BW 20111125-27+Thoughts+historical truth

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Don't read for True/False distinctions. Rather, read with an inquiring imagination for more information about what we are capable of doing to one another.
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I have never done a webpage on the United States' Thanksgiving Day and will not do one this year either. A sense of gratitude should be nurtured year-round, not just on a single day. As Meister Eckhart wrote centuries ago, "If the only prayer you ever say is thank you, it will suffice."

 

    • Catherine Cowart Brigden If people would read Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford, the natives attacked the settlers first. I believe that people have a right to defend themselves when attacked. We also have to remember that these settlers were, especially Bradford and Wm. Brewster, deeply in tune with their relationship with God. The settlers never denied that the Indians whom they befriended taught them how to farm the land and save their lives. The settlers gave thanks to God for the aid that the natives gave to them to help them survive.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig And people have always disseminated They Attacked Us First stories on both sides of any conflict. And "deeply in tune with their relationship with God" has never precluded genocides followed by thanks to God for the "victory". And the histories that fly the farthest are generated by the people who won, which is why I think of them as mytho-histories. There never has been a narrative that wasn't influenced by what the author wanted the reader to think. No matter what Bradford or Brewster wrote, the challenge is to receive statements as fictional proposals, so we don't get more interested in defense of the indefensible and shrouded past than we are in present truth and justice.
    • Catherine Cowart Brigden Then, according to you, there is no history and nothing can be learned by studying primary sources. The only true point of view that you can see is based on the conjecture that people rewriting history books, who do not site any sources at all, and their theories of what may or may not have been experienced by the "losing" side.

      This type of logic would discount any autobiography ever written, even yours, as being factual.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig Nope. But that is a classic misinterpretation of the mytho-psychological orientation and very understandable. There is history, in the sense of what happened, factually, and some reports hue closer to those facts than others. However, you and I have never heard or even told The Truth about anything, because there isn't only one Truth about anything and the act of telling itself is interpretive, involving subjective bias and selective creativity (also known as fiction). A complex/nuanced understanding of anything requires acknowledgment of the conjectural in the creation of language and thought itself. Siting sources is essential in order to account as best one can for authorial biases, whenever they are known. Autobiographies, including mine, are, like all thinking and writing, mythological, which is to say they present a context of overt and covert belief systems in which there is room for the factual and the figurative in an always co-creative (at least author and reader) soup of both.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig With that said, here is the mythistorical (facutal-fictional) starting place that seems most helpful to me for our ongoing consideration of being human beings and a nation: "Pilgrims", existing tribes, "Puritans", and other colonial powers committed atrocities upon each other. Several women and men with integrity on all sides were good to each other and tried to get everybody else to cut it out. To the more mechanically sophisticated and ruthless/psychologically entitled victors went the spoils and the heavy bias in deciding which myth of history got brought forward. Sympathy rests with those who got crushed and poxed into extinction in the exchange because, in retrospect, they had no chance against the prevailing genocidal mythology of empire/conquest and the reach of our "guns, germs, and steel". Whether or not the pitcher hits the stone first or not, its going to be very bad for the pitcher. Speaking from nothing more than human self-interest, the water of the wisdom that was effectively lost when the indigenous pitcher was brutally destroyed is incalculably valuable. Beyond that utilitarian concern, at the level of simple humanity, we earned shame that is our children's legacy of environmental horror by being so thoughtlessly devoted to self-interested fear-driven belief systems driven by violent domination rather than the messages of compassion that had been in global circulation for centuries.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig Extensive gratitude as ever to Kathleen Jenks.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig And to Catherine for caring enough to pursue this here.
    • Catherine Cowart Brigden One thing that I learned at the University of Dallas is that there is universal Truth. There are universal laws and values that we can judge everything by. When we succumb to individual truth that you endorse, we lose the light by which we guide our lives. It leads to moral relativism. Granted there has been some really crappy stuff done to people by opposing groups throughout time, but that does not mean that we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and call what we can judge to be factual and true simply because they were a part of the "white imperialists".

      The first slaves that were brought to America were not enslaved by the Dutch who sold them here, they were enslaved by other Africans. You condemn white men for bringing small pox, a virus that the people of that time period had no idea how to fight, to the New World. (It wasn't until the mid to late 1700s that a treatment and potential cure was found.) Native Americans fought a war against people whom they considered to be invaders. Passing judgement on an entire group of people based on their ignorance of how they were spreading disease and how to care for the environment is like condemning a two year old for spilling a glass of acid when he didn't know what was in the glass.

      That being said we have to use our judgement and use the true values and morals that we have been taught to determine what the true story is. Hind sight is always 20/20. We must understand that there is EVIL in the world. There is evil in every society, and each one of us must battle the evil within ourselves. Jesus teaches to judge by the fruit. Granted, the progressive history that is being forced down our throats by the mainstream media and in public schools focuses more on the evil of the white man rather than the good that he has done.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig One thing that I learned at the University of Dallas is that universal Truth is Universal, which is to say archetypal, which is to say essential to understanding and suggestive but not easily applicable to particulars, and that universal laws and values do not conveniently deploy to replace individual judgment despite attempts to use them in this way to support myriad, often contradictory, political agendas. Laying claim to the universal in the name of Truth is part and parcel of what I learned at UD to call hubris. Fortunately, hubris is an excellent place to begin discussing the extreme arrogance and loss of contact with reality that is the result of overestimating one's own competence or capabilities, for example in the judgment of Everything. This is especially true when the judgments are foisted on others from a position of power and privilege, which brings us back neatly to the discussion of empire and the cliched attribution of "moral relativism" to those who ask for interpretive moderation and epistemological humility. Colonizing universal truth in order to judge simplistically the complex weave of fact and fiction that is experience, historical or otherwise, is simply a bad idea continually overused.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig When we succumb to the binary fantasy of truth that you endorse (morality is either Universal or relative), we lose the nuanced light by which we feed our souls and build understanding into our lives. Binary literalism leads to really crappy stuff done to people by people invested in tribalism/oppositionalism throughout time. Babies don't get throw out of the hospital because their parents are poor, or thrown into mass graves created by political ideologues, or out with the bathwater because of relativism, but because of what someone in power has judged to be factual because they believe simply that they have a handle on universal truths.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig The first slaves were brought to America because of a system that included all who did the enslaving, selling, and benefiting from the labor of the peoples that survived the crossing. To point out that some were not enslaved by the Dutch who sold them here, but were originally enslaved by other Africans, is to take refuge in what you imagine to be fact, without really being able to know for certain, and to as much as defend an indefensible practice which is one of humanity's greatest shames.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig I hold us (“white” men and women) responsible for bringing small pox, a virus that the people of that time period had no idea how to fight, to the New World, because it was already established fact that colonizing indigenous cultures had often crippling effects on native populations, which the entitled, expanding militarists (western Europeans in the conversation we are having) chose to ignore because they knew the universal truth that “uncivilized” = subhuman. They knew the repeated cost to both the enslaved and the indigenous peoples and didn't care.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig Native Americans didn't "consider" Europeans to be invaders. It is profoundly ironic that you would play the interpretation card you find so objectionable to defend against one of the only certain, historically established facts upon which almost everybody agrees unconditionally. We were invaders in every sense of the term. Their response could only be considered "fighting a war" when they had been driven into both defensive and offensive alliances by extermination and rejection from the lands where they had lived for generations.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig Holding responsible a group of people who were not ignorant of how they were spreading disease and reshaping the environment involves condemning my own ancestors, not somebody else’s people, grown men and women who did what they did knowing that they would have flourished the label you use below (EVIL) if they had found themselves in the positions they were foisting upon the peoples they intended to replace. Even the politicians, "settlers", and military officers who could be compared with justice to a two year old spilling a glass of acid, were in truth adults and must bear some responsibility for up-ending the same glass over and over, and graduating from spilling to hurling the acid in the face and over the land of the peoples they could have called neighbors. The VAST majority knew what was in the glass.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig That being said, I'm glad you advance the need to use our judgment. The "true values and morals that we have been taught" however, unquestionably include some excellent ideas, like loving our "enemies" and defaulting to compassion in all things, side-by-side with the habit of attributing virtue to ourselves and an ability to determine what the True Story is, when there is never one story or one simple truth to derive. Hind sight is never 20/20, but is always natural solipsism divided by available humility. We must understand that there is EVIL in the world and, in so many cases It Is Us. There is evil in every society as a result of simplistic thinking and judgmental literalism, and each one of us must battle the evil within ourselves by refraining from laying claim to universal truth. Jesus teaches not to judge others, not to imagine you know the fruits of someone else’s choices until you've managed to pull the prickly pear from your own eye, and that only God may Judge. Imagining that a "progressive history" is "being forced down our throats by the mainstream media" that is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America continues to be a working strategy to distract from the almost complete lack of real news of both "conservative" and "liberal" society-building. There is little focus on the evil of the white man, and even less on the good that he has done, because it is much more important to induce him to continue buying the ideas and products that reduce our chances of being better human beings and citizens.
    • Catherine Cowart Brigden
      I wonder why people are so eager to condemn humanity when we live at the advantage of his invention and ingenuity. People live in California which is the pinnacle of Manifest Destiny and communicate with technology that wouldn't have been possible without the brilliant creativity of man.

      Looking back at the initial context of this conversation, the Plymouth Colony, the settlers came to the New World because they had no where else to go. They were being persecuted for what they believed, and their intention was to live here in peace.

      In aiming condemnation toward white Europeans, you overlook other conquering peoples who worked toward and sometimes succeeded in eliminating entire civilizations from the face of the earth: Islam and the Mongols.

      Jesus does teach us to judge. What he is saying is that we must be right with him in order to judge. He also teaches that we should not condemn. The only condemnation comes from God the Father on the Last Day.

      As a history and geography teacher, I have found that there is a great deal being taught in history books about the evil of the white man. The focus is placed on the evils of white imperialism. The fact that we live in a free nation where we have rights given to us by our Creator seems to be a footnote. Due to the failed policy of NCLB, children are not being taught to think and analyze anymore. They are being taught how to take standardized tests. We have an entire generation of children that do not know how to make any kind of judgement because they are taught that they should not judge at all.

      If corporate America is so bad, then we all need to unite and stop buying stuff. We need to get rid of our computers and cars. Go and find a farm somewhere and live off the land.

      The strategy that you spoke of is definitely in full force on our society, and it is being used as a method of control over us. This is what the progressives want. Progressives in both political parties want big business and big government to be in complete control over their ideal view of what society should be. This is why we must turn back to what Jesus taught, universal morality, and use our judgement to discern what is truly right and wrong. Society seems to be so focused on the grey.

      I think that we do agree on many things. However, truth and morality must be universal or no rule of law can prevail. Anarchy will result and lead to the total decay of society. Friedrich Nietzsche was right. God is dead. We, as a society, have killed Him because we no longer accept universal truth and morality. The will to power is all that is left.

      I am going to have to leave the conversation now because I have a small business to run. I hope you had a blessed and fun Thanksgiving and that all is well with your van. Hug that beautiful baby for me. Take care.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig This people didn't condemn humanity or California. I'm a huge fan of invention and ingenuity, communicating and technology. I’m just not a fan of attributing to us The Pinnacle of anything when ideas, like Manifest Destiny, that made it de rigueur to massacre other persons are held up as exemplars of achievement. Again, the problem is defending or attacking using broad, True-False generalities as though they were moral guidestars. The brilliant creativity of the hu-man is good when it is good, not when it is creatively productive of horrors.
       
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig Looking back at the initial context of this conversation, the Plymouth Colony "settlers" came to the New World for all the reasons human beings go anywhere, including persecution for what they believed, to get a fresh start far from regulation so they could do more of what they liked without official interference, to live here in peace, and to reshape their environment in the image of their particular and exclusive mythology. In aiming condemnation toward white Europeans, I take a small step toward being honest about the privilege that put me closer at birth to the top of a carefully constructed social ladder. I didn't overlook other conquering peoples who worked toward and sometimes succeeded in eliminating entire civilizations from the face of the earth, because we weren't discussing them. It is clear that cultural benisons and calamities went hand in hand in the history of Islamic nations, the Mongols, and many other groups against which it is currently the fashion to shake our collective fist in order to feel less guilt about the parts of our power gains that are inherited (undeserved) and continually ill-gotten. Good Grief. Neither did I mention, or overlook , teenage immigrant welfare mothers on drugs who are taking all our jobs.
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig Not only did Jesus not teach us to judge others, he strictly forbade same. Scripture also never suggests he had his eye on our being "right with him", and CERTAINLY not "in order to judge." The last thing he had any interest in was preparing people to judge each other. As a scholar of religions, I have found that there is a great deal being foisted on sheeplike congregations by painting fangs and claws on a straw man "evil white imperialist" as code to manipulate people using the fear arising from their unacknowledged racism. We live in a nation that is freer for some than others as rights, whether given to us by our Creator or each other's good citizenship, or both, seem to be becoming a footnote due to a raft of failed policies including NCLB. I agree that children are not being taught to think and analyze in favor of preparing them for standardized tests and other binary judgment mechanisms. The problem of the last generation or so is, indeed, that they do not know how to discriminate between sound choices and falling victim to specious political manipulations, but this is because they are taught that there is a True or False approach to everything, thereby learning to distrust rather than refine their own experience, which continually demonstrates that life is more nuanced than the lockstep application of what an authority insisted corresponded with Universal Truths which coincidentally reinforce his world view.
       
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig Again, the problem is not that Corporate America is Bad, only that its Goodness, and that of its god, The Market, is an article of faith. Deprived of our implicit faith and trust, and treated like convenient fictions constructed in order to do business, rather than as more valuable than people, corporations would be reduced once more to a legal device having potential benefits and costs, a considerable demotion from their current position wherein they can become Too Big to Fail, i.e. God. Uniting and stopping the endless buying of stuff is an excellent idea. Getting rid of our computers and cars also might be a broadening experiment. Farming everywhere might also be a good curative and a wise idea given the coming social system failure. But all the excellent suggestions you make also have their own problems if one hasn't learned to think subtly and assume every automated system will have dehumanizing consequences for which humans must account.
       
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig I'm glad we can agree that methods of control over us are being constantly deployed and refined, but "progressive" has become almost meaningless in our larger context and in this exchange. There are definitely people in both political parties who want Big to be in complete control (business/government indivisible) via an ideal view of what society should be. It might make sense to call them Progressives, in that Progress in its mechanized non-human sense seems to be the mythology in the context of which most of our current dilemmas seem unstoppable. I’ll need to give that further thought.
       
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig If you mean the Jesus of the Bible, you will find that he did not at any point teach universal morality. That is, at very least, an overlay of Greek ideas. Instead he proposed that using our judgment to discern what is truly right and wrong involved litmus tests, like Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself. Society seems to me to be focused on the grey of mechanical dehumanization, instead of the variety of colors, including grey, which await our apprehension when looking for ways to love our lives and our fellow persons despite our own prejudice and ignorance, by being fascinated by the dazzling variety and moved by the potential depth of human experience.
       
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig I too think that we agree on many things, however, the idea that truth and morality must be universal or no rule of law can prevail is documented as laughable by anyone actually involved in deploying the rule of law. “Anarchy” suggests a distrust of authoritarianism, and the idea that Community happens due to the cooperative co-creativity of individuals in groups, rather than due to governments, which tend toward the coercive by their very nature. I would argue that governments retain their right to exist to the degree that they encourage cooperative co-creativity of individuals in groups, which pulls the horns and fangs off The Anarchist against whom, again, oligarchs fearful of losing their power love to shake their tiny fists and decry "the total decay of society." Friedrich Nietzsche was never so unsubtle as to be Right. "God is dead" is a brilliant trope irreducible to something so obvious as a fact. We, as a society, have killed/split/resurrected Him in a thousand faces and splinter ideologies from "we no longer accept universal truth and morality" to insisting that everyone must. The will to power is certainly appearing in authoritarian paternalism, with its gloves off of late, but to suggest that Power is "all that is left" is to succumb to the very relativism against which you rail.
       
    • Brandon WilliamsCraig I understand you must be about other business, but I thank you kindly for the opportunity to do what I love--write about ideas. May your small business flourish! I too hope you had an excellent Thanksgiving and that all is well with your people.