Bulletin #717
Subject: ‘THE
BIG LIE,’ and the stench
that follows it . . . .
7
October 2016
Grenoble, France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
While re-reading Antonio Damasio’s 2003 book, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain, I came across the mention of a 1966 novel by Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), which Damasio recommended as an excellent illustration of the 17th-century philosopher’s ideas. This novel, The Fixer, was made into a movie by Dalton Trumbo in 1968 (two years before his death), and I was delighted recently to find available on the Internet this story of the 'natural law' of one man's challenge to the tyrannical hegemony of the state, inspired by the writings of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677).
The Fixer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2pXL4S3LII
For anyone wishing to understand
Spinoza and seeking to experience the effect of his liberating philosophy in
our present Age of Political Deceit,
which threatens to suffocate all of us, this film by one of the great ‘Hollywood Ten’
screenwriters comes highly recommended. Standing on the shoulders of giants, like Spinoza, Damasio brings a neurological expertise to this
examination of the philosopher’s life and thoughts. “One of the values of
philosophy,” observes this world-famous neurologist, “is that throughout its
history it has prefigured science. In turn, I believe, science is well served
by recognizing that historical effort.”(p.15) Damasio
goes on to justify his scientific undertaking of looking for Spinoza :
The main purpose of this book, then,
is to present a progress report on the nature and human significance of
feelings and related phenomena, as I see them now, as neurologist;
neuroscientist, and regular user.
The gist of my current view is that feelings are the expression of human
flourishing or human distress, as they occur in mind and body. Feelings are not
a mere decoration added on to the emotions, something one might keep or
discard. Feelings can be and often are revelations of the state of life
within the entire organism –a lifting of the veil in the literal sense of the
term. Life being a high-wire act, most feelings are expressions of the struggle
for balance, ideas of the exquisite adjustments and corrections without which,
one mistake too many, the whole act collapses. If anything in our existence can
be revelatory of our simultaneous smallness and greatness, feelings are.
How that revelation comes to mind is itself beginning to be revealed.
The brain uses a number of dedicated regions working in concert to portray
myriad aspects of the body’s activities in the form of neural maps. This portrait
is a composite, an ever-changing picture of life on the fly. The chemical and
neural channels that bring into the brain the signals with which this life
portrait can be painted are just as dedicated as the canvas that receives them.
The mystery of how we feel is a little less mysterious now.
It is reasonable to wonder if the attempt to understand feelings is of
any value beyond the satisfaction of one’s curiosity. For a number of reasons,
I believe it is. Elucidating the neurobiology of feelings and their antecedent
emotions contributes to our views on the mind-body problem, a problem central
to the understanding of who we are. Emotion and related reactions are aligned
with the body, feelings with the mind. The investigation of how thoughts trigger
emotions and of how bodily emotions become the kind of thoughts we call
feelings provides a privileged view into mind and body, the overtly disparate
manifestation of a single and seamlessly interwoven human organism.
The effort has more practical payoffs, however. Explaining the biology
of feelings and their closely related emotions is likely to contribute to the
effective treatment of some major causes of human suffering, among them
depression , pain, and drug addiction. Moreover, understanding what feelings
are, how they work, and what they mean is indispensable for the future
construction of a view of human beings more accurate than the one currently
available, a view that would take into account advances in the social sciences,
cognitive science and biology. Why is such a construction of any practical use?
Because the success or failure of humanity depends in large measure on how the
public and the institutions charged with the governance of public life
incorporate that revised view of human beings in principles and policies. An
understanding of the neurobiology of emotions and feelings is a key to the
formulating of principles and policies capable of reducing human distress and
enhancing human flourishing. In effect, the new knowledge even speaks to the
manner in which humans deal with unresolved tensions between sacred and secular
interpretations of their own existence.
. . .
Spinoza saw drives, motivations,
emotions, and feelings –an ensemble Spinoza called affects—as a central aspect
of humanity. Joy and sorrow were two prominent concepts in his attempts to
comprehend human beings and suggest ways in which their lives could be lived
better.(pp.7-8)
Spinoza was a contemporary of René
Descartes (1596-1650), who was 37 years older and had discreetly migrated to
Holland in 1629 to avoid hostilities from the French Church. In 1633, the year
Spinoza was born, Descartes moved to Amsterdam. It was also the year that the
Vatican condemned Galileo Galilei’s writings on the heliocentric system of the
planets (on June 22, 1633). The significance of this latter event was not lost
on Descartes; he withdrew immediately from publication his Treatise of Man (which was published posthumously thirty years
later, in 1662) and he promptly reoriented his work, le Discours de la méthode (in 1637) et the essays which followed, in particular Méditations métaphysiques (1641) and his Principes
de la philosophie (1644), all of which
attempted to accommodate the hegemony of Church dogma.
By 1642, in contradiction with his earlier
thinking, Descartes was postulating an immortal soul separate from the
perishable body, perhaps as a preemptive measure to forestall further attacks.
If that was the intent, the strategy eventually worked, but not quite in his
lifetime. Later he made his way to Sweden to mentor the spectacularly
irreverent Queen Chrisina. He died midway through his
first winter in Stockholm, at the age of fifty-four.”(p.22).
His preemptive measure which failed in his life
time took a life of its own as an ontological error of monumental proportions
and has been used in support of ruling class dogmas in the centuries that
followed his death.
Spinoza, by contrast, remained true to his
discoveries. He too was persecuted by organized religion, and he had seen his
‘protector’, Jan De Witt a leading liberal political figure in the Netherlands,
murdered in a gruesome fashion on August 20, 1672. Spinoza felt his life to be
in immediate danger.
For most of Spinoza’s life Holland was a
republic, and during Spinoza’s mature years the Grand Pensionary
Jan De Witt dominated political life. De Witt was ambitious and autocratic but
also was enlightened. It is not clear how well he knew Spinoza, but he
certainly knew of Spinoza and probably helped contain the ire of the more
conservative Calvinist politicians when Tractatus
(1670) began to cause scandal. De Witt owned a copy of the book since 1670. He
is rumored to have sought the philosopher’s opinion on political and religious
matters, and Spinoza is rumored to have been pleased by the esteem De Witt
showed him. Even if the rumors are untrue, there is little question De Wit was
interested in Spinoza’s political thinking and at least sympathetic to his
religious views. Spinoza felt justifiably protected by De Witt’s presence.
Spinoza’s sense of relative safety came to an abrupt close in 1672
during one of the darkest hours of Holland’s golden age. In a sudden turn of
events, of the sort that define this politically volatile era, De Witt and his
brother were assassinated by a mob, on the false suspicion that they were
traitor’s to the Dutch cause in the ongoing war with France. Assailants clubbed
and knifed both de Witts as they dragged them on the
way to the gallows, and by the time they arrived there was no need to hang them
anymore. They proceeded to undress the corpses, suspend them upside down,
butcher-shop style, and quarter them. The fragments were sold as souvenirs,
eaten raw, or eaten cooked, amid the most sickening merriment. All this took
place . . . literally around the corner from Spinoza4s home, and it was
probably Spinoza’s darkest hour as well.
. . . Spinoza was undone. The
savagery revealed human nature at its shameful worst and jolted him out of the
equanimity he had worked so hard to maintain. He prepared a placard that read
ULTIM BARBORORUM (ultimate barbarians) and wanted to post it near the remains.
Fortunately Van der Spijk
(his landlord) . . . prevailed. He simply locked the door and kept the key, and
Spinoza was thus prevented from leaving the house and facing a certain death.
Spinoza cried publicly –the only time, it is said, that others saw him in the
throes of uncontrolled emotion. The intellectual safe harbor, such as it was,
had come to an end.
. . .
Only twenty-seven
years separated the death of these two part-time contemporaries. . . . Both
spent most of their lives in the Dutch paradise, Spinoza by birthright, the
other by choice –Descartes had decided early in his career that his ideas were
likely to clash with the Catholic Church and monarchy in his native France and
left quietly for Holland. Yet both had to hide and pretend, and in the case of
Descartes, perhaps distort his own thinking.(p.21)
Damasio
comments on another similarity between the two thinkers;
Descartes prepared the inscription for his own tombstone :
He who hid well, lived well.
Descartes's body was first buried in an orphans'
grave outside of Stockholm, as a Catholic in a Protestant nation. In 1663, his
works were placed on the Index of
Prohibited Books by Pope Alexander VII. In 1666, after devout French
Catholics came to his defense, his remains were transferred to
Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, in France; then in 1671, Louis XIV prohibited the
reading of Descartes in France. In 1792, the National Convention planned to
transfer his remains to the Panthéon, but instead he
was reburied in 1819 at the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the 6th arrondisement
of Paris, his skull and a finger missing.
Spinoza’s grave is located in the backyard of the New Church in The Hague. There is no cemetery; his grave is a flat stone lying in the yard, with a vertical tombstone, announcing whose grave it is, with the inscription of one word: CAUTE ! This is the word Spinoza habitually used at the end of his correspondence, written beneath the drawing of a rose. For the last decade of his life, his writings were indeed sub-rosa, and his parting advice was always the same: “BE CAREFUL !” Spinoza’s body in inexplicably missing from this grave . . . .
If René Decartes' efforts to conceal his original ideas to accomodate the hegemony of the Chruch fooled no one in his life time, this subterfuge had a devistating effect on future generations. Baruch Spinoza, by contrast, insisted that powerful emotions could create feelings that would protect the the mind from self-destruction and could embolden it to demand justice, conforming to 'natural law,' even in opposition to 'statutory laws.'
The 23 items below offer CEIMSA readers a view of the problematic times which we have inherited, when power concedes to nothing but power (to paraphrase the escaped slave and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass). We would do well to remember the price paid for unfinished revolutions. The stakes today are high and the dangers should not be minimized. The writings of Spinoza and Descartes serve as testimony to the theory and practice of the human mind and the laws which govern it, over the laws which govern capitalist hegemony.
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor emeritus of American Studies
University Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and
Social Movements
The University of California-San Diego
a.
Cold War, Today, Tomorrow, Every Day Till
The End Of The World
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45594.htm
by
William Blum
NATO (= USA) has been surrounding
Russia for decades. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
captured the exquisite shamelessness
of
this with his remark of September 27, 2014: “Excuse us for our existence in the
middle of your bases.”
By contrast here is US Secretary of
State, John Kerry: “NATO is not a threat to anyone. It is a defensive alliance.
It is simply meant to provide
security. It is not focused on Russia or anyone else.”
===========
b.
From: "À la Une de Là-bas" <contact@la-bas.org>
To: "FRANCIS FEELEY" <francis.feeley@u-grenoble3.fr>
Sent: Tuesday, 4 October, 2016 7:47:56 PM
Subject: Trump/Clinton ? Le mur de Calais ? Le braquage de Kim Kardashian ?
Trump/Clinton ? Le mur de Calais ? Le braquage de Kim Kardashian ?
|
===========
c.
The Empire Strikes Back
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45588.htm
by Chris Hedges
“There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death,” Ernesto “Che”
Guevara said. “We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the
world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as
any country’s defeat is a defeat for all of us.”
===========
d.
Wall Street: The Trump-China missing link
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/361057-wall-street-trump-china-/#.V-5-tSeR7w8.facebook
by Pepe
Escobar
The
yuan is about to enter the IMF’s basket of reserve
currencies this coming Saturday - alongside the US dollar, pound, euro and yen.
This
is no less than a geoeconomic earthquake.
===========
e.
Trump's Hypocrisy on
NAFTA
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17353
Tim Wise and Paul Jay discuss how Trump's call for
import taxes would lead to trade wars and that his commitment to high profits
is at odds
with his plans to keep jobs in the US.
===========
f.
Clinton
Proposed Killing Julian Assange By
Drone Strike
http://www.torontosun.com/2016/10/03/hillary-clinton-suggested-taking-out-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-with-drone-report
by The Toronto Sun
“Can’t
we just drone this guy?” she pondered during one high-charged meeting, State Department sources
reportedly told True Pundit. According to the website, others in the room
laughed. But not Clinton, who called the Assange
a “soft target.”
===========
g.
Hillary
Clinton-Pandora Redux
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45600.htm
by George Capaccio
Come Election Day, when I enter the curtained booth at my
polling location, I will be thinking of those victims — from Palestine,
Iran, and Iraq to Honduras, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine — and
mark my ballot accordingly.
===========
h.
Former CIA
Detainees Describe Previously Unknown Torture Tactic:
A Makeshift
Electric Chair
by Alex Emmons
Two former CIA
captives recently described being threatened with a makeshift electric chair —
a previously unreported torture method — while being held in the U.S.
government’s infamous “Salt Pit” prison in Afghanistan.
===========
i.
How
the US Armed-up Syrian Jihadists
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/09/29/how-the-us-armed-up-syrian-jihadists/
by Alastair Crooke
The West blames Russia for the bloody
mess in Syria, but U.S. Special Forces saw close up how the chaotic U.S. policy
of aiding Syrian jihadists enabled Al Qaeda and ISIS to rip Syria apart,
explains ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.
===========
j.
Syria - The U.S. Propaganda Shams Now Openly Fail
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/09/syria-us-propaganda-shams-start-to-openly-fail-.html
by Moon Of Alabama
The Obama
administration, and especially the CIA and the State Department, seem to be in
trouble. They shout everything they can against Russia and allege that the
cleansing of east-Aleppo of al-Qaeda terrorist is genocidal. Meanwhile no
mention is ever made of the famine of the Houthis in
Yemen which the U.S. and Saudi bombing and their blockade directly causes.
===========
k.
Why Everything You
Hear About Aleppo Is Wrong
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45605.htm
(Video-with
free-lance journalist Vanessa Beeley)
What's
really going on in Aleppo? Are Assad and Putin exterminating the population for
sport? Is it a war against US-backed "moderates"? That is what the
mainstream media would have us believe. We speak with Vanessa Beeley, a journalist who just returned from Aleppo for the
real story.
===========
l.
U.S. “Military Aid” to Al Qaeda, ISIS-Daesh
http://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-military-aid-to-al-qaeda-routine-shipments-of-weapons-to-syrian-freedom-fighters/5548960
by Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Pentagon
Uses Illicit Arms Trafficking to Channel Enormous Shipments of Light Weapons
into Syria.
===========
m.
The US, France and Britain
Scrap United Nations Diplomacy, Embrace Terrorism against the People of
Syria...
by Felicity Arbuthnot
“An ambassador is a …
gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” (Attributed to Sir
Henry Wotton, 1568-1639.)
===========
n.
Fake
News And False Flags:
Pentagon Paid $540mn For Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2016/10/02/fake-news-and-false-flags-how-the-pentagon-paid-a-british-pr-firm-500m-for-top-secret-iraq-propaganda/
by Crofton Black and Abigail
Fielding-Smith
Russia is upping its stake in Syria. Additional
Russian SU-24, SU-25 and SU-34 jets are arriving.
===========
o.
Barbarism in Words and Deeds
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45602.htm
by
James Petras
The US representative to the United
Nations, Ambassador ‘Ranting Sam’ Samantha Power, accused the Russian and
Syrian governments of ‘barbarism’, claiming Moscow or Damascus had attacked an
unarmed United Nations humanitarian convoy delivering aid to civilians in
Aleppo.
===========
p.
Expanding
the Debate: Jill Stein "Debates" Clinton & Trump
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45579.htm
Video
by Democracy Now!
While the Green Party’s
Jill Stein was escorted off the campus at Hofstra,
what would it sound like if she actually participated in the debate?
We air excerpts from the presidential debate and get response from Green Party
presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein.
===========
q.
Kaepernick
Forces Americans To Choose Sides
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45583.htm
by Matt Peppe
When Colin Kaepernick of the San Francisco 49ers chose to remain
seated during the national anthem on August 26 prior to the start of the team’s
game against the Green Bay Packers, as the rest of the stadium stood, he was
not the only one engaging in a political act. But Kaepernick
was likely the only one doing so consciously. And though he was outnumbered by
tens of thousands in the stadium, and millions who watched on their television
sets, Kaepernick’s bold statement was infinitely more
powerful and outsized in its impact.
===========
r.
Shimon
Peres Was No Peacemaker
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/shimon-peres-dies-israel-qana-massacre-never-forget-no-peacemaker-robert-fisk-a7334656.html
by Robert Fisk
I’ll never
forget the sight of pouring blood and burning bodies at Qana.
Peres said the massacre came as a
‘bitter surprise’. It was a lie: the UN had repeatedly told Israel the camp was
packed with refugees.
===========
s.
Shimon Peres: Israeli
War Criminal
Peres
epitomized the disparity between Israel’s image in the West and the reality of
its bloody, colonial policies in Palestine and the wider region.
===========
t.
Israel's $38 Billion Scam
http://www.unz.com/article/israels-38-billion-scam/
by Philip Giraldi
Bibi wants more and Congress might
deliver.
===========
u.
National Prison Strike Enters Third We
ek
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17356
Many
prisoners are on hunger strikes and there are signs of discontent among
officers with the prison administrations, says Pastor Kenneth Glasgow.
===========
v.
From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, Ava DuVernay's Film "13th" Examines Racist U.S.
Justice System
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/10/3/from_slavery_to_mass_incarceration_ava
===========
w.
Expanding the Debate:
Green Ajamu Baraka "Debates" Pence & Kaine
Part Part 1
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/10/5/expanding_the_debate_green_ajamu_baraka
Democracy Now! Special