[Dialogue] Somehow, this paper, from an old research assembly is catching my attention

[John Epps via Dialogue]

Thanks Jim.

This was one of our corporate classics. As I recall, the basic categories
were from JWM, and many of us worked on refining the insights. It was
Desmond Avery during a summer program who put it into the deathless prose
that you posted. It is indeed appropriate these days.

On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 10:26 AM, Doug & Pat Druckenmiller via Dialogue <
dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:

> Thanks for posting this Jim.
>
>
> As we look to the 40th year anniversary of the "Band of 24"  this is a
> great context for what we were doing.  I particularly like the passage:
>
>
> "'Action', however, 'will remove the doubt that theory cannot solve',
> which is why the man of faith is a man of action. This is the deep address
> of a Town Meeting or a Social Demonstration: one necessary deed has more
> life giving power than a thousand good ideas."
>
>
> The gathering recently in Cannon Ball, ND needs to be considered in the
> light of this insight.
>
> Doug
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Dialogue <dialogue-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net> on behalf of
> James Wiegel via Dialogue <dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net>
> *Sent:* Monday, February 13, 2017 10:14 AM
> *To:* Colleague Dialogue; Order Ecumenical Community; Colleague Dialogue
> *Subject:* [Dialogue] Somehow, this paper, from an old research assembly
> is catching my attention
>
> Global Research Assembly
> Chicago Nexus
> July 1976
> *THE LIBERAL HERESY*
> Anyone who has been caught up in the great drive for renewal which
> characterizes our time will know that there are forces which work against
> him. There is something that does not like resurgence, that tries to defeat
> new life, that is out to destroy anything that speaks of hope or vitality
> of a human future. However mild or friendly he may be he finds himself in a
> life and death struggle with a vicious and malignant enemy that is out to
> destroy him. This has always been the case, and the enemy has won all kinds
> of titles for itself over the centuries, such as Satan, the Lord of the
> Flies, the Cloven Hoof, the Evil One, the Serpent, etc. This essay is no
> attempt to anatomize him all over again for our time, only to describe one
> of his more dangerous and insidious disguises. I've have called it the
> Liberal Heresy, because it bears the same relation to true Liberalism as
> the wolf does to Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother: it looks pleasant
> and harmless but in fact it is out to gobble you up, so that all your fine
> intentions and great expectations vanish without trace.
> In the first place this heresy uses the *Abstraction of the Good Idea*.
> This is a kind of romantic rationalism or idealism which emphasizes fine
> ideas and admirable thinking at the expense of effective action. Thus this
> liberal might say, "All people should love one another", or, "Freedom of
> the press at all costs", or "It is tyrannical to use the English language
> in Africa", or "All forms of air pollution, including driving and smoking
> should be made illegal", and so on. The ideas are not bad  on the
> contrary they are very good ideas, often irrefutable, and that is that
> gives them their power to destroy. For instance, you know in the very depth
> of your being that people should love one another, but since they hate each
> other and always will it is hard to come up with a practical response to
> the love ideal: it would be much more logical to commit suicide or to sit
> very still for the rest of your life so that you at least do not hurt
> anyone. You don't have to go that route, of course, but there is something
> in the tone of such ideals when they come from the liberal heretic that
> encourages you to do so. In fact a valuable clue as to whether it is the
> enemy you are listening to is whether you are getting depressed and
> paralyzed: if you are, it probably is. He makes you feel terribly reluctant
> to soil yourself in the dreadful complexity of actual situations, and
> guilty about having ever gotten involved in something.
> The problem with this kind of liberalism is evident. It quickly becomes a
> brand of hatred for life masquerading as compassion or honest thinking. It
> has the power to destroy while pretending to redeem. "Action", however,
> "will remove the doubt that theory cannot solve", which is why the man of
> faith is a man of action. This is the deep address of a Town Meeting or a
> Social Demonstration: one necessary deed has more life giving power than a
> thousand good ideas.
> In the second place, the liberal heresy uses the *Weaponry of an
> Immediate Eschaton*. An immediate eschaton of any kind provides you with
> enough weapons to destroy pretty much anything." Since the world is on the
> brink of extinction (through population explosion or nuclear warfare or
> insecticides or Communism or the fuel crisis or the beef shortage or the
> drought or galloping inflation or pollution etc.) it need not be taken
> seriously. Why would you build anything when the whole world is about to
> come crashing down about your ears? The best you can do is stock your
> basement with canned foods and wait for it to happen, or build up an
> arsenal and hope you can fight your way out when it happens, or bury your
> head so that a piece of debris doesn't dash your brains out, or just carry
> on unobtrusively getting the most you can out of the few days that are
> left." This approach to life could be relatively harmless, but it tends to
> crusade, and in doing so to negate everything that does not react the same
> way. For instance if someone says "Unless we introduce mandatory
> sterilization for every welfare recipient in the western world there is not
> going to be any future"' he is implying that any other human undertaking is
> absolutely futile and pathetic and misguided. Thus a lethal attack has been
> launched, quite possibly without your even realizing it, and any hope or
> courage you may have had is massacred before you had a chance to do much
> about it.
> Lucidity about inevitable doom is all very well, but when it invites you
> to base your decisions on fear or despair it has revealed itself as just
> another illusion, as hostile to new life as any complacency. The clue to
> the inauthenticity of this stance is that the liberal blithely hops from
> one eschaton to the next as time moves on. It proclaims a predestined,
> imminent, inevitable doom of the world. It bullies people into diving on
> the edge of catastrophe, either taking some emergency action or some
> special dispensation from action It negates any7 serious responsibility by
> showing the way the uselessness of everything. It refuses to deal with
> existing structures .since there is no time for this and they are all.
> doomed anyway. Meanwhile
> Sisyphus continues to roll his boulder and the man of faith continues with
> inexorable patience to build the earth.
> In the third place the libera1 heresy is characterized by a propensity to
> live in *The Romanticism of the Democratic Principle*. Here the liberal
> prefers to poll the opinions, reasoned or haphazard, of every Tom, Dick and
> Harry, rather than take the awful step of actually deciding about
> something. "Since there is nothing to be done we can at least make the
> situation less unpleasant by agreeing about something." In this case
> political justice takes precedence over everything, and if someone is upset
> about what is happening you should stop or sabotage the whole program until
> they are happy about it. "Every human being is important, therefore we must
> ride roughshod over no one." A real dyed in the wool liberal heretic will
> not be deterred by any paralysis or chaos or even disaster that may ensue
> from this approach to polity, since to him anything is better than
> oppression, and therefore it is in fact probably preferable to abandon an
> enterprise before someone gets hurt. By the same token, he will not co
> operate with any unjust government. This means of course that his hands are
> rather tied for the moment in America, India, Italy, the Philippines,
> China, Russia, Rhodesia, Scotland, and so on, but even if his hands are
> tied at least they are clean.
> Since the ideal of one man one vote is very dear to him, and since it is
> consistently impracticable, one of the liberal heretic's more
> characteristic states of mind is outrage. He swells with indignation, his
> eyes flash with scorn: "How can you say that India's doing well now the
> Emergency has taken hold?" "How can it be good if Mayor Daley thinks it's
> good?" "So you just went ahead and wrote proposals without a single
> anthropologist on the team? Without even speaking the seven dialects they
> speak there?" This kind of attack can effectively wreck your whole
> operation if you don't look out. By some tragic irony the cry of liberty
> and equality that once was used to set men free, and still can be used that
> way, has become a weapon to kill initiative. And the one who is using it
> will probably look better than his opponent. The man of faith, however,
> cares for the world; his reverence extends to all of life. He will not tie
> his destiny to a political principle, however noble it may be, and he will
> not condemn whole sections of the world to starvation or chaos because they
> seem to contradict his favorite truth about life. He reads the signs of the
> times, he discerns what is necessary in order that life and still more life
> may be given back to the world, and then uses whatever political mechanisms
> may be needed for the work to continue.
> The fourth device used by this liberal heretic is a safe one  *Criticism
> of the Detached Observer*. His three best ways of doing this have already
> been described, but you cannot rely on him to limit himself to these: he
> can find fault with any plan of action, for a boundless variety of reasons,
> and furthermore he will, since this is the only way to justify his own
> immobility. Thus you may come under vicious attack at any time for serving
> bananas too often or getting up too early or speaking too plainly or too
> deviously or with too much of a nasal twang or too academically or too
> inaccurately. No matter how effective or even miraculous a community
> program may be, if it falls outside the pale of his ethical piosity he will
> shoot to kill. This may come in the form of a suave academic critique, or a
> chocking denunciation of your techniques, or a withering description of
> your wall decor, or some spine chilling hints about your possible political
> affiliations. Since he is always more or less justifiable in this activity,
> and since he is sniping from a bullet proof ivory tower, it should be said
> plainly here that he is very dangerous.
> Fortunately, however, the hope that renews community is a hope that does
> not disappoint; it cannot be destroyed. Thus, although it is constantly
> taking the necessary precautions against sabotage it continues relentlessly
> to do its work. This does not mean that someone involved in this work is
> safe  on the contrary he is extremely vulnerable and can be wiped out at
> a moment’s notice, and will be if he doesn't take care. It just means that
> he can put his trust in nothing but the power of being itself, and when he
> does he and his work are indestructible.
> Now the liberal heretic has one last trick up his sleeve to thwart the
> forces of renewal, and it is liable to catch you off guard, since it seems
> so out of tune with the other four. It is called the *Activism of an
> Innocent Helper*. Just when you were beginning to think he suffered from
> some kind of chronic inertia he swings into action. He jumps up from the
> table saying, "You can just spend another year figuring out how to win the
> whole war if you like, but while you are just sitting around I'm going to
> be out there doing something.." So he goes off to help someone with
> something or to visit some old folk or teach someone to read or dig a
> flowerbed. This is a thinly disguised invitation to abandon the Long March
> of Care for the sake of some more reasonable or acceptable kind of
> activity. The liberal heretic would rather be doing something, anything,
> than the whole thing. Since winning the war is such an overwhelming
> responsibility he opts for engaging in a couple of skirmishes instead. He
> does not actually want to win, he just wants to be busy, busy enough to be
> innocent. In the name of hope he perpetuates the despair which says, "I
> knew it was just another do-good project." Under the banner of action he
> promotes a rebellion whose goal is in fact the same as before: inertia.
> The man of faith however knows the song which goes, "To only to is less/
> Than forming humanness, "and though he may share the unbearable impatience
> to be out getting killed in a skirmish he continues to watch over the whole
> war and pray over the whole world.
> The liberal heresy often poses as heroism, but is in fact a cowardly
> retreat from life's slings and arrows, for underneath it is a profound
> negativism, an assumption that real life the way it is, is bad. The
> opposite approach to life releases human creativity. But the contemporary
> campaign for human development often finds itself in peril at the arrival
> of this enemy in one of its guises. However, as the general says, "Know the
> enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril."
> In this case if you know just one of these you will probably know the other
> well enough.
>
> Jim Wiegel <http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=123>
> “If you want an adventure . . . what a time to be alive!”. Joanna Macy
>
> 401 North Beverly Way,Tolleson, Arizona 85353
> 623-363-3277 <(623)%20363-3277>
> jfwiegel at yahoo.com <marilyn.oyler at gmail.com>
> www.partnersinparticipation.com
>
> Upcoming ToP training opportunities in Arizona
> <http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=10>
>
> More info on:
>
> ToP® Facilitation Methods <http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=48>
>
> ToP® Strategic Planning <http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=50>:
> Mastering the Technology of Participation
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz3mniiYCdI>
>
> Register on line / see the ToP National Schedule
> <http://www.top-training.net/>
> AICP Planners: 14.5 CM for all ToP® courses
>
> The AZ ToP® Community of Practice
> <http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=203> meets the 1st Friday,
> of every month, 1-4 pm, at ACYR, 648 N. 5th Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85003
> <https://www.google.com/maps/place/648+N+5th+Ave/@33.456329,-112.080545,16z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x872b123a5312512d:0x93c9f71171108956?hl=>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dialogue mailing list
> Dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net
> http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/dialogue-wedgeblade.net
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue-wedgeblade.net/attachments/20170213/703478ed/attachment.html>