
Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a
capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very
strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical
Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is
Marxist), repression is the essence of that order
and that gives us the person Freud describes –
the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses,
because his sexual instincts are repressed. We
can envision a future, if we can only destroy
this existing oppressive order, in which we
liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we
have a world of "polymorphous perversity," in
which you can "do you own thing." And by the way,
in that world there will no longer be work, only
play. What a wonderful message for the radicals
of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re
baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having
to worry about anything except eventually having
to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way
they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them
to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them
everything they want to hear which is
essentially, "Do your own thing," "If it feels
good do it," and "You never have to go to work." ..." ~

[Some] Scholars and Activists who were influenced by Herbert Marcuse
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/scholaractivists.htm

excerpts:

Davis, Mike .. writer, historian, activist, resides in Los Angeles [snip]

"...What's being recycled as postmodernism is
Frankfurt School Marxism in its most pessimistic
mode, although admittedly jazzed up with some
very interesting thoughts about new technologies and media .."

Gonsalves, Brian. His website includes an
<http://gonsalves.org/leisure.htm>autobiographical
essay in which Brian writes the following:

"The last time that literature induced a major
shift in my world view was 1999; during a brief
respite from my depression I first tackled the philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

Associated with the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School,
Marcuse was extremely influential upon the
radical Left in the 1960’s. His philosophy is a
highly original synthesis of Hegel, Marx, and
Freud. A materialist aestheticism permeates his
thought (perhaps this is what attracted me to it)
and yet in his analysis of both society and the
individual there is much depth. Though he is
primarily concerned with the beautiful, the true
and the good are not neglected to the extent that
they are in Nietzsche. Marcuse changed my way of
thinking by directing my attention toward the social organism.

After years of blind individualism I had
forgotten that I too was part of society and that
many of my own problems were of a universal
nature. In Eros and Civilization Marcuse draws
attention to the fact that society demands of its
members a level of repression over and above what
is needed to defeat scarcity and provide for the
commonweal. Technology has made feasible a
drastic reduction of the amount of overall labor
engaged in by man, opening up the utopian
possibility of a society based around leisure and play.

Nevertheless, the culture of toil is perpetuated
by an obsolete work ethic and by the manufacture
of false needs through advertising. People must
continue to work full-time in order to buy
mass-advertised gadgets and luxury items. This
over-consumption is fostered so as to support the
over-production which keeps everyone working. The
absurdities of advanced capitalism are further
explored in Marcuse’s second great work,
One-Dimensional Man. The book’s central point is
that modern society’s totalitarian nature almost
excludes the possibility of there arising any genuine opposition to it.

The proletariat, stupefied by mass media, has
itself become a counter-revolutionary force. High
art, once a gateway to an alternative dimension,
has lost its transcendental quality through being
commercialized. Philosophy also has lost its
ability to oppose society as critical thought
forms (as in Hegel and Marx) have given way to a
shallow positivism. Writing in the late sixties,
Marcuse did see a viable oppositional force in
the student radicals. He quickly became their guru.

As I recognized that Eros and Civilization and
One-Dimensional Man were thoroughly applicable to the 1990’s I became angry.

Less and less did I feel guilty about not fitting
into this society. More did my alienation make me
determined to fight the establishment.

My chance came in December 1999 with the
convention of the World Trade Organization in
Seattle. I caught a bus to the city and joined
thousands of people protesting the order of
global corporate capitalism. In all honesty it
was exhilarating to take part in that small piece
of history. When I got home, however, my
enthusiasm waned. Neither Herbert Marcuse nor
memories of Seattle could keep me from slipping
back into my usual depression." ~

Hoffman, Abbie ...after graduating from Brandeis
University (where he studied with Herbert) in
1959, Hoffman received an MA from Berkeley. ... ~

Moyers, Bill. ...television journalist (retired
2004), practitioner of "deep-think" journalism.

print journalist, ordained Baptist minister,
press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, and
newspaper publisher before coming to television
in 1970. See
<http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/M/htmlM/moyesrbill/moyersbill.htm>museum.tv
biography.
In a
<http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/1987_winter/second.html>1987
essay in
<http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/1987_winter/second.html>New
Perspectives Quarterly, "Second Thoughts:
Reflections on the Great Society," Moyers wrote:

Compromise with the Powers That Be

In 1965, I sent to the President an essay by
Herbert Marcuse, the leftist philosopher so
admired by the student movement, in which Marcuse
applauded LBJ's objectives, but doubted the
government's ability to stay the course.
"Rebuilding the cities, restoring the
countryside, redeeming the poor and reforming
education," said Marcuse, "could produce
nondestructive full employment. This requires,"
he said, ''nothing more, nothing less than the
actual reconstruction outlined in the President's
program. But the very program," he said,
"requires the transformation of power structures
standing in the way of its fulfillment." ~

etc., etc., etc.

~ Janice

>Janice Matchett wrote:
>
>>At 09:52 PM 5/20/2006, Pim van Meurs wrote:
>>
>>On Sat 20 May 2006 17:09:18 -0400, Janice Matchett wrote:
>>
>>*/@ I consider Marxists to be extremists - how about you? .. /*
>>http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/661218/posts?page=10#10
>>
>>
>>*Pim: * /"That depends on how one defines Marxism. .."
>>
>>/*@@ * I know, I know.* "It all depends on what the meaning of "is", is".
>>
>>*I'm outta your boat.
>>
>>~ Janice
>>
>>
Received on Sun May 21 20:07:07 2006