I followed the stories of the archbishops, two in the red corner and two in
the blue corner and found their performance on convincing. By way of
comment I am submit my article "The Year Heaven fell silent at last". you
can use my name Henk vander Laan
The Year when Heaven fell silent at last
A Summing up of a Search
for Insight into the Story of Humanity
“ … On many occasions when I’m dancing,
I have felt touched by something sacred.
In those moments, I’ve felt my spirit soar
And become one with everything that exists.
I become the stars and the moon . . .
The singer and the song . . .
I keep on dancing and dancing . . . and dancing,
Until there is only . . . the dance.”
Michael Joseph Jackson –-- 1958 -2009
It was in what the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the Age of Extremes that
the storm clouds gathered, those of the Second Great Depression (1929 –
1934), - the First being from 1873 to 1896, in the period he called the Age
of Empire (1875 – 1914) that began with the ending of slavery and slave
trade all over the world and with the colonial genocides in the Congo,
Namibia and Tanzania.
This period was followed by the subsequent resurgence of a single-minded
Fascism in Europe, Central and South America, - the original one being that
which gave rise to the Roman Empire (46 BCE – 410 CE).
Then followed the tornadoes of World War I and II in Europe, Asia, Oceania,
the Middle East and Africa with their genocides in Europe and Asia, the
South-East region of it of China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, finally
resulting in the dissolution of the German, the Austria-Hungarian (Holy
Roman), the Third Reich, the British, French, Japanese Empire of the Sun,
American and Russian Empires.
It then came to pass that a number of American historians and their
publishers undertook to write the Story of Humankind, as recorded in stone,
sculpture, architecture, paint, networks of road and sea transport and
trade, and above all the oral and written communications of the artists and
thinkers.
From the earliest communities through their development into tribal and
national members of a globalised society, coming together in the United
Nations Organisation established in 1945, the books they wrote and
published provided outlines of their social, economic and political
histories and described the traditional as well as scientific growth of all
fields of knowledge of people in their environment of earth and cosmos as
well as of its metaphysical significance, to become cultural habitats for
humans. They are the stories of their societies’ evolution, as they engaged
the dynamics of peace with security in family and community as well as
those of war with destruction of what had not been secured in their
cultural habitats.
Earmarking this evolution for understanding were forms of metaphysical
thinking, denominated as religious (from religare = to create cohesion)
ideologies of salvation, that were able to restore the balance disturbed by
unequal development in ways of living, thinking, working and playing within
tribal and national borders and also internationally. These were
promulgated by wise men and women, whose ways of thinking were listened to
and followed by populations of tribal, national and international
dimensions.
The main groups were described as Animist (Spirit or Shamanist), Hindu,
Jaïn, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Judaic, Christian, Tao, Islamic, Confucian,
Shinto, Sikh, Bahai, and those linked to a Hero, Prophet, Sacred Books
(Baghavad Gita, Avesta, Tao tê Ching, Torah, Guru Grant Sahib, Gospels,
Koran, Hadith), some of which produced Codes of Laws (surviving for Jews,
Roman Catholics and Muslims in Mitzvot and Talmud with Pirke Abot (The
Wisdom of the Fathers), Canon Law and Sharia), gradually giving way to
Science’s analytical way of thinking with technological insights and
skills as well as considerations of legal and in particular constitutional
structuring of the ways of the human community.
Even the Way of Science, piloted by the Money made and lost in the Markets,
had its books to-live-by with The Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital, and
all of them had a persisting Salvation Dynamic in them to give purpose and
direction to the people’s logistical progression, as a response to a
developing understanding of the forces of their changing physical and
social environment, called forth by the evolving interaction of living and
self-conscious beings with this environment.
In my book In an African Direction I have laid out the ways of thinking
by which people were made to cohere in communities from biological families
to globally connected individuals and their groupings.
The Ways of Family – Clan – Tribe – City – Nation – Empire – United Nations
and their manner of cohering through the revelations of the interpreters of
their activities of hunting – farming – herding – commerce – industry were
spread with the help of the developments of science and technology, driven
by the cultural dynamo of their culture stories on the wings of globalising
transport and communication.
From the earliest tales of ecstatic experiences of the shamans of the old
and new stone ages through those of the urban civilisations, their nations
and empires the metaphysical thinking, that spun the stories of human
existence and its progression, sought divine, heavenly authentification
until the present age of globalisation, when one by one the heavenly voices
have fallen silent till people coming out of this schizophrenia of culture
have ended up having to speak and listen to each other concerning the
mystery of human existence, and do so with the compassion of understanding.
Of those who can still hear a Voice from Heaven there now remain
principally only the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is struggling with an
identity crisis of national proportions, seen in their search for where the
voice of Allah can be heard, while the fact is that breakthrough ideas
proceed from human minds anywhere in the world where there is the required
need and room for their genesis.
When there is not this saving understanding of the social forces loose in a
nation and the world at large, it can only bring confusion, strife and war,
for which the social, economic and political fact of human globalisation
logistically demands the most effective weapons of mass destruction, the
nuclear ones.
In my book Empires of the Moon I tell of the main adviser to the Emperor of
Europe, Charlemagne (742-814), the monk Alcuin of York (735-804), who
taught his pupils of the school he founded at the imperial court in Tours
in the South of France that Vox populi Vox Dei est.
It must have been about the briefest lesson in democratic politics ever
given, but it took Europe well over a 1000 years to begin learning it, and
the ability to perceive and communicate the truth of a social, economic and
political situation still requires a lot more learning, that needs to be
reflected in appropriate Constitutions. Among other phenomena of political
exchange between electorate and elected, the guided and misguided efforts
at designing a Constitution of the People of Kenya over a period of more
than 15 years is making this very clear.
With every country its government professes to be some kind of democracy,
Religious, Christian, Islamic, Social, Liberal, or in the case of China
based on an Ancient Mandate of Heaven, understood as that of the People but
then in the abstract, secured against the confusions of reality t. v.
History shows that there cannot be a qualification for Democracy as a
definition of how humankind with its dynamic for linking up needs to build
governance structures, that has to be guided by a Charter of Human Rights
as agreed upon by the United Nations aware of the changing circumstances of
the Human Condition.
Still bothered by the Voice there is the United Kingdom with its State
Church and divinely consecrated King or Queen, a tradition that keeps
confusing its democratic constitution, and also the Presidency of the
United States with the expectation for it to have prophetic empowerment.
But then Barack Husein Obama appeared in Washington and he could hear the
whole world and knew how to find saving ways of escape into showing
understanding and even into presenting this American Dream and its
firepower as commedia, divine as well as human, an enduring culture
matrix.
. There also remains the ‘shock and awe’ of terror-striking Believers, who
listen to their bombs as echoes from the Voice they call by Name, but which
no longer reaches them, leaving them like Saitan sustained in Hell by
hearing in his mind the sound of the words with which the God he loves
exiled him.
In an anachronistic strategy of responding to the primal calls of culture
the Roman Catholic Church bases its authority on the celibacy of its
priesthood as a power source found in the Eros symbol, that mobilises all
human faculties for action, and also reveals itself in the phallic
projection of the High Priest’s mitre that symbolises the inflation of
power to unite the divine and the human for creativity, the way the crown
shows forth the bestowal of radiant intelligence that empowers the King to
govern.
These cultural insights have long since been very inadequately replaced in
legislation by leaders unaware of the problems that come invariably with
efforts to manipulate in reenacting rituals the power of not well
understood symbols, especially primal ones like Eros, the primary binder of
human relations, which has a vital need of biological guidance for its
truth.
On the matter of priestly celibacy a biographical note might throw some
light. It was in July, 1953, that I and 30 or so of my classmates of the
Third Year Divinity course of St. Joseph’s Missionary College in Mill Hill,
London, were called together on the eve of our ordination to the
sub-diaconate in the Roman Catholic Church to be addressed by an old
Tyrolese priest, who taught the Moral Theology course in the College. With
a happy smile on his face he explained to us the facts of life concerning
the office of the sub-diaconate, that it would elevate us to the status of
brides of God. In my mind this hieros gamos (sacred wedding) idea clashed
with that of becoming an empire-building official in the British or Belgian
colonies charged with letting the humble people of these lands share in the
benefits to humankind, offered them by the most powerful Church in the
world, the Roman Catholic one.
After this difficult to digest idea our teacher administered to us an oath,
not that of a celibacy, which we had already taken for granted as coming
with the territory, and into which, as I saw it, he had given us his
personal insight, but the notorious Anti-Modernism oath, a by management
paranoia induced potpourri of philosophical propositions, the holders of
which were damned and expelled without a hearing.
Since none of them contributed to a life in Africa I took the oath without
a qualm, unaware that I would eventually subscribe to their basic reform of
needed changes in message and practice, and then come to see this as
impossible without radical constitutional reorientation of the purpose and
the total overhaul of the management structure of the project teams.
Coming back to the pilgrimage centres of the Great Religions, none of them
has succeeded in unifying their believers not even with their dedicated
codes of law, that have taken the place of the capacities inherited among
the tribal shamans to give healing, communal and inter-communal
reconciliation as well as spiritual invigoration to their people in their
progression towards constitutional governance in balancing control of
social and economic changes brought about by their developing scientific
insights and technological skills.
All of the people converging in their diverse cultural streams historically
experienced this legacy of a divine connection as a road block in the
direction of a working democratic government, that of the three arms of
Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary, of which the last one still
held on for the longest time to a vestige of an ancient heavenly
connection, that keeps derailing true democratic governance in spite of the
supervisory efforts of the Media and their criticisms and exposures.
The philosophy behind Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media, of
which the theme is his saying, “The Medium is the Message”, gives us
insight into the philosopher Mircea Eliade’s approach to the subject of
‘religious phenomena’, like those claimed by the religions, as the most
powerful of all signs representing society-constituting factors and the
need for especially this particular factor to keep pace with social,
economic and political developments in human progression on the wheels of
transport and the waves of communication.
This is the combining element of community building, Eliade says, that
cannot be grasped by means of physiology, biology, neurology, psychology,
sociology, economics, linguistics, arts, not even the
celebrities-generating performing arts, or any academic study approach,
because they miss the one unique and irreducible source of power held by
this quintessential appearance in the history of the progression of human
society - ‘the element of the sacred’.
In the performing arts, those of music, singing, dancing, acting, poetry
and oratory, Michael Jackson has after his death been recognised as coming
in our time nearest to giving the global Message responding to the global
Medium by laying out his humanity before the world.
He will have been a true Shaman for the worldwide appearance of the
’element of the sacred’ in a global community, when this leads to an
understanding of the mystery of humanity that becomes a cultural dynamo,
this Symbol seen in the trance brought about by song and dance, which
Michael Jackson called the ‘ecstasy of a union with God’ (‘whatever one
conceives God to be’), and for which he like the tribal shamans of yore
knew the techniques, at a time that this dynamo begins to appear for all to
see in the energising rhythm of teamwork for survival, also known as love
of family, and not as it has been doing till now in Money and its
imperialist and gaming power structures.
An appearance of this ‘element of the sacred’ in the 7th century CE is
signalled and explained by Karen Armstrong in her book Muhammad Prophet for
our Time, in which she narrates the coming to a peaceful understanding
between tribes brought by the followers of Prophet Muhammad, Peace be upon
him, coming as in a haj from Medina to Mecca, to dedicate the holy places
of Arabia to Allah, the One God, as Islamic monuments of unification and
peace for the Arabs and those that would join them.
Here they followed the other great religions with world centres for their
Message, like Jerusalem for the Jews, whose Prophets, including Jesus the
Christ, Peace be upon him, had the message of ‘human rights over Empire’,
which was appropriated politically in its Christian form by the Empire for
its Pax Romana immensa et augusta, when this Palestinian Centre of Jahweh
was destroyed and in essence transferred to Rome.
The ’element of the sacred’ in its amazing cultural history is one that can
be seen to light up the human mind, physically as well as psychologically,
with an existential insight that identifies a transcendental link with its
appearance, traditionally known as ‘Falling in Love’, ‘Getting Religion’,
‘Experiencing Art’ and gaining a crucial ‘cognitive insight’, an insight
also described by Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard in his condemnation
of the Church in the owners, the Clergy, for losing its truth.
It gives a human community the ability to extend the biological structuring
of the family-bonding dynamic by bringing into play a spiritual,
metaphysical one and let this override and erode it, then to restore and
expand it with the help of a new and deeper insight in which more doors of
perception are opened in a thinking process that does not let itself be
tethered by insights so far gained, those revealed and accepted as magical
short cuts to community building in politically engaged Tribal Dreams,
World Religions and Social Ideologies.
As the hardened and sharply jagged forms round their adherents, which these
have become, those prototypes of global linking have been overtaken by the
demand for a transcendentally empowered unification of the humanised world
that is marked out by the scale of the logistical connections in its social
infrastructure.
The democracies with a leadership based simply on majority votes for
parties, those that have closed their ears to the insane lure of the call
to war, have now to overcome the self-destructive easy path to sinking into
kleptocracy with its community-ravishing activities, covered by a web of
lies and deception, that also maintained the heavenly links. For this they
have to gain the conviction that all the world’s assets are needed to
secure the survival of life, including the self-conscious one of humanity,
this being the touchstone of the morality in their system of values.
The Voice affirming Alcuin of York’s dictum Vox populi Vox Dei est, which
Democracy is expected to sound, will be found there where a population has
reached a sufficiently critical degree of enlightenment from educational
communications, provided by access to the inter-linked incidental
Thought-Hubs of the peoples of the earth. This access is measured by
ability to connect lines of thought wherever one comes across them, evoked
in the face of continuing existential challenges to Humanity.
With this understanding of the social forces loose in a nation and in
groups of nations, political leaders can openly and in a honest manner look
for and find the directing support, that builds effective legislation in a
country among the people of the God, whose voice to be listened to is the
one these men, women and children of the Earth are meant to be.
Henk J. van der Laan - Nairobi, June, 2009
e-mail : Kenya.Platoscorner@gmail.com
Postscript :
American political spokespersons, including their President, are fond of
comparing Kenya to South Korea by way of GDP, without mentioning that this
nation, North and South, has shared three millennia of meaningful cultural
history with China and Japan.
Political leaders should understand that a practical knowledge of cultural
history is the most important tool in their professional lives. It made
Churchill the great statesman he finally became. He called Uganda ‘The
Pearl of Africa’ and had a vision of the Nile beginning its journey to the
Mediterranean by going through a power-generating dam.
Obama on his first trip to Africa as US President was wise to go to Ghana,
for it is there as well as in Angola and at the Cape that Africa began
sharing history with the Western Empires, and how! As to Europe, people
were dying of hunger in 1944 in Amsterdam and yes in The Hague too, and
prisoners were killed in roadside executions. I witnessed it.
Many of the populations of the Americas barely survived this particular
historical experience, Africa’s people, however, did, sustained by their
tribal kinship structures, now to refocus the light of intellect on working
their survival strategy in changed circumstances.
Militarily constructed Empires cannot deal with the rhythm of a
population’s life and therefore spin it out into economic, political and
religious stories, that are mostly legislation borrowing its energy from
‘an appearance of an element of the sacred’, but often no more than a
conspiracy leading to war and genocide.
History is about life, and so what matters most is not the manner we relate
to the people with whom we do business, but the way we do this to those
with whom we work, play, learn, eat, sleep and dream of what a life in sync
can be.
I followed the stories of the archbishops, two in the red corner and two in the blue corner and found their performance on convincing. By way of comment I am submit my article "The Year Heaven fell silent at last". you can use my name Henk vander Laan
The Year when Heaven fell silent at last
A Summing up of a Search for Insight into the Story of Humanity
“ … On many occasions when I’m dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred. In those moments, I’ve felt my spirit soar And become one with everything that exists. I become the stars and the moon . . . The singer and the song . . . I keep on dancing and dancing . . . and dancing, Until there is only . . . the dance.”
Michael Joseph Jackson –-- 1958 -2009
It was in what the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the Age of Extremes that the storm clouds gathered, those of the Second Great Depression (1929 – 1934), - the First being from 1873 to 1896, in the period he called the Age of Empire (1875 – 1914) that began with the ending of slavery and slave trade all over the world and with the colonial genocides in the Congo, Namibia and Tanzania. This period was followed by the subsequent resurgence of a single-minded Fascism in Europe, Central and South America, - the original one being that which gave rise to the Roman Empire (46 BCE – 410 CE). Then followed the tornadoes of World War I and II in Europe, Asia, Oceania, the Middle East and Africa with their genocides in Europe and Asia, the South-East region of it of China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, finally resulting in the dissolution of the German, the Austria-Hungarian (Holy Roman), the Third Reich, the British, French, Japanese Empire of the Sun, American and Russian Empires. It then came to pass that a number of American historians and their publishers undertook to write the Story of Humankind, as recorded in stone, sculpture, architecture, paint, networks of road and sea transport and trade, and above all the oral and written communications of the artists and thinkers. From the earliest communities through their development into tribal and national members of a globalised society, coming together in the United Nations Organisation established in 1945, the books they wrote and published provided outlines of their social, economic and political histories and described the traditional as well as scientific growth of all fields of knowledge of people in their environment of earth and cosmos as well as of its metaphysical significance, to become cultural habitats for humans. They are the stories of their societies’ evolution, as they engaged the dynamics of peace with security in family and community as well as those of war with destruction of what had not been secured in their cultural habitats. Earmarking this evolution for understanding were forms of metaphysical thinking, denominated as religious (from religare = to create cohesion) ideologies of salvation, that were able to restore the balance disturbed by unequal development in ways of living, thinking, working and playing within tribal and national borders and also internationally. These were promulgated by wise men and women, whose ways of thinking were listened to and followed by populations of tribal, national and international dimensions. The main groups were described as Animist (Spirit or Shamanist), Hindu, Jaïn, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Judaic, Christian, Tao, Islamic, Confucian, Shinto, Sikh, Bahai, and those linked to a Hero, Prophet, Sacred Books (Baghavad Gita, Avesta, Tao tê Ching, Torah, Guru Grant Sahib, Gospels, Koran, Hadith), some of which produced Codes of Laws (surviving for Jews, Roman Catholics and Muslims in Mitzvot and Talmud with Pirke Abot (The Wisdom of the Fathers), Canon Law and Sharia), gradually giving way to Science’s analytical way of thinking with technological insights and skills as well as considerations of legal and in particular constitutional structuring of the ways of the human community. Even the Way of Science, piloted by the Money made and lost in the Markets, had its books to-live-by with The Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital, and all of them had a persisting Salvation Dynamic in them to give purpose and direction to the people’s logistical progression, as a response to a developing understanding of the forces of their changing physical and social environment, called forth by the evolving interaction of living and self-conscious beings with this environment. In my book In an African Direction I have laid out the ways of thinking by which people were made to cohere in communities from biological families to globally connected individuals and their groupings. The Ways of Family – Clan – Tribe – City – Nation – Empire – United Nations and their manner of cohering through the revelations of the interpreters of their activities of hunting – farming – herding – commerce – industry were spread with the help of the developments of science and technology, driven by the cultural dynamo of their culture stories on the wings of globalising transport and communication. From the earliest tales of ecstatic experiences of the shamans of the old and new stone ages through those of the urban civilisations, their nations and empires the metaphysical thinking, that spun the stories of human existence and its progression, sought divine, heavenly authentification until the present age of globalisation, when one by one the heavenly voices have fallen silent till people coming out of this schizophrenia of culture have ended up having to speak and listen to each other concerning the mystery of human existence, and do so with the compassion of understanding. Of those who can still hear a Voice from Heaven there now remain principally only the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is struggling with an identity crisis of national proportions, seen in their search for where the voice of Allah can be heard, while the fact is that breakthrough ideas proceed from human minds anywhere in the world where there is the required need and room for their genesis. When there is not this saving understanding of the social forces loose in a nation and the world at large, it can only bring confusion, strife and war, for which the social, economic and political fact of human globalisation logistically demands the most effective weapons of mass destruction, the nuclear ones. In my book Empires of the Moon I tell of the main adviser to the Emperor of Europe, Charlemagne (742-814), the monk Alcuin of York (735-804), who taught his pupils of the school he founded at the imperial court in Tours in the South of France that Vox populi Vox Dei est. It must have been about the briefest lesson in democratic politics ever given, but it took Europe well over a 1000 years to begin learning it, and the ability to perceive and communicate the truth of a social, economic and political situation still requires a lot more learning, that needs to be reflected in appropriate Constitutions. Among other phenomena of political exchange between electorate and elected, the guided and misguided efforts at designing a Constitution of the People of Kenya over a period of more than 15 years is making this very clear. With every country its government professes to be some kind of democracy, Religious, Christian, Islamic, Social, Liberal, or in the case of China based on an Ancient Mandate of Heaven, understood as that of the People but then in the abstract, secured against the confusions of reality t. v. History shows that there cannot be a qualification for Democracy as a definition of how humankind with its dynamic for linking up needs to build governance structures, that has to be guided by a Charter of Human Rights as agreed upon by the United Nations aware of the changing circumstances of the Human Condition. Still bothered by the Voice there is the United Kingdom with its State Church and divinely consecrated King or Queen, a tradition that keeps confusing its democratic constitution, and also the Presidency of the United States with the expectation for it to have prophetic empowerment. But then Barack Husein Obama appeared in Washington and he could hear the whole world and knew how to find saving ways of escape into showing understanding and even into presenting this American Dream and its firepower as commedia, divine as well as human, an enduring culture matrix. . There also remains the ‘shock and awe’ of terror-striking Believers, who listen to their bombs as echoes from the Voice they call by Name, but which no longer reaches them, leaving them like Saitan sustained in Hell by hearing in his mind the sound of the words with which the God he loves exiled him. In an anachronistic strategy of responding to the primal calls of culture the Roman Catholic Church bases its authority on the celibacy of its priesthood as a power source found in the Eros symbol, that mobilises all human faculties for action, and also reveals itself in the phallic projection of the High Priest’s mitre that symbolises the inflation of power to unite the divine and the human for creativity, the way the crown shows forth the bestowal of radiant intelligence that empowers the King to govern. These cultural insights have long since been very inadequately replaced in legislation by leaders unaware of the problems that come invariably with efforts to manipulate in reenacting rituals the power of not well understood symbols, especially primal ones like Eros, the primary binder of human relations, which has a vital need of biological guidance for its truth. On the matter of priestly celibacy a biographical note might throw some light. It was in July, 1953, that I and 30 or so of my classmates of the Third Year Divinity course of St. Joseph’s Missionary College in Mill Hill, London, were called together on the eve of our ordination to the sub-diaconate in the Roman Catholic Church to be addressed by an old Tyrolese priest, who taught the Moral Theology course in the College. With a happy smile on his face he explained to us the facts of life concerning the office of the sub-diaconate, that it would elevate us to the status of brides of God. In my mind this hieros gamos (sacred wedding) idea clashed with that of becoming an empire-building official in the British or Belgian colonies charged with letting the humble people of these lands share in the benefits to humankind, offered them by the most powerful Church in the world, the Roman Catholic one. After this difficult to digest idea our teacher administered to us an oath, not that of a celibacy, which we had already taken for granted as coming with the territory, and into which, as I saw it, he had given us his personal insight, but the notorious Anti-Modernism oath, a by management paranoia induced potpourri of philosophical propositions, the holders of which were damned and expelled without a hearing. Since none of them contributed to a life in Africa I took the oath without a qualm, unaware that I would eventually subscribe to their basic reform of needed changes in message and practice, and then come to see this as impossible without radical constitutional reorientation of the purpose and the total overhaul of the management structure of the project teams. Coming back to the pilgrimage centres of the Great Religions, none of them has succeeded in unifying their believers not even with their dedicated codes of law, that have taken the place of the capacities inherited among the tribal shamans to give healing, communal and inter-communal reconciliation as well as spiritual invigoration to their people in their progression towards constitutional governance in balancing control of social and economic changes brought about by their developing scientific insights and technological skills. All of the people converging in their diverse cultural streams historically experienced this legacy of a divine connection as a road block in the direction of a working democratic government, that of the three arms of Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary, of which the last one still held on for the longest time to a vestige of an ancient heavenly connection, that keeps derailing true democratic governance in spite of the supervisory efforts of the Media and their criticisms and exposures. The philosophy behind Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media, of which the theme is his saying, “The Medium is the Message”, gives us insight into the philosopher Mircea Eliade’s approach to the subject of ‘religious phenomena’, like those claimed by the religions, as the most powerful of all signs representing society-constituting factors and the need for especially this particular factor to keep pace with social, economic and political developments in human progression on the wheels of transport and the waves of communication. This is the combining element of community building, Eliade says, that cannot be grasped by means of physiology, biology, neurology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, arts, not even the celebrities-generating performing arts, or any academic study approach, because they miss the one unique and irreducible source of power held by this quintessential appearance in the history of the progression of human society - ‘the element of the sacred’. In the performing arts, those of music, singing, dancing, acting, poetry and oratory, Michael Jackson has after his death been recognised as coming in our time nearest to giving the global Message responding to the global Medium by laying out his humanity before the world. He will have been a true Shaman for the worldwide appearance of the ’element of the sacred’ in a global community, when this leads to an understanding of the mystery of humanity that becomes a cultural dynamo, this Symbol seen in the trance brought about by song and dance, which Michael Jackson called the ‘ecstasy of a union with God’ (‘whatever one conceives God to be’), and for which he like the tribal shamans of yore knew the techniques, at a time that this dynamo begins to appear for all to see in the energising rhythm of teamwork for survival, also known as love of family, and not as it has been doing till now in Money and its imperialist and gaming power structures. An appearance of this ‘element of the sacred’ in the 7th century CE is signalled and explained by Karen Armstrong in her book Muhammad Prophet for our Time, in which she narrates the coming to a peaceful understanding between tribes brought by the followers of Prophet Muhammad, Peace be upon him, coming as in a haj from Medina to Mecca, to dedicate the holy places of Arabia to Allah, the One God, as Islamic monuments of unification and peace for the Arabs and those that would join them. Here they followed the other great religions with world centres for their Message, like Jerusalem for the Jews, whose Prophets, including Jesus the Christ, Peace be upon him, had the message of ‘human rights over Empire’, which was appropriated politically in its Christian form by the Empire for its Pax Romana immensa et augusta, when this Palestinian Centre of Jahweh was destroyed and in essence transferred to Rome. The ’element of the sacred’ in its amazing cultural history is one that can be seen to light up the human mind, physically as well as psychologically, with an existential insight that identifies a transcendental link with its appearance, traditionally known as ‘Falling in Love’, ‘Getting Religion’, ‘Experiencing Art’ and gaining a crucial ‘cognitive insight’, an insight also described by Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard in his condemnation of the Church in the owners, the Clergy, for losing its truth. It gives a human community the ability to extend the biological structuring of the family-bonding dynamic by bringing into play a spiritual, metaphysical one and let this override and erode it, then to restore and expand it with the help of a new and deeper insight in which more doors of perception are opened in a thinking process that does not let itself be tethered by insights so far gained, those revealed and accepted as magical short cuts to community building in politically engaged Tribal Dreams, World Religions and Social Ideologies. As the hardened and sharply jagged forms round their adherents, which these have become, those prototypes of global linking have been overtaken by the demand for a transcendentally empowered unification of the humanised world that is marked out by the scale of the logistical connections in its social infrastructure. The democracies with a leadership based simply on majority votes for parties, those that have closed their ears to the insane lure of the call to war, have now to overcome the self-destructive easy path to sinking into kleptocracy with its community-ravishing activities, covered by a web of lies and deception, that also maintained the heavenly links. For this they have to gain the conviction that all the world’s assets are needed to secure the survival of life, including the self-conscious one of humanity, this being the touchstone of the morality in their system of values. The Voice affirming Alcuin of York’s dictum Vox populi Vox Dei est, which Democracy is expected to sound, will be found there where a population has reached a sufficiently critical degree of enlightenment from educational communications, provided by access to the inter-linked incidental Thought-Hubs of the peoples of the earth. This access is measured by ability to connect lines of thought wherever one comes across them, evoked in the face of continuing existential challenges to Humanity. With this understanding of the social forces loose in a nation and in groups of nations, political leaders can openly and in a honest manner look for and find the directing support, that builds effective legislation in a country among the people of the God, whose voice to be listened to is the one these men, women and children of the Earth are meant to be.
Henk J. van der Laan - Nairobi, June, 2009
e-mail : Kenya.Platoscorner@gmail.com
Postscript :
American political spokespersons, including their President, are fond of comparing Kenya to South Korea by way of GDP, without mentioning that this nation, North and South, has shared three millennia of meaningful cultural history with China and Japan. Political leaders should understand that a practical knowledge of cultural history is the most important tool in their professional lives. It made Churchill the great statesman he finally became. He called Uganda ‘The Pearl of Africa’ and had a vision of the Nile beginning its journey to the Mediterranean by going through a power-generating dam. Obama on his first trip to Africa as US President was wise to go to Ghana, for it is there as well as in Angola and at the Cape that Africa began sharing history with the Western Empires, and how! As to Europe, people were dying of hunger in 1944 in Amsterdam and yes in The Hague too, and prisoners were killed in roadside executions. I witnessed it. Many of the populations of the Americas barely survived this particular historical experience, Africa’s people, however, did, sustained by their tribal kinship structures, now to refocus the light of intellect on working their survival strategy in changed circumstances. Militarily constructed Empires cannot deal with the rhythm of a population’s life and therefore spin it out into economic, political and religious stories, that are mostly legislation borrowing its energy from ‘an appearance of an element of the sacred’, but often no more than a conspiracy leading to war and genocide. History is about life, and so what matters most is not the manner we relate to the people with whom we do business, but the way we do this to those with whom we work, play, learn, eat, sleep and dream of what a life in sync can be.