Communal Politics Quotes

the greater the number of owners, the less the respect for common property. People are much more careful of their personal possessions than of those owned communally; they exercise care over common property only in so far as they are personally affected.

We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands...searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living...for the integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences...Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it. -Commencement Speech, Wellesley 1969

The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.

The political vision of the religious right is for the most part an individualistic politics of righteousness, not a communal politics of compassion.

Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics –in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to ‘deliver’. In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers.

There is no monopoly of common sense On either side of the political fence We share the same biology Regardless of ideology Believe me when I say to you I hope the Russians love their children too [...] There's no such thing as a winnable war It's a lie we don't believe anymore ..." (The Russians)

Hence the great irony: Hayek, one of the greatest champions of individual liberty and economic freedom the world has ever known, believed that knowledge was communal. Dewey, the champion of socialism and collectivism, believed that knowledge was individual. Hayek's is a philosophy that treats individuals as the best judges of their own self-interests, which in turn yield staggering communal cooperation. Dewey's was the philosophy of a giant, Monty Pythonesque crowd shouting on cue: "We're All Individuals!

I have seen, over and over, the connection between tuning in to what brings aliveness into our systems and bring able to access personal, relational and communal power. Conversely, I have seen how denying our full, complex selves—denying our aliveness and our needs as living, sensual beings—increases the chance that we will be at odds with ourselves, our loved ones, our coworkers, and our neighbors on this planet.

The more settled and ordered one's life - and in particular one's communal life - the easier it becomes for one's imagination to fail.

Their pledge, in fact, came close to later communal farming ideas. The communal farm was not born of social or political idealism. It was based on the necessities of survival; there was no other way.

Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign against him. Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert Browning’s famous poem, ‘The Lost Leader,’ in which Browning criticizes Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us.’ A few more of the poem’s lines were: ‘We shall march prospering, not thro’ his presence; Songs may inspirit us, not from his lyre,’ and ‘Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.’ There was not one word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai’s photograph!

These two trends—the decline of communal institutions and the expansion of corporate brands in our culture—have had an inverse, seesaw-like relationship to one another over the decades: as the influence of those institutions that provided us with that essential sense of belonging went down, the power of commercial brands went up.

When you enter the realm of politics and ideology, the distinction between opinion and fact starts to cloud, and the stakes become dauntingly high; there is no system of communal 'we' to rely on to hash out issues of truth.

Laissez-faire capitalism, or anarchocapitalism, is simply the economic form of the libertarian ethic. Laissez-faire capitalism encompasses the notion that men should exchange goods and services, without regulation, solely on the basis of value for value. It recognizes charity and communal enterprises as voluntary versions of this same ethic. Such a system would be straight barter, except for the widely felt need for a division of labor in which men, voluntarily, accept value tokens such as cash and credit. Economically, this system is anarchy, and proudly so.

The decimation of public spaces renders a sense of communal life increasingly difficult. There are fewer places for people to congregate, whether for relaxation and enjoyment, or to discuss issues of common concern or participate in collaborative projects. This heightens the competitive individualism that so often leads to loneliness and isolation, while having devastating repercussions for our ability to participate in democratic decision-making.

Over the years, the British had strategically pitted the Muslims against the Hindus, supporting the All India Muslim League and encouraging the notion that the Muslims were a distinct political community. Throughout British India, separate electorates had been offered to Muslims, underscoring their separateness from Hindus and sowing the seeds of communalism. Teh Morley-Minto reforms in 1908 had allowed direct election for seats and separate or communal representation for Muslims. This was the harbinger for the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. In 1940, the Muslim League, representing one-fifth of the total population of India, became a unifying force. They were resentful that they were not sufficiently represented in Congress and feared for the safety of Islam.

As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics – in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like.

The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything. The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself. Call center angst is one more illustration of the way that Kafka is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority. Read, for instance, the bleak farce of K’s encounter with the telephone system in the Castle, and it is hard not to see it as uncannily prophetic of the call center experience.

History is naughty for it first creates chaos and then brings about order.

It does not have to be this way. We know from American history that our communal, electoral power allows us to build vibrant social networks, safer communities, and better education systems—when we decide to do so. If impoverished structures lead to negative outcomes, then a renewed focus on restoring equitable structures and infrastructures will improve individual and communal health.

I’m saying we have to have some communality. And we have to have discipline. That’s not the same as saying everyone has to look alike, act alike, think alike. Without community and discipline we’ll stay ineffective fragments or worse, we’ll be obliterated.” “I’m not a political person. All I want is to be left alone to do my work.” “You damn sight better become a political person. Things are so bad no one can afford to sit on the sidelines.

Voluntary communism, together with laissez-faire capitalism, has nothing to be ashamed of on moral and economic grounds. They can each hold up their heads, high. Far from enemies, they are merely opposite sides of the same voluntaristic coin. Together, they must battle state coercion, whether called State Capitalism or State Socialism. The point is, “left” vs. “right” is a red herring. The reddest and perhaps most misleading red herring in all political-economic theory.

Confucius did not accept the status quo, which held that wealth and power spoke the loudest. He felt that virtue, both as a personal quality and as a requirement for leadership, was essential for individual dignity, communal solidarity, and political order.

In the modern period, the alliance between Christianity and the political order continues to some extent. But even more so, the dream of God has been submerged by the individualism that characterizes much of modern Western culture. The dream of God is quite different from contemporary American dreams. The dream of God - a politics of compassion and justice, the kingdom of God, a domination-free order - is social, communal, and egalitarian. But our dreams - the dreams we get from our culture - are individualistic: living well, looking good, standing out.

Greed subsumes love and compassion; living simply makes room for them. Living simply is the primary way everyone can resist greed every day. All over the world people are becoming more aware of the importance of living simply and sharing resources. While communism has suffered political defeat globally, the politics of communalism continue to matter. We can all resist the temptation of greed. We can work to change public policy, electing leaders who are honest and progressive. We can turn off the television set. We can show respect for love. To save our planet we can stop thoughtless waste. We can recycle and support ecologically advanced survival strategies. We can celebrate and honor communalism and interdependency by sharing resources. All these gestures show a respect and a gratitude for life. When we value the delaying of gratification and take responsibility for our actions, we simplify our emotional universe. Living simply makes loving simple. The choice to live simply necessarily enhances our capacity to love. It is the way we learn to practice compassion, daily affirming our connection to a world community.

Suhrawardy, who was barred from politics by Ayub Khan, challenged the concept of Pakistan as an ideological state. Emphasis on ideology, he argued, “would keep alive within Pakistan the divisive communal emotions by which the subcontinent was riven before the achievement of independence.

When viewed historically the development of philosophical liberalism has to be seen as inseparable from economic liberalism (laissez-faire capitalism). The effect for Nietzsche of the domination of the polity by a money-economy is that the basis for a strong communal, ethical life is undermined, and culture is overtaken by philistinism. The expression, and realisation, of true individuality becomes almost impossible in the modern world. For Nietzsche liberalism emancipates the ‘private person’ (of bourgeois society), but not the ‘true individual’. It lacks a conception of culture.

To claim Jesus as Lord is to say that his sovereignty extends to the economic, the political, the social, the cultural, the aesthetic, the ecological, the personal, and the communal arenas. Nothing is excluded from his sovereignty. And likewise nothing is excluded fro the church's ministry of reconciliation.

Nationalism is the political manifestation of a folk's collective unconscious; heathenism/ satanism is the spiritual manifestation. Both ascend from the same source. Its therefore no coincidence that occultism and nationalism/facism have both claimed common adherents prior to the present interest in both by youth.

Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.

For this equality belongs to the post-Renaissance world of ideology-of political magic and the alchemical science” of politics. Envy is the basis of its broad appeal. And rampant envy, the besetting virus of modern society, is the most predictable result of insistence upon its realization. Furthermore, hue and cry over equality of opportunity and equal rights leads, a fortiori, to a final demand for equality of condition. Under its pressure self respect gives way in the large majority of men who have not reached the level of their expectation, who have no support from an inclusive identity, and who hunger for “revenge” on those who occupy a higher station and will (they expect) continue to enjoy that advantage. The end result is visible in the spiritual proletarians of the “lonely crowd.” Bertrand de Jouvenel has described the process which produces such non-persons in his memorable study, On Power. They are the natural pawns of an impersonal and omnicompetent Leviathan. And to insure their docility such a state is certain to recruit a large “new class” of men, persons superior in “ability” and authority, both to their ostensible “masters” among the people and to such anachronisms as stand in their progressive way. Such is the evidence of the recent past and particularly of American history. Arrant individualism, fracturing and then destroying the hope of amity and confederation, the communal bond and the ancient vision of the good society as an extrapolation from family, is one villain in this tale. Another is rationalized cowardice, shame, and ingratitude hidden behind the disguise of self-sufficiency or the mask of injured merit. Interdependence, which secures dignity and makes of equality a mere irrelevance, is the principal victim.

As spontaneous organizations of the distressed emerge, professional politicians and political parties attempt to capture their energy toward their own electoral gain. Franklin Roosevelt, as we have seen, was not averse to using antimarket rhetoric to appeal to the distressed. And once the politicians capture power and there is a drive to legislate, incumbents are not far behind in directing legislations toward their needs. Thus, much as a riot can be exploited by a few to achieve goals that are not the intent of the mob—it is interesting how often riots that are ostensibly labeled “communal” in India turn into a targeted destruction of especially irksome rival businesses owned by the minority community—the political organizations of the distressed can be used by those who have a broader agenda.

We observe in this torrent of incoherence a lack of regularity in the subject himself; the "I" has fallen to pieces after struggling for three centuries against the great objective institutions and dissolving them with its subjectivism and rejecting in them any law that was sacred and binding on itself. There is no reason to think that Decadence - obviously an historical phenomenon of great inevitability and significance — has confined itself to poetry; we should expect in the more or less distant future the Decadence of philosophy and finally the Decadence of morality, politics, and forms of communal life. To a certain extent Nietzsche can already be considered the Decadent of human thought — at least to the extent that Maupassant, in certain "final touches" of his art, can be considered the Decadent of human emotion. Like Maupassant, Nietzsche ended in madness; and in Nietzsche, just as in Maupassant, the cult of the "I" loses all restraining limits: the world, history, and the human being with his toils and legitimate demands have disappeared equally from the works of both; both were "mystic males" to a considerable degree, only one of them preferred to "flutter " above "quivering orchids," whereas the other liked to sit inside a cave or upon a mountaintop and proclaim a new religion to mankind in his capacity as the reborn "Zarathustra." The religion of the "superman," he explained. But all of them, including Maupassant, were already "supermen" in that they had absolutely no need of mankind and mankind had absolutely no need of them. On this new type of nisus formativus of human culture, so to speak, we should expect to see great oddities, great hideousness, and perhaps great calamities and dangers. ("On Symbolists And Decadents")

The European powers at that time believed they could change Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of its political existence, and in their attempt to do so introduced an artificial state system into the Middle East that has made it into a region of countries that have not become nations even today. The basis of political life in the Middle East—religion—was called into question by the Russians, who proposed communism, and by the British, who proposed nationalism or dynastic loyalty, in its place. Khomeini's Iran in the Shi'ite world and the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere in the Sunni world keep that issue alive. The French government, which in the Middle East did allow religion to be the basis of politics—even of its own—championed one sect against the others; and that, too, is an issue kept alive, notably in the communal strife that has ravaged Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s.

These days, partisanship for many people is not about which political party has the better policies. It's a conflict between the saved and the damned. People often use the partisan identity to fill the void left when their other attachments wither away - ethnic, neighborhood, religious, communal, and familial. This is asking more from politics than politics can deliver. Once politics become your ethnic or moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor.

The images of “enough” are: 1. eschatological harvest, 4: 8 2. Jewish crowds satisfied in wilderness, 6: 44 3. all food declared clean, 7: 19 4. gentile crowds satisfied in wilderness, 8: 8 5. abundant leftovers, 8: 19f. 6. communal abundance, 10: 30. These images imply a new practice over against the temple-based system of economic redistribution, which has failed. This is the practice of cooperative sharing, a return to the original Israelite vision of a community of production and consumption.

The assumption on the part of most Indian political parties that overt friendship with Israel would cost its advocates dearly at the Indian ballot box remains a strong factor, especially when elections loom in states with a significant number of Muslim voters. It did not help that pro-Israeli stances were, in the early years, advocated only by the communally minded Hindu chauvinist party the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which used support for Israel mainly as an additional stick to beat the Muslims with.

Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics - in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to *deliver* In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers.

A great liberal betrayal is afoot. Unfortunately, many “fellow-travelers” of Islamism are on the liberal side of this debate. I call them “regressive leftists”; they are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogenous and inherently opposed to human rights values. They are culturally reductive in how they see “Eastern”—and in my case, Islamic—culture, and they are culturally deterministic in attempting to freeze their ideal of it in order to satisfy their orientalist fetish. While they rightly question every aspect of their “own” Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of “cultural authenticity” and anticolonialism. They claim that their reason for refusing to criticize any policy, foreign or domestic—other than those of what they consider “their own” government—is that they are not responsible for other governments’ actions. However, they leap whenever any (not merely their own) liberal democratic government commits a policy error, while generally ignoring almost every fascist, theocratic, or Muslim-led dictatorial regime and group in the world. It is as if their brains cannot hold two thoughts at the same time. Besides, since when has such isolationism been a trait of liberal internationalists? It is a right-wing trait. They hold what they think of as “native” communities—and I use that word deliberately—to lesser standards than the ones they claim apply to all “their” people, who happen to be mainly white, and that’s why I call it reverse racism. In holding “native” communities to lesser—or more culturally “authentic”—standards, they automatically disempower those communities. They stifle their ambitions. They cut them out of the system entirely, because there’s no aspiration left. These communities end up in self-segregated “Muslim areas” where the only thing their members aspire to is being tin-pot community leaders, like ghetto chieftains. The “fellow-travelers” fetishize these “Muslim” ghettos in the name of “cultural authenticity” and identity politics, and the ghetto chieftains are often the leading errand boys for them. Identity politics and the pseudo-liberal search for cultural authenticity result in nothing but a downward spiral of competing medieval religious or cultural assertions, fights over who are the “real” Muslims, ever increasing misogyny, homophobia, sectarianism, and extremism. This is not liberal. Among the left, this is a remnant of the socialist approach that prioritizes group identity over individual autonomy. Among the right, it is ironically a throwback from the British colonial “divide and rule” approach. Classical liberalism focuses on individual autonomy. I refer here to liberalism as it is understood in the philosophical sense, not as it’s understood in the United States to refer to the Democratic Party—that’s a party-political usage. The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims—all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm.

The images of communal survival and flourishing our culture feeds us all to easily blur our vision of God‘s new creation – for instance, we think America is a Christian nation, and democracy the only truly Christian political arrangement. Unaware that our culture has subverted our faith, we lose a place from which to judge our own culture. In order to keep our allegiance to Jesus Christ pure, we need to nurture commitment to the multicultural community of Christian churches. We need to see ourselves and our own understanding of God’s future with the eyes of Christians from other cultures, listen to voices of Christians from other cultures so as to make sure that the voice of our culture has not drowned out the voice of Jesus Christ.

The decline of Greek democracy was brought about not by the realism of antiquity (where, according to Marx's German Ideology 'communal life was a "truth", whereas in modern times it has become an idealistic lie'). Quite the contrary, the seed of its destruction lay in the idealism of abstract civic freedom, which is incapable of mastering material development. The historical limitation of ancient sculpture was not its adherence to life, its corporeality, but on the contrary, its escape from life, its retreat into empty space. 'Abstract individuality', i.e. the atom of 'civic society', 'cannot shine in the light of existence'. The only conclusion which can be drawn from this interpretation is that freedom and material life must be united around a higher principle than the 'abstract individuality' of the atom-citizen. Or, to translate philosophy into the language, of politics, democratic demands must be given a realistic plebeian colouring, a broad mass base.

I love football. I love the aesthetics of football. I love the athleticism of football. I love the movement of the players, the antics of the coaches. I love the dynamism of the fans. I love their passion for their badge and the colour of their team and their country. I love the noise and the buzz and the electricity in the stadium. I love the songs. I love the way the ball moves and then it flows and the way a teams fortune rises and falls through a game and through a season. But what I love about football is that it brings people together across religious divides, geographic divides, political divides. I love the fact that for ninety minutes in a rectangular piece of grass, people can forget hopefully, whatever might be going on in their life, and rejoice in this communal celebration of humanity. The biggest diverse, invasive or pervasive culture that human kinds knows is football and I love the fact that at the altar of football human kind can come worship and celebrate.

We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends. This premise of primordial individualism underpins the understanding of rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence and thus of the democratic political community that springs from it. This premise also underlies contemporary neoclassical economics, which builds its models on the assumption that human beings are rational beings who want to maximize their individual utility or incomes. But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts. Aristotle was more correct than these early modern liberal theorists when he said that human beings were political by nature. So while an individualistic understanding of human motivation may help to explain the activities of commodity traders and libertarian activists in present-day America, it is not the most helpful way to understand the early evolution of human politics. Everything

The failure of Communism was consecrated in the fall of the Soviet Union. The remarkable thing is that, as in most cases when prophecy fails, the faith never faltered. Indeed, an alternative version had long been maturing, though cast into the shadows for a time by enthusiasm for the quick fix of revolution. It had, however, been maturing for at least a century and already had a notable repertoire of institutions available. We may call it Olympianism, because it is the project of an intellectual elite that believes that it enjoys superior enlightenment and that its business is to spread this benefit to those living on the lower slopes of human achievement. And just as Communism had been a political project passing itself off as the ultimate in scientific understanding, so Olympianism burrowed like a parasite into the most powerful institution of the emerging knowledge economy--the universities. We may define Olympianism as a vision of human betterment to be achieved on a global scale by forging the peoples of the world into a single community based on the universal enjoyment of appropriate human rights. Olympianism is the cast of mind dedicated to this end, which is believed to correspond to the triumph of reason and community over superstition and hatred. It is a politico-moral package in which the modern distinction between morals and politics disappears into the aspiration for a shared mode of life in which the communal transcends individual life. To be a moral agent is in these terms to affirm a faith in a multicultural humanity whose social and economic conditions will be free from the causes of current misery. Olympianism is thus a complex long-term vision, and contemporary Western Olympians partake of different fragments of it. To be an Olympian is to be entangled in a complex dialectic involving elitism and egalitarianism. The foundational elitism of the Olympian lies in self-ascribed rationality, generally picked up on an academic campus. Egalitarianism involves a formal adherence to democracy as a rejection of all forms of traditional authority, but with no commitment to taking any serious notice of what the people actually think. Olympians instruct mortals, they do not obey them. Ideally, Olympianism spreads by rational persuasion, as prejudice gives way to enlightenment. Equally ideally, democracy is the only tolerable mode of social coordination, but until the majority of people have become enlightened, it must be constrained within a framework of rights, to which Olympian legislation is constantly adding. Without these constraints, progress would be in danger from reactionary populism appealing to prejudice. The overriding passion of the Olympian is thus to educate the ignorant and everything is treated in educational terms. Laws for example are enacted not only to shape the conduct of the people, but also to send messages to them. A belief in the power of role models, public relations campaigns, and above all fierce restrictions on raising sensitive questions devant le peuple are all part of pedagogic Olympianism.

What are some of the concerns regarding the penal substitutionary metaphors? Some of this debate is theological and exegetical, often centering upon Paul and the proper understanding of his doctrine of justification. Specifically, some suggest that the penal substitutionary metaphors, read too literally, create a problematic view of God: that God is inherently a God of retributive justice who can only be “satisfied” with blood sacrifice. A more missional worry is that the metaphors behind penal substitutionary atonement reduce salvation to a binary status: Justified versus Condemned and Pure versus Impure. The concern is that when salvation reduces to avoiding the judgment of God (Jesus accepting our “death sentence”) and accepting Christ’s righteousness as our own (being “washed” and made “holy” for the presence of God), we can ignore the biblical teachings that suggest that salvation is communal, cosmic in scope, and is an ongoing developmental process. These understandings of atonement - that salvation is an active communal engagement that participates in God’s cosmic mission to restore all things - are vital to efforts aimed at motivating spiritual formation and missional living. As many have noted, by ignoring the communal, cosmic, and developmental facets of salvation penal substitutionary atonement becomes individualistic and pietistic. The central concern of penal substitutionary atonement is standing “washed” and “justified” before God. No doubt there is an individual aspect to salvation - every metaphor has a bit of the truth —but restricting our view to the legal and purity metaphors blinds us to the fact that atonement has developmental, social, political, and ecological implications.

I could do this. I just had to be careful and not punch her. Piece of cake. “Hi,” Heather said, stretching the word. She walked carefully, as if worried I’d bite her. “Hi!” Kate Daniels, a good neighbor. Would you like some cookies? “I’m sorry to bother you . . . What is that smell?” Spider guts. “How can I help you?” “Umm, the neighbors asked me to bring some issues to your attention.” I bet they did, and she bravely soldiered under that burden. “Shoot.” “It’s about the mailbox.” I could see the communal mailbox out of the corner of my eye. It seemed intact. “You see, the mailman saw your husband during one of his walks.” “He’s my fiancé,” I told her. “We are living in sin.” Heather blinked, momentarily knocked off her stride, but recovered. “Oh, that’s nice.” “It’s very nice. I highly recommend it.” “As I was saying, he saw your fiancé when he was in his animal shape. How to put it . . . He became alarmed.” That was generally a normal reaction when encountering Curran for the first time. “We are not sure if they will deliver mail again.” “Did you receive any official notices from the post office?” “No, but . . .” Heather tried a smile. “We were thinking maybe your fiancé could not do that anymore.” “Do what?” I had a sudden urge to strangle Heather. I was so tired of people acting like Curran was an inhuman spree killer who would murder babies in their sleep. “Walk around in his animal shape.” No strangling. Strangling would not be neighborly. “It would also be nice if he limited the range of his walks.” I had had a really long day. My nerves were stretched thin and she was jumping up and down on the last of them. I inhaled slowly. Two years of sorting shapeshifter politics and their run-ins with humans had to count for something.

The notion that property is the means to all other means was ruled out by the new radicals. The deep seated ressentiment towards private property, indeed towards anything private, blocked the conclusion that follows from any impartial examination of wealth-producing and freedom-favouring mechanisms: an effective world improvement would call for the most general possible propertization. Instead, the political metanoeticians enthused over general dispossession, akin to the founders of Christian orders who wanted to own everything communally and nothing individually. The most important insight into the dynamics of economic modernization remained inaccessible to them: money created by lending on property is the universal means of world improvement. They are all the blinder to the fact that for the meantime, only the modern tax state, the anonymous hyper-billionaire, can act as a general world-improver, naturally in alliance with the local meliorists - not only because of its traditional school power, but most of all thanks to its redistributive power, which took on unbelievable proportions in the course of the twentieth century. The current tax state, for its part, can only survive as long as it is based on a property economy whose actors put up no resistance when half of their total product is taken away, year after year, by the very visible hand of the national treasury for the sake of communal tasks. What the un-calm understands least of all is the simple fact that when government expenditures constitute almost 50 per cent of the gross national product, this fulfills the requirements of actually existing liberal-fiscal semi-socialism, regardless of what label is used to describe this situation - whether people call it the New Deal, 'social market economy' or 'neoliberalism'. What the system lacks for total perfection is a homogeneous worldwide tax sphere and the long-overdue propertization of the impoverished world.

In 1942, Merton set out four scientific values, now known as the ‘Mertonian Norms’. None of them have snappy names, but all of them are good aspirations for scientists. First, universalism: scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge, no matter who comes up with it – so long as their methods for finding that knowledge are sound. The race, sex, age, gender, sexuality, income, social background, nationality, popularity, or any other status of a scientist should have no bearing on how their factual claims are assessed. You also can’t judge someone’s research based on what a pleasant or unpleasant person they are – which should come as a relief for some of my more disagreeable colleagues. Second, and relatedly, disinterestedness: scientists aren’t in it for the money, for political or ideological reasons, or to enhance their own ego or reputation (or the reputation of their university, country, or anything else). They’re in it to advance our understanding of the universe by discovering things and making things – full stop.20 As Charles Darwin once wrote, a scientist ‘ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.’ The next two norms remind us of the social nature of science. The third is communality: scientists should share knowledge with each other. This principle underlies the whole idea of publishing your results in a journal for others to see – we’re all in this together; we have to know the details of other scientists’ work so that we can assess and build on it. Lastly, there’s organised scepticism: nothing is sacred, and a scientific claim should never be accepted at face value. We should suspend judgement on any given finding until we’ve properly checked all the data and methodology. The most obvious embodiment of the norm of organised scepticism is peer review itself. 20. Robert K. Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ (1942), The Sociology of Science: Empirical and Theoretical Investigations (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973): pp. 267–278.

Activists who expressed genuine and reasonable concern for the struggles of trans-identified people would simultaneously dismiss women’s desire for safety, privacy, dignity and fair competition. Unlike those activists, I feel compassion both for people who feel at odds with their sexed bodies, and for the people, mainly women and children, who are harmed when sexual dimorphism is denied. At first I was puzzled that well-educated young women were the most ardent supporters of this new policy of gender self-identification, even though it is very much against their interests. A man may be embarrassed if a female person uses a male changing room; a male in a communal female facility can inspire fear. I came to see it as the rising generation’s ‘luxury belief’ – a creed espoused by members of an elite to enhance their status in each other’s eyes, with the harms experienced by the less fortunate. If you have social and financial capital, you can buy your way out of problems – if a facility you use jeopardises your safety or privacy, you will simply switch. It is poorer and older women who are stuck with the consequences of self-ID in women’s prisons, shelters and refuges, hospital wards and care homes. And some women’s apparent support for self-ID is deceptive, expressed for fear of what open opposition would bring. The few male academics and journalists who write critically on this topic tell me that they get only a fraction of the hate directed at their female peers (and are spared the sexualised insults and rape threats). This dynamic is reinforced by ageism, which is inextricably intertwined with misogyny – including internalised misogyny. I was astonished by the young female reviewer who described my book’s tone as ‘harsh’ and ‘unfortunate’. I wondered if she knew that sexists often say they would have listened to women if only they had stated their demands more nicely and politely, and whether she realised that once she is no longer young and beautiful, the same sorts of things will be said about her, too.

Writers take and remake everything we see around us: we metabolize the details of our loved ones, alter time and memory, shapeshift our personal and physical differences into transformative images that, when done with care, can create a world that feels more than accurate, but real. Doing this requires that we watch and listen to one another with great attention, something we’re generally discouraged from doing lest we come off as stalkers. From the time we’re children, we’re taught it’s rude to stare, nosy to eavesdrop; you can’t just root around in other people’s journals and closets and minds. I can’t ask my colleagues what they really think and feel about their marriages or children, because that’s private, and privacy requires that I pretend to believe what both strangers and loved ones tell me. Being polite means, ironically, paying less attention to the people I want to be close to, bypassing their foibles and idiosyncrasies and quiet outrages in the name of communal goodwill. But writing requires we pay attention to others at a level that can only be classified as rude. The writer sees the button trailing by its single thread on the pastor’s shirt; she tastes the acid sting behind a mother’s compliment. To observe closely leads the writer to the radical recognition of what both binds her to and separates her from others. It will push her to hear voices she’s been taught should remain silent. Oftentimes, these voices, and these truths, reveal something equally powerful, and profoundly unsettling, about ourselves. I want to end this letter to you by proposing something that some critics and sociologists might reject out of hand, which is the possibility that White people, too, might, by paying close attention to the voices around them and inside themselves, be able to experience double consciousness. If double consciousness is in part based on the understanding of the systemic power of Whiteness, and if it is also the realization that one’s self-regard can never be divorced from the gaze of others, then the practice of double consciousness might be available to everyone, including those who constitute the majority.

Despite its reputation for individualism and unbridled capitalism, the United States has a history rich in cooperation and communalism. From the colonial era to the present—and among the indigenous population for millennia—local communities have engaged in self-help, democracy, and cooperation. Indeed, the “individualistic” tradition might more accurately be called the “self-help” tradition, where “self” is defined not only in terms of the individual but in terms of the community (be it family, township, religious community, etc.). Americans are traditionally hostile to overarching authorities separate from the community with which they identify, a hostility expressed in the age-old resentment towards both government and big business. The stereotype, based on fact, is that Americans would rather solve problems on their own than rely on political and economic power-structures to do so. The following brief survey of the history substantiates this claim. While my focus is on worker cooperatives, I will not ignore the many and varied experiments in other forms of cooperation and communalism. Certain themes and lessons can be gleaned from the history. The most obvious is that a profound tension has existed, constantly erupting into conflict, between the democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses of ordinary Americans and the tendency of economic and political power-structures to grow extensively and intensively, to concentrate themselves in ever-larger and more centralized units that reach as far down into society as possible. Power inherently tries to control as much as it can: it has an intrinsic tendency toward totalitarianism, ideally letting nothing, even the most trivial social interactions, escape its oversight. Bentham’s Panopticon is the perfect emblem of the logic of power. Other social forces, notably people’s strivings for freedom and democracy, typically keep this totalitarian tendency in check. In fact, the history of cooperation and communalism is a case-study in the profound truth that people are instinctively averse to the modes of cutthroat competition, crass greed, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dehumanization that characterize modern capitalism. Far from capitalism’s being a straightforward expression of human nature, as apologists proclaim, it is more like the very antithesis of human nature, which is evidently drawn to such things as free self-expression, spontaneous “play,”131 cooperation and friendly competition, compassion, love. The work of Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson shows how people have had to be disciplined, their desires repressed, in order for the capitalist system to seem even remotely natural: centuries of indoctrination, state violence, incarceration of “undesirables,” the bureaucratization of everyday life, have been necessary to partially accustom people to the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism and the commodification of the human personality.132 And of course resistance continues constantly, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. “Wage-slavery,” as workers in the nineteenth century called it, is a monstrous assault on human dignity, which is why even today, after so much indoctrination, people still hate being subordinated to a “boss” and rebel against it whenever they can.

As I noted in Chapter 14, “The Earthquake,” there was a supermarket in Jerusalem where I shopped for fruits and vegetables almost every day. It was owned by an Iraqi Jewish family who had immigrated to Israel from Baghdad in the early 1940s. The patriarch of the family, Sasson, was an elderly curmudgeon in his sixties. Sasson’s whole life had left him with the conviction that the Arabs would never willingly accept a Jewish state in their midst and that any concessions to the Palestinians would eventually be used to liquidate the Jewish state. Whenever Sasson heard Israeli doves saying that the Palestinians really wanted to live in peace with the Jews, but that they just couldn’t always come out and declare it, it sounded ludicrous to him. It simply ran counter to everything life in Iraq and Jerusalem had taught him, and neither the Camp David treaty with Egypt nor declarations by Yasir Arafat—nor the Palestinian uprising itself—had convinced him otherwise. As I said, as far as Sasson was concerned, the problem between himself and the Palestinians was not that they didn’t understand each other, but that they did—all too well. Sasson, I should add, did not appear to be ideologically committed to Israel’s holding the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was a grocer, and ideology did not trip easily off his tongue. I am sure he rarely, if ever, went to the occupied territories. Like a majority of Israelis, he viewed the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip primarily in terms of security. I believe that Sasson is the key to a Palestinian–Israeli peace settlement—not him personally, but his world view. He is the Israeli silent majority. He is the Israeli two-thirds. You don’t hear much from the Sassons of Israel. They don’t talk much. They are not as interesting to interview as wild-eyed messianic West Bank settlers, or as articulate as Peace Now professors who speak with an American accent. But they are the foundation of Israel, the gravity that holds the country in place. And, more important, years of reporting from Israel have taught me that there is a little bit of Sasson’s almost primitive earthiness in every Israeli—not only all those in the Likud Party on the right side of the political spectrum, but a majority of those in the Labor Party as well; not only those Israelis born in Arab countries, but those born in Israel as well. Indeed, the Israeli public is not divided fifty-fifty on the question of peace with the Palestinians. The truth is, the Israeli public is divided in three. One segment, on the far left—maybe 5 percent of the population—is ready to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza tomorrow, and sincerely believes the Palestinians are ready to live in peace with the Jews. Another segment, on the far right—maybe 20 percent of the population—will never be prepared, for ideological reasons, to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. They are committed to holding forever all the Land of Israel, out of either nationalist or messianic sentiments. In between these two extremes you have the Sassons, who make up probably 75 percent of the population. The more liberal Sassons side with the Labor Party, the more hard-line Sassons side with the Likud, but they all share a gut feeling that they are locked in an all-or-nothing communal struggle with the Palestinians. Today the

crawfish. Nine guests were already gathered around, squeezing the highly seasoned meat out of the tails, sucking the juice out of the rest of the carcass and then going immediately for another, washing them down with beer and also eating the potatoes and corn on the cob that had been boiled along with the crawfish. It was one of the most ingrained communal rituals in New Orleans, everyone eating from the same horn of plenty, facing one another and talking, talking, talking as they ate, about music they had seen, city politics, the Saints game, which was still going inside, making jokes, making plans, making good-natured trouble.

The Kharijis who had repudiated ʿAli after the battle of Siffin formed small bands, usually of between thirty and a hundred men. Each group was at once an outlaw gang and a fanatical religious sect. They were held together by the conviction that they were the only true Muslims and that their rebellions had profound religious justification. A group of Kharijis (called Najda) controlled a good part of Arabia – including Bahrain, Oman, Hadhramaut, and Yemen – before they were finally crushed. These Khariji bands were most likely formed by uprooted individuals looking for communal affiliation through sectarian movements. The second civil war, then, was a crisis for the cohesion of the Arab-Muslim elite, for its political authority, and for its concepts of true belief and communal leadership.

Stuyvesant Town also was a safe haven, yielding a community of loyal, lifelong friends. As kids, we would hang out at the playgrounds until it was too dark to see. Later, we shared the raptures and torments of adolescence in a wild 1960s New York City scene. With numerous temptations and very few limits, we hung together and guided one another through many storms. Maybe that’s why I have always found comfort in community. Whether in newsrooms, campaigns, or the White House, I have thrived in communal settings, finding emotional nourishment in the friendships and camaraderie of the team.

The new social movements which emerged since the end of the Cold War, experiencing a resurgence in the years after 2008, have been similarly unable to devise a new political ideological vision. Instead they expend considerable energy on internal direct-​democratic process and affective self-​valorisation over strategic efficacy, and frequently propound a variant of neo-​primitivist localism, as if to oppose the abstract violence of globalised capital with the flimsy and ephemeral “authenticity” of communal immediacy.

Yankees also combined what you might call social conservatism with political liberalism. Traditional and stern in their private lives, they believed in communal compassion and government action. They believed that individuals have a collective responsibility to preserve the “good order.” Even in the mid-eighteenth century, the New England colonies had levels of taxation for state and local governments that were twice as high as the levels in colonies such as Pennsylvania and Virginia. They also put tremendous faith in education. For the past 350 years, New England schools have been among the best in the United States. New Englanders have, to this day, some of the highest levels of educational attainment in the nation.19

We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends. This premise of primordial individualism underpins the understanding of rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence and thus of the democratic political community that springs from it. This premise also underlies contemporary neoclassical economics, which builds its models on the assumption that human beings are rational beings who want to maximize their individual utility or incomes. But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts.

Though birds use vocal warnings to exclude others from their territory, language for long served man as a unifying agent to keep his separate communal organizations within bounds. Linguistically, each group is surrounded by an invisible wall of silence, in the form of a different language group. The multiplicity of existing languages and dialects (some four thousand in all), despite the unifying processes of trade, transportation, and travel, suggests that the expressive and emotive functions of language remained as important in the formation of a culture as the function of communication: if nothing else, they prevented a flattening out of human potentiality through mechanization. Hence one of the first efforts of a political conqueror is to suppress the popular language of the conquered; and the most effective means of defence against such suppression, first suggested by Rousseau, is the revival of the national language and its literature.

The early Christians threatened the empire not by withholding their vote or by raging against Roman political sins. They simply lived a form of communal life that revealed the limits of the political order, and that was revolutionary enough.

Who's in Charge Here? When a congregation is profoundly clergy-centered—when the pedagogy consists of a clergyperson (performer) downloading information and inspiration to parishioners (audience)—the game is rigged. The theological message may be one of community, but the lived experience is one of dependence on an authority. Under those conditions, not much can be done to build the communal trust that allows compassion to flower, no matter how benign the leader is.

There were other important reasons for the growth of American individualism at the expense of community in the second half of the twentieth century besides the nature of capitalism. The first arose as an unintended consequence of a number of liberal reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Slum clearance uprooted and destroyed many of the social networks that existed in poor neighborhoods, replacing them with an anonymous and increasingly dangerous existence in high-rise public housing units. “Good government” drives eliminated the political machines that at one time governed most large American cities. The old, ethnically based machines were often highly corrupt, but they served as a source of local empowerment and community for their clients. In subsequent years, the most important political action would take place not in the local community but at higher and higher levels of state and federal government. A second factor had to do with the expansion of the welfare state from the New Deal on, which tended to make federal, state, and local governments responsible for many social welfare functions that had previously been under the purview of civil society. The original argument for the expansion of state responsibilities to include social security, welfare, unemployment insurance, training, and the like was that the organic communities of preindustrial society that had previously provided these services were no longer capable of doing so as a result of industrialization, urbanization, decline of extended families, and related phenomena. But it proved to be the case that the growth of the welfare state accelerated the decline of those very communal institutions that it was designed to supplement. Welfare dependency in the United States is only the most prominent example: Aid to Familles with Dependent Children, the depression-era legislation that was designed to help widows and single mothers over the transition as they reestablished their lives and families, became the mechanism that permitted entire inner-city populations to raise children without the benefit of fathers. The rise of the welfare state cannot be more than a partial explanation for the decline of community, however. Many European societies have much more extensive welfare states than the United States; while nuclear families have broken down there as well, there is a much lower level of extreme social pathology. A more serious threat to community has come, it would seem, from the vast expansion in the number and scope of rights to which Americans believe they are entitled, and the “rights culture” this produces. Rights-based individualism is deeply embedded in American political theory and constitutional law. One might argue, in fact, that the fundamental tendency of American institutions is to promote an ever-increasing degree of individualism. We have seen repeatedly that communities tend to be intolerant of outsiders in proportion to their internal cohesiveness, because the very strength of the principles that bind members together exclude those that do not share them. Many of the strong communal structures in the United States at midcentury discriminated in a variety of ways: country clubs that served as networking sites for business executives did not allow Jews, blacks, or women to join; church-run schools that taught strong moral values did not permit children of other denominations to enroll; charitable organizations provided services for only certain groups of people and tried to impose intrusive rules of behavior on their clients. The exclusiveness of these communities conflicted with the principle of equal rights, and the state increasingly took the side of those excluded against these communal organizations.

Originally, there was no private property in these means: all land was held in common. But in time, the “primitive communal” order gave way to class differentiation as one group succeeded in monopolizing the vital resources and used its economic power to exploit and dominate the rest of the population by erecting political and legal institutions protecting its class interests. It also employed culture—religion, ethics, the arts and literature—to the same end. Such devices have enabled the ruling class to exploit the rest of the population.

uff! dikhao. Shrutikitaab kheenchti hai. Hamara Pramanik Itihaas. Cover par ishtihaar ke taur par kavitanuma panktiyan hain. Yon: "Islam kee buniyaad pe yah desh Hindustaan mit raha hai. Aa hee jaayega ek din yahan Islam ka dastoor. Ho jaayenge ek din yahan se hindu Kafir kafoor Bandhuon chet jao."" "Bhari-poori Industry chal rahi hai." Shrutiab kitaab pakde hai. "Ekdum se to yeh Industry nahin ban gayee. Hum kahan the, jab yah ban rahee thee?"Hanif poochta hai. Uff, show... Shruti snatches the book: "Our Proven History." On the cover, by way of advertisement, are lines of a rhyme. "Foundation of Islam is wiping out Hindustan One day they will take over And Kafir Hindus thrown out Wake up Brothers" "This is a full-fledged industry," Shruti holds the book. " This industry did not come up just now. Where were we, when it was being put up?" Hanif asks.

Huq, being the leader of the KPP, opened negotiations with the Congress to form a coalition. However, talks between the two parties soon broke down. The Congress insisted on giving immediate importance to the release of political prisoners while for the KPP, the settlement of agrarian debt was the primary concern. As negotiations between the KPP and the Congress broke down, the KPP saw no option but to form a coalition ministry with the League, with Huq as the Chief Minister. However, this turned out to be the biggest political blunder for Huq – the selection of personnel of the Ministry was not in his hands, and nine out of eleven members were from the zamindar class. This was deeply resented by other members of the KPP, who soon began to distance themselves from the new coalition party. Faced with severe criticism from both the KPP and the Congress for completely deviating from his electoral promises, Huq joined the Muslim League in October 1937. With this, the ministry practically became a League ministry.

The Eighties were a little like the Fifties—it was sort of a conservative era, money conscious, politically nasty, and Republican,” says former Mission of Burma drummer Peter Prescott. “And usually that means there’s going to be a good underground,” he adds with a laugh. “There’s something to get pissed off with communally.

speech (and of the communal encounter that it frames) emphasizes the witness’s necessary “openness” to the alterity (unpredictability and unknowability) of the addressee. How does one understand that openness, which seems to be integral to, and formative of, any testimonial address? I propose that at issue is the subjective precariousness of self-disclosure by the witness—of revealing oneself, or of laying oneself bare in the presence of another. At issue is also, to put it in a rather enigmatic way, the making of a testimonial statement: “my life depends on your believing.” That statement of “life dependence” resonates particularly strongly in Améry’s suicidal meditations and in Kertész’s lament for the ephemerality of his camp memories.

The uninterrupted remnant presence of the catastrophe in the life of the subject (also in its synecdochic relation to the communal) defines that subjective existence as fragmentary,15 “subjectivity as wounded, blamed, and persecuted exposure” (Blanchot 1995b: 24).

Yet much as the state supplies all we need, so too does wokeness/UJP have a mystical and therapeutic streak in it. All things must be ordered according to man-centered social justice, necessitating government control. But at the same time, people (at least some people) must be free to find and publicly celebrate their true selves. When this union of statism and selfism breaks free of the traditional constraints of Judeo-Christian religion, fundamentalist creationism, free markets, democratic government, personal responsibility, and strong local church presence in communities, then the earth will be made right, rescued from global warming, intolerant dogmatism, political liberty, and communalism. We will not live forever in a world made right by God, what Christians call “escalated re-creation.” Instead, we will live in a world governed by science, technology, and justice. Wokeness does not do away with eschatology; it immanentizes it in a distinctly humanist form, but not live-and-let-live humanism—hard-edged judicial and statist humanism.

Alienation is inevitable when our inner sense of value becomes status-driven, hinging on externally imposed standards of competitive achievement and acquisition, and a highly conditional acceptance — I should say "acceptability" — in others' eyes. With the erosion of the middle class in recent decades, people who judged themselves in terms of wordly success have sustained a perceived loss of worth. The promise of the middle-class dream has largely evaporated, to the distress and deep anger of many. But even people perched atop the economic pyramid can experience a devaluation of self, for the simple reason that materialistic values run counter to the need for meaning, for purpose beyond self-serving endeavors. There are no moral fingers to wag here. Objectively, it is the case that centering on the self's evanescent desires to the exclusion of communal needs results in a diminished connection to our deepest selves, which is to say the parts of us that generate and sustain true well-being. Whatever "wins" our personality can rack up, whatever momentary sense of security we gain through our various identities, however much we burnish our image or self-image with material gains — these are a flimsy replacement for the rewards (and challenges) of being alive to one's humanity. An investor dabbling daily in millions told Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg, "I feel like I'm wasting my life. When I die, is anyone going to care that I earned an extra percentage point on my return? My work feels totally meaningless." That loss of meaning, Duhigg says, afflicts "even professionals given to lofty self-images, like those in medicine and law." Why would this be? the author wondered. The answer: "Oppresive hours, political infighting, increased competition sparked by globalization, an 'always-on culture' bred by the internet — but also something that's hard for these professionals to put their finger on, an underlying sense that their work isn't worth the grueling effort they're putting into it." It's simple economics, really: artificial inflation (of self-concept, of identity, of material ambition) is bound to lead to a downturn or even a crash when the bubble inevitable burts.

I also strongly believe that Partition would have been less bloody if the political leaders had tried to build upon the communal unity created by the events of February 1946, instead of ignoring it. I

Thus framed the first narrative lacuna, the first release of communal tears, in this storied journey is that the oppressive Pharaoh did not know Joseph. What it is about Joseph that this Pharaoh—only the latest in a succession of Pharaohs within the political institution—did not know is unclear and unstated. But far as epistemological amnesia screams for narrative and interpretive attention. His amnesia is corrosive to the communal and interpret of existence of the Hebrews. And it is from that abyss that the exodus-motif begins to birth Exodus-story.

But a universal politics must not make false promises either: after capitalism comes plenitude, the absence of alienation, and communal harmony: postpolitical 2.0. No. Antagonism is a constitutive element of our being. We are strangers, neighbors, and even enemies to ourselves. Post-capitalism will not be envy-free, ressentiment-free. A more just society predicated on the disavowal of symbolic castration (lack), envy, or ressentiment is a recipe for failure of the worse kind.

Since there is a reciprocity between causation and prevention, those same statistics show the conditions that prevent violence. These are: economic and political egalitarianism, with classless societies, no slavery or social classes, and minimal hierarchicalization in the political sphere; and relative freedom from the invidious display of wealth, boasting, sensitivity to insult, and other social and cultural characteristics that tend to stimulate shame, envy, and violence. What is extraordinary about the range of cultures we have discussed so far is that for all their variety, ranging from modern (post)-industrial economies to Anabaptist communal farming communities to the most primitive non-literate hunting-and-gathering societies, they have two things in common: in all of them, wealth and political power are shared unusually equitably, and they all have remarkably reduced rates of violence. It would appear that social and political egalitarianism (democracy) serves to diminish both shame and violence quite effectively, across a wide range of differing levels of overall economic and cultural development.

The interval between the first and second wars in Iraq (1991 and 2003) has seen a remarkable shift from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu in the discourse about contemporary warfare. Clausewitz enjoyed an undreamed of renaissance in the USA after the Vietnam War and seemed to have attained the status of master thinker. On War enabled many theorists to recognize the causes of America’s traumatic defeat in Southeast Asia, as well as the conditions for gaining victory in the future. More recently, however, he has very nearly been outlawed. The reason for this change can be found in two separate developments. Firstly, there has been an unleashing of war and violence in the ongoing civil wars and massacres, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, in the secessionist wars in the former Yugoslavia, and in the persistence of inter-communal violence along the fringes of Europe’s former empires. These developments seemed to indicate a departure from interstate wars, for which Clausewitz’s theory appeared to be designed, and the advent of a new era of civil wars, non-state wars, and social anarchy. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War seemed to offer a better understanding of these kinds of war, because he lived in an era of never-ending civil wars. Secondly, the reason for the change from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu is connected with the ‘revolution in military affairs’. The concepts of Strategic Information Warfare (SIW) and fourth generation warfare have made wide use of Sun Tzu’s thought to explain and illustrate their position. The ‘real father’ of ‘shock and awe’ in the Iraq War of 2003 was Sun Tzu, argued one commentator in the Asia Times. Some pundits even claimed triumphantly that Sun Tzu had defeated Clausewitz in this war, because the US Army conducted the campaign in accordance with the principles of Sun Tzu, whereas the Russian advisers of the Iraqi army had relied on Clausewitz and the Russian defence against Napoleon’s army in 1812. The triumphant attitude has long been abandoned.

A common Amish question in their communal decision making reflects that group’s dedication to simplicity: “What will this do to our community?” It has been suggested that such a deliberation is also a great one for the people of the world. There are two kinds of people: those who sincerely ponder this question, and those so preoccupied with other interests that they don’t consider it in their business operations, religious leadership, philosophical perspectives, or theological understandings. But the global community that is relentlessly and unevenly forming still includes a wide swath of those who have not yet joined the global community movement. For the latter group, humanitarian efforts still appear to be nothing more than political maneuverings, personal image enhancements, or financial advantages in tax benefits. A genuine commitment to improve the living conditions of the world community has not yet appeared on their radar screens as worth personal investment.

I yield to none in a genuine desire to promote communal harmony and amity. If I have violated the political convention of the day by revealing the very unpleasant but historical truth about the relations between the Hindus and Muslims, I have done so in order to elucidate and explain the course of events in the past, not unmingled with the hope that our leaders would drawn some useful lessons for the future.

The Ticklish Subject shows how today, in spite of the decline of the paternal metaphor and the inefficacy of ethical-political principles, global capitalist relations of production actually structure an ever more prohibitive and homogenized social reality: The true horror lies not in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital but, rather, in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course; that there is in fact no particular Secret Agent animating it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today’s world. (Ticklish, p. 218) Multiculturalism – as well as postmodern efforts to reduce truth to “narratives” or “solidarity of belief” – simply further the interests of global capital. Žižek notes wryly that liberal pseudo-leftists really know all of this, but the problem is that they want to maintain their relatively comfortable lifestyles (bought at the expense of suffering in the Third World), and meanwhile to maintain the pose of revolutionary “beautiful souls.” Postmodern “post-politics” replaces the recognition of global ideological divisions with an emphasis on the collaboration of enlightened experts, technocrats, and specialists who negotiate to reach compromises. Such pragmatic “administration of social matters” accepts in advance the very global capitalist framework that determines the profitability of the compromise (Ticklish, p. 199). This suspension of the space for authentic politics leads to what Žižek calls “postmodern racism,” which ignores the universal rights of the political subject, proliferates divisions along cultural lines, and prevents the working class from politicizing its predicament. Even more seriously, according to Žižek, post-politics no longer merely represses the political, but forecloses it. Thus instead of violence as the neurotic “return of the repressed,” we see signs of a new kind of irrational and excessive violence. This new manifestation of violence results from the (psychotic) foreclosure of the Name of the Father that leads to a “return in the Real.” This violence is thus akin to the psychotic passage a l’acte: “a cruelty whose manifestations range from ‘fundamentalist’ racist and/or religious slaughter to the ‘senseless’ outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reason” (Ticklish, p. 198). Where then, is the power to combat such foreclosure? The Ticklish Subject shows that the subversive power of subjectivity arises only when the subject annuls himself as subject: the acknowledgment of the integral division or gap in subjectivity allows the move from subjection to subjective destitution. Insofar as the subject concedes to the inherent failure of symbolic practices, he no longer presupposes himself as a unified subject. He acknowledges the nonexistence of the symbolic big Other and the monstrosity of the Real. Such acceptance involves the full assertion – rather than the effacement – of the gap between the Real and its symbolization. In contrast to the artificial object character of the imaginary capitalist ego, The Ticklish Subject discloses the “empty place” of the subject as a purely structural function, and shows that this functioning emerges only as the withdrawal from one’s substantial identity, as the disintegration of the “self” that is situated and defined within a communal universe of meaning.

The end of the story is not about individuals going to heaven but about a community reconciled to God, living together in a city: a communal life where humans have taken the good gifts of God’s creation and collaborated to build something new.

since there is no unchangeable human nature, our very intimate fear of death is already politically overdetermined, for it arises in an individualist and egotistical society with little sense of communal solidarity;

The diversity of the experiences of social unrest and protest in Kabylia, the Mzab Valley and the towns of the south of Algeria was clear, notably in the communal dimension of the violence in the Mzab and the established history of social protest in Kabylia in contrast to its relatively recent appearance in previously quiescent towns such as Ouargla and In Salah. Shared themes and elements were, none the less, obvious.

That republican vision can help us see what it would take to both establish and sustain meaningful individual and communal self-rule. It aims at a politics of common action and of solidarity achieved by engagement and accommodation, not hostility and exclusion. In this sense, seeing how the Constitution can serve as a means of greater unity in our society also involves seeing more clearly what the republicanism that underlies it might consist of. But the Constitution is not just an expression of that republican worldview. It is intended to inculcate it and to convey it to citizens, so that life under the kind of regime created by the Constitution can be understood in part as a formation in republicanism.

The time period covered in NITRO - 1995 to 2001 - represents a number of themes that transcend its subject matter; notably, the rise of early Internet culture, the still-active notion of 'mainstream', the limits of creative expression, ‘edgy’ entertainment that pushed the envelope, television and its cultural power (including, as a corollary, the decline of the televised communal experience), and the relative tranquility of America’s cultural, economic and political affairs. ...it was in this context that the explosion in wrestling’s popularity occurred.

[A]s an anthropologist, my job is not to love or hate, like or dislike, admire or disdain others. My purpose is primarily to understand not only how things are, but how/why they became the way they are…if I could sum up the most valuable thing I have learned from anthropology, it is this: the problems we have in this world are not Black, Muslim, Russian, Chinese, white, and so on. Our problems are simply human problems. They happen because we are born or thrown into certain contexts, places, circumstances, and structures that are often much bigger than ourselves, and we then try to make sense, resist, fight, accept, or give in to our circumstances in various ways. All our human successes and failures highly depend on our will, awareness, and the resources available to us to make individual or communal changes. [From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]

In the early twentieth century, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski ventured to the Trobriand Islands, part of present-day Papau New Guinea, in order to study the region's practice of gift exchange. People of the islands would travel great distances to offer one another symbolic, seemingly worthless necklaces and armbands. Malinowski believed he was observing a kind of soft power. Gift exchange was not a form of altruism, since there was the expectation of reciprocity. And it wasn't random, since the flow of gifts followed discernible patterns. Instead, he argued that this act of giving and receiving bound everyone in a political process. The expansion of these exchanges across the islands represented an expansion of political authority. The sociologist Marcel Mauss found Malinowski's explanation insufficient. He felt that Malinowski placed too much emphasis on transaction, rather than how feelings of indebtedness actually work. In 1923, he published "Essay on the Gift," which placed Malinowski's island networks in conversation with gifting practices in other societies, like indigenous traditions in the Americas, systems of communal ownership in China. Mauss introduced the idea of delayed reciprocity. You give expecting to receive. Yet we often give and receive according to intermittent, sometimes random intervals. That time lag is where a relationship emerges. Perhaps gifts serve political ends. But Mauss believed that they strengthened the bonds between people and communities. Your obligation isn't just to repay the gift according to a one-to-one ratio. You're beholden to the "spirit of the gift", a kind of shared faith. Every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one's ring of associations.

She was intelligent, charitable, and insightful. Her philosophy provided communal peace in a city with many political and religious divisions. Moreover, Hypatia never wavered. She epitomized resilience. The highway that women in STEM walk today would not have been possible without the faint trail that emerged out of fourth-century Alexandria forged by Hypatia.

[I]t is significant that in this case, where the sudden amalgamation of a number of isolated cantons into a new political unity might have so naturally suggested the idea of a representative constitution in the modern sense, no trace of any such idea occurs; in fact the very opposite course was followed, and the communal organization was simply reproduced in a far more absurd manner than before. Nowhere perhaps is it so clearly apparent as in this instance, that in the view of antiquity a free constitution was inseparable from the appearance of the sovereign people in person in the primary assemblies, or from a city; and that the great fundamental idea of the modern republican-constitutional state, viz. the expression of the sovereignty of the people by a representative assembly — an idea without which a free state would be a chaos — is wholly modern. Even the Italian polity, although in its somewhat representative senates and in the diminished importance of the comitia it approximated to a free state, never was able in the case either of Rome or of Italia to cross the boundary-line.

Continetti concludes: "An intellectual, financial, technological, and social infrastructure to undermine global capitalism has been developing for more than two decades, and we are in the middle of its latest manifestation… The occupiers’ tent cities are self-governing, communal, egalitarian, and networked. They reject everyday politics. They foster bohemianism and confrontation with the civil authorities. They are the Phalanx and New Harmony, updated for postmodern times and plopped in the middle of our cities. There may not be that many activists in the camps. They may appear silly, even grotesque. They may resist "agendas" and "policies." They may not agree on what they want or when they want it. And they may disappear as winter arrives and the liberals whose parks they are occupying lose patience with them. But the utopians and anarchists will reappear… The occupation will persist as long as individuals believe that inequalities of property are unjust and that the brotherhood of man can be established on earth." You can see why anarchists might find this sort of thing refreshingly honest. The author makes no secret of his desire to see us all in prison, but at least he’s willing to make an honest assessment of what the stakes are. Still, there is one screamingly dishonest theme that runs throughout the Weekly Standard piece: the intentional conflation of "democracy" with "everyday politics," that is, lobbying, fund-raising, working for electoral campaigns, and otherwise participating in the current American political system. The premise is that the author stands in favor of democracy, and that occupiers, in rejecting the existing system, are against it. In fact, the conservative tradition that produced and sustains journals like The Weekly Stand is profoundly antidemocratic. Its heroes, from Plato to Edmund Burke, are, almost uniformly, men who opposed democracy on principle, and its readers are still fond of statements like "America is not a democracy, it’s a republic." What’s more, the sort of arguments Continetti breaks out here--that anarchist-inspire movements are unstable, confused, threaten established orders of property, and must necessarily lead to violence--are precisely the arguments that have, for centuries. been leveled by conservatives against democracy itself. In reality, OWS is anarchist-inspired, but for precisely that reason it stands squarely in the very tradition of American popular democracy that conservatives like Continetti have always staunchly opposed. Anarchism does not mean the negation of democracy--or at least, any of the aspects of democracy that most American have historically liked. Rather, anarchism is a matter of taking those core democratic principles to their logical conclusions. The reason it’s difficult to see this is because the word "democracy" has had such an endlessly contested history: so much so that most American pundits and politicians, for instance, now use the term to refer to a form of government established with the explicit purpose of ensuring what John Adams once called "the horrors of democracy" would never come about. (p. 153-154)

Jinnah had, among other things, criticized the singing in government schools of the patriotic hymn ‘Vande Mataram’. Composed by the great Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the poem invoked Hindu temples, praised the Hindu goddess Durga, and spoke of seventy million Indians, each carrying a sword, ready to defend their motherland against invaders, who could be interpreted as being the British, or Muslims, or both. ‘Vande Mataram’ first became popular during the swadeshi movement of1905–07. The revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose named his political journal after it. Rabindranath Tagore was among the first to set it to music. His version was sung by his niece Saraladevi Chaudhurani at the Banaras Congress of 1905. The same year, the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati rendered it into his language. In Bengali and Tamil, Kannada and Telugu, Hindi and Gujarati, the song had long been sung at nationalist meetings and processions. After the Congress governments took power in 1937, the song was sometimes sung at official functions. The Muslim League objected vigorously. One of its legislators called it ‘anti-Muslim’, another, ‘an insult to Islam’. Jinnah himself claimed the song was ‘not only idolatrous but in its origins and substance [was] a hymn to spread hatred for the Musalmans’. Nationalists in Bengal were adamant that the song was not aimed at Muslims.The prominent Calcutta Congressman Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to Gandhi that ‘the province (or at least the Hindu portion of it) is greatly perturbed over the controversy raised in certain Muslim circles over the song “Bande Mataram”. As far as I can judge, all shades of Hindu opinion are unanimous in opposing any attempts to ban the song in Congress meetings and conferences.’ Bose himself thought that ‘we should think a hundred times before we take any steps in the direction of banning the song’. The social worker Satis Dasgupta told Gandhi that ‘Vande Mataram’ was ‘out and out a patriotic song—a song in which all the children of the mother[land] can participate, be they Hindu or Mussalman’. It did use Hindu images, but such imagery was common in Bengal, where even Muslim poets like Nazrul Islam often referred to Hindu gods and legends. ‘Vande Mataram’, argued Dasgupta, was ‘never a provincial cry and never surely a communal cry’. Faced with Jinnah’s complaints on the one side and this defence by Bengali patriots on the other, Gandhi suggested a compromise: that Congress governments should have only the first two verses sung. These evoked the motherland without specifying any religious identity. But this concession made many Bengalis ‘sore at heart’; they wanted the whole song sung. On the other side, Muslims were not satisfied either; for, the ascription of a mother-like status to India was dangerously close to idol worship.

The relation between the SS's Hindutva and its Mafia Character is one of inverse proportionality: on a number of occasions, the SS called off Hindu nationalist agitations in exchange for money. The Shiv Sena(SS) support to the Indira Gandhi's Emergency dictatorship should be seen in the same light; it was the only "communal" organisation not to be banned.

What I mean when I talk about sovereignty is that "we have a different way of being". Those of us who are organising around the idea of sovereignty are not asking for inclusion within the capitalist system. We're not asking for the so-called benefits of a capitalist system, which is always based on exclusions because it is based on privatising what was once communal and shared. We're saying no to being incorporated. We're saying yes to a completely different way of being, to a society based on commonality and plurality, not the fundamentalism of markets, religion, and the gender binary. We're not pushing to get in. Why should we want to enmesh ourselves in an economy and a political system that is driving the planet and our species toward destruction?

Communalism is the political exploitation of a religious ideology.

Modern political systems are labeled liberal democracies because they unite two disparate principles. Liberalism is based on a rule of law that maintains a level playing field for all citizens, particularly the right to private property, which is critical for economic growth and prosperity. The democratic part, political choice, is the enforcer of communal choices and accountable to the citizenry as a whole. Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed revolts around the world of the democratic part of this equation against the liberal one.

Everything about Paris fascinated me, including the politics. After the revolution, things were unstable but hopeful: new movements were springing up everywhere. One of them embraced the socialist ideal that property should be shared; another proposed that God was not a paternalistic figure but, rather, an androgynous one. There was communal living, and communal loving, as well.

Somehow Malaysia must find a way to create racially neutral space in the public sphere. This is not an easy task as most of the country’s social and political institutions are tied to racial identity. Because of the connection between race and religion, it would be virtually impossible to see religion as a vehicle. The educational system has proved to be an imperfect tool of national identity. For many, it remains a communalized institution that has powerful political symbolism.

Assimilation: The Ideal and the Reality By B. A. Nelson, Ph.D Milton M. Gordon, in his Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins, has defined three discrete stages in the development of this concept. The ideal of “Anglo-conformity,” which “demanded the complete renunciation of the immigrant’s ancestral culture in favor of the behavior and values of the Anglo-Saxon core group” prevailed almost until the end of the nineteenth century. It was superseded in the following two decades by the “melting pot” ideal, which heralded “a biological merger of the Anglo-Saxon peoples with other immigrant groups and a blending of their respective cultures into a new indigenous American type.” During the 1920s, the ideal of ”cultural pluralism” came into vogue, postulating “the preservation of the communal life and significant portions of the culture of the later immigrant groups within the context of American citizenship and political and economic integration into American society.” … total and widespread acceptance of “Anglo-conformity” would be an impossible anachronism in the 1980s, when the majority of the nation’s immigrants come from Third World nations. Despite the glaring contradiction between the ideal of “Anglo-conformity” and the reality of contemporary immigration, one aspect of “Anglo-conformity” does, however, linger on as a phantom “residue,” much like the whiff of scent which remains in a long-emptied bottle. Although both leaders and the led know that “Anglo-conformity” has become an impossible ideal, both retain this one notion that has become a perennial source of solace whenever anyone dares to suggest that future immigration might challenge and deny the national premise of e pluribus unum. … This notion assures those who believe in it that, even if the “Anglo-Saxon core group” dwindles in numbers and power to the point of becoming marginal, the Anglo-Saxon political heritage will yet survive. … This last “residue” of belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority would be simply an innocuous illusion were there not indications that official public policy is moving in a direction directly contrary to the Anglo-Saxon political tradition. ,,, The new American dilemma, as fateful as the one once addressed by Gunnar Myrdal, is the nation’s drift away from its tradition of “liberal pluralism,” in which “government gives no formal recognition to categories of people based on race or ethnicity,” and towards a new, “corporate pluralism,” which “envisages a nation where its racial and ethnic entities are formally recognized as such -- are given formal standing as groups in the national polity -- and where patterns of political power and economic reward are based on a distributive formula which postulates group rights and which defines group membership as an important factor in the outcome for individuals.” … Corporate pluralism is, in fact, the opposite of the popular notion of assimilation as the disappearance of alien characteristics in an all-transforming native culture. Since corporate pluralism replaces “individual meritocracy” with “group rewards,” it strongly discourages assimilation…

Much has been made of the fact that so many sixties radicals went on to become hardcore capitalists, profiting by the system they once critiqued and wanted to destroy. But no one assumes responsibility for the shift in values that made the peace and love culture turn toward the politics of profit and power. That shift came about because the free love that flourished in utopian communal hippie enclaves, where everyone was young and carefree, did not take root in the daily lives of ordinary working and retired people. Young progressives committed to social justice who had found it easy to maintain radical politics when they were living on the edge, on the outside, did not want to do the hard work of changing and reorganizing our existing system in ways that would affirm the values of peace and love, or democracy and justice. They fell into despair. And that despair made capitulation to the existing social order the only place of comfort.

The reason is that this knowledge has no cultural depth or complexity whatever. It is concerned only with the most immediate practical (that is, economic and sometimes political) results. It has, for instance, never mastered the crucial distinction between experiment and experience. Experience, which is the basis of culture, tends always toward wholeness because it is interested in the meaning of what has happened; it is necessarily as interested in what does not work as in what does. It cannot hope or desire without remembering. Its approach to possibility is always conditioned by its remembrance of failure. It is therefore not “objective,” but is at once personal and communal.

Thus on all sides we have a triple constriction of the means of communication: the elimination of the less profitable means in favor of the more profitable; the fact that these means are in the hands of the very limited class of wealthy men, and thus naturally express the opinions of that class; and the further fact that, as one of the chief avenues to political and personal power, they attract above all those ambitious for such power. That system which more than all others should contribute to social homeostasis is thrown directly into the hands of those most concerned in the game of power and money, which we have already seen to be one of the chief anti-homeostatic elements in the community. It is no wonder then that the larger communities, subject to this disruptive influence, contain far less communally available information than the smaller communities, to say nothing of the human elements of which all communities are built up. Like the wolf pack, although let us hope to a lesser extent, the State is stupider than most of its components. This runs counter to a tendency much voiced among business executives, heads of great laboratories, and the like, to assume that because the community is larger than the individual it is also more intelligent. Some of this opinion is due to no more than a childish delight in the large and the lavish. Some of it is due to a sense of the possibilities of a large organization for good. Not a little of it, however, is nothing more than an eye for the main chance and a lusting after the fleshpots of Egypt.

The basic thought running through the Manifesto - that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and the oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles - this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.