Joseph Peter Stern
www.citizenphilosophy.net |
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CONTENTS KEY
8. Sectarian Authority Figures
13. The God Debate
16. Global Warming
Some people consider that genetics are an important feature. If so, then mine are perhaps a little complex. My paternal forbears were Irish Catholic working class, or rather peasants. The ancestral memories of my paternal grandfather were pooled in resentments against the British rule in Ireland. He was heir to stark reminiscences of oppression and injustice. His family had been peasant farmers for generations, knowing little else but hard work. His father fled the poverty to live in Yorkshire, where he himself was born.
That family was one of the many who departed from their home country. Even today, affluent people can scarcely imagine the situation that existed in Ireland during the nineteenth century. A searing memory for many emigres was the Great Famine of 1845-52, in which a million Irish died. About one third of the population were then dependent upon the potato for survival, and that crop caught blight.
While Victorian England grew prosperous, the subject Irish people reaped a poverty that is almost unbelievable. It is evident that a basic problem lay in the system of landlordism created by British rule. There were other aspects of the oppression in occurrence since the time of Cromwell. During the eighteenth century, British proscriptions against Irish Catholics were severe. The victims were then prevented from gaining education. During the "reformed" nineteenth century, the afflicted majority still comprised about 80 per cent of the Irish population, and were mainly illiterate tenant serfs.
Some of the details are told in one of the more realistic Wikipedia articles. "Views of the Irish as racially inferior, and for this reason significantly responsible for their circumstances, gained purchase in Great Britain during and immediately after the famine" (Wikipedia Great Famine, accessed 03/02/2011).
Survivors of the famine migrated to England and other countries, and in large numbers. One immediate problem was how to educate themselves, a prospect preferably not to be accomplished in accordance with British colonial standards. In some directions, self-taught education became an ideal. In practice however, very few could achieve this, and most illiterate Irish needed tuition, even in British schools.
My Irish grandfather worked in a British iron foundry and joined the British navy, in which he served during the First World War. After the war, he found that poverty was still impossible to avoid. Living in Middlesbrough, like many others (both English and Irish) he discovered that employment was scarce. Soup queues and allotments were a common resort of the depressed working class during the 1920s and 1930s. He grew vegetables to sustain the life of his family. He had numerous mouths to feed during a lengthy period of unemployment.
His wife was another Roman Catholic, this time of mixed Irish and Scottish descent. A problem was that "Paddy" became very disillusioned with religion, and developed a conflict with the local priests. Like many others of his background, he was illiterate, but during his thirties he taught himself to read and write. He was then able to read the Bible extensively. His conclusion was negative, and to the consternation of his wife and friends, he became a marxist radical. He was now reading the Das Kapital of Karl Marx (in translation), and this he regarded as his new bible.
My Irish grandfather loathed the upper class and detested aristocracy. He said the British government had betrayed the working men who had been conscripted in the 1914-18 war against Germany, leaving so many in a dire economic predicament while the privileged members of society lived in surfeit and luxury. He was one of those who joined the "hunger marches" to London, where many thousands moved down from the northern counties in protest at their plight. Most of the men were not actually starving, but they were in need, and the general disconsolate mood induced by hopeless circumstances was a tragic factor. See Socialism and Sociology.
Paddy's other serious confrontation occurred with the local Roman Catholic priests. He made no secret of his changed views, and was bold in declaring what he believed. The prestigious priests had no sympathy with poverty or dissidents. One of their leaders was so wrathful that he visited the home of my grandfather and enacted a ceremony of excommunication, cursing all inmates of the house. My grandmother was still a loyal Catholic, but her feelings did not count. This event occurred in the early 1930s.
My father was born in 1924, and lost his chances of education when he was obliged to work in a steel foundry to assist the family income. The Second World War started, and after Japan entered that conflict, he was old enough to volunteer for military service, along with many others influenced by the new patriotic spirit (furthered by the media then existing). The working class had survived the afflicted interim to save the nation once again. In retrospect, my father viewed his conscription as a term in hell. He was sent to Burma as a member of the air force, and acquired war memories that could make the hearer flinch if he chose to divulge details. Very often, he just wanted to forget.
When he got back to England and became a civilian again in the late 1940s, he entered the employment of my maternal grandfather, who lived in Cambridge. My English grandfather was also working class, but had gained a substantial degree of economic success, effectively becoming a version of middle class prosperity. He had started his career as a plumber with a handcart, in the simple way that tradesmen lived in the 1920s and 30s. Thrifty and abstemious, he became an employer of labourers and plasterers, who built the houses he planned. My father became his foreman, but later achieved independence, building his own houses in Cambridgeshire.
My English grandfather was not religious, unlike his wife (of middle class origin, she was consigned to an orphanage and became a committed Christian). One of his ancestors was a coachman to the Duke of Connaught, so closely associated with Queen Victoria. His early handcart was a less resplendent mode of travel. Later in his life, he acquired some of the much desired new motor vehicles, including a lorry used by his employees. In contrast, my father could never afford a lorry, though he eventually became successful as an independent builder, after much hard work.
I was born in 1950, while my parents still lived in the Cambridge home of my English grandfather. There were workshops attached to the house, where employees worked. The smell of blowlamps, copper pipes, putty, paint, and timber was much in evidence. I was only three years old when I started to watch the workmen, though on one occasion I became a nuisance, and one of the workers cheerfully threatened to paint my nose red. I retreated in dismay, and complained to my amused grandfather.
My father was more manually skilled than many other artisans. He was a bricklayer, plasterer, carpenter, plumber, and roofer. He occasionally took an interest in the contents of local Cambridge museums, and once took me on an excursion to the stately home at Audley End. I was about thirteen at that time, and noticed his responses to the impressive property. He was offput by the splendour, and disliked the associations of aristocracy. He identified with the working men who had constructed the grand house. I remember him gazing up at the ornate ceilings with astonishment. He himself had created many ceilings, though of the standard contemporary type devoid of the lavish ornament favoured in earlier centuries. He emphasised that the craftsmen involved would have received too little in payment for their work. Details of their lives had vanished; only the lords and status owners were commemorated.
In later years, I made a study of antique crafts. There was such a clear division between how the employers lived, and how the artisans lived. The history of politics is not the same as the history of arts and crafts. The output of craftsmen so often becomes an economic fetish of the wealthy, as it does today from America to China. The recent preference for minimalism is also supported by leisured wealth, and has further blurred the issue of what really occurs in human societies. The web memo On Art and Craftsmanship (2008) is a brief indicator of my own views.
Because of my father's building projects, my family moved house repeatedly, and I attended several schools in my early years. I learned to read at the age of seven, when many others in my class were still struggling. From that date I developed a strong habit of independent reading in leisure hours. I was surprised to find that my friends did not follow the same pattern. My literary diet varied from the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs to Homer and Greek mythology. At school, I found essays quite easy to accomplish, and frequently obtained high marks in English classes.
I attended Arbury junior school for two years, and there passed the eleven-plus examination. Only a handful of children graduated that year in the school, and my friends did not. Those acquaintances were now allocated to "secondary" schools, considered inferior in the educational system. Yet my transition to a new "status" grammar school involved much homework, some of which I considered needless.
During the early 1960s, I attended one of the best grammar schools in Cambridge (officially ranked as the third in priority after the “County” and the more elite Perse). Unhappily, I found that I learned more through homework than from the class tutors. The science teachers were monotonously boring, in the general estimation of the pupils, and the maths master was a bullying tyrant feared by some pupils. The English literature teacher was occasionally known to sit immobile through an entire class (his head placed on his desk), with an alcoholic hangover from the night before; otherwise, he relied heavily on pupils (including myself) reading aloud passages from Dickens. The highlight of the week was the history teacher, who contributed enlivening accounts of some events in India, as part of the otherwise formal course in eighteenth century British political history.
I was keen on learning French, achieving a place in the top three class results, but a decision was taken by the headmaster to limit this aspect of the curriculum, the sciences being considered a priority. After the first few years, I was no longer able to take French lessons, and anomalously, was given more woodwork lessons. No other languages were available. Even French was becoming rare in British schools by that time. German was even more difficult to find, and Latin was a dead language outside the universities.
Science was taught in a manner that left me asking dissident questions. Physics and chemistry were administered in a form that I considered to be punishment. I sometimes achieved good marks in physics, though I could not feel much interest in the course. There was no relation to humanity, or to history. At a later period in my life, I discovered that there was a subject known as the history of science, which really did interest me. However, this study was not taught at grammar schools. As for biology, I reacted to some classes in which the focus was an unpleasant confrontation with the dissected bodies of rats. I was an early convert to the anti-vivisection campaign, then relatively obscure and confined to literature that was difficult to obtain.
The maths master was a particular problem. He had transferred from an elite public school, and was accustomed to total subservience. He made no allowance for pupils who could not understand the tuition, and discouraged questioning by his overbearing attitude. Boys in my class were scared to ask him a question, his readiness to belittle "backwardness" being all too obvious. His rather menacing attitude towards other studies was expressed in his unofficial celebration of mathematics as the leading subject in the school curriculum. The sciences could be tolerated as being of practical use, though English was only just acceptable, in that everyone had to learn at least some language. Yet history was despised. I was shocked when he strongly implied that history was no use at all. The bullying paragon of mathematics was probably the most unpopular teacher in the school.
I contracted chronic eyestrain, to such an extent that I had to stop reading for more than very brief periods. My new spectacles did not alleviate the problem. I was obliged to see a psychologist recommended by the school, as this was the only means of avoiding compulsory attendance. The eminent psychiatrist related to the Freudian category, and after a circuitous method of analysis, he eventually diagnosed me as suffering from strong reactions to the erratic school curriculum. He was in sympathy, and advised my transition to a different school, perceiving that my wish was to cease school altogether. I was still fourteen, but when I became fifteen, I would legitimately be able to leave school at the close of the summer term.
So I briefly transferred to another school, of less repute than the former, but with a headmaster noted for progressive ideas and sympathy with pupils. This was a mixed school, with both girls and boys in the classes, unlike the all-male componency of the grammar school. The new school was much preferable to the earlier one, and my eyestrain eased. None of the teachers I encountered there were tyrannical like the former maths master, and nor lax like the former English tutor. I found that religious education was here taken seriously, unlike the nil status afforded elsewhere. I was easily able to write essays on the New Testament, the problem being that I did not agree with orthodox Biblical exegesis.
I remained unhappy with the general curriculum, and also the markedly non-intellectual aptitude of many pupils, who were prone to numerous juvenile distractions. I became irritated by the trivial conversations occurring between classes. Pop music, television, and parties were the sole horizons of my classmates. I realised by now that I was inwardly committed to moving in a different educational direction, one in which I could find autonomy.
In 1965 I left school at the age of fifteen, still in conflict with the curriculum, and before taking any GCE exams. Two years later, the emerging new fad for drugs was to claim many victims amongst schoolchildren who were influenced by pop stars and "parties." I was fortunately immune to that fad, having escaped the media promoting it (which indirectly included lax schoolmasters susceptible to cannabis).
Meanwhile, in 1965 I had been reading avidly at home about the history of India, and was not content with the British colonial phase. I discovered that native Indian religion and philosophy had an interest of their own; the details could not be learnt at a British grammar school. I also grasped that the Islamic heritage was far more complex than the events of annexation by the British Raj.
During the next two years, I became familiar with Vedanta (and Hinduism), Buddhism and Sufism. I was fascinated by both Sanskrit and Arabic-Persian vocabularies. I also gave some attention to Christian mysticism, and started to read Plato at the age of sixteen. My parents had warned me that if I ceased school, my career prospects would be limited. I did not wish to go back to conventional education, and decided that I would take the route which afforded more of the studies I wanted rather than any curtailment of those.
I also had a belief that one must renounce career securities in the pursuit of what was more instructive. It is difficult to convey the immediacy of this belief, though much easier to describe my reasoning that, as I had learned how homework could overcome the deficiencies in the class mode of teaching at school, then I could similarly apply "homework" to subjects missing from the school curriculum. I had often gained first place in the class results for English and History, but the ethnocentric nature of those subjects did not inspire me to further commitments. Shakespeare and Dickens are still not my favourite authors, and British political history requires social history as a complement, to say the least.
My tendency to "renunciation" requires clarification. From certain sources I acquired the theme "Be in the world but not of the world." This was chiefly associated with Sufism. In my case, no religious affiliation was existent. The means of rendering this guideline efficient required due thought. On visits to London, I encountered both Buddhist and Vedanta monks, and I could have joined the latter, but this was not my route. However, I sympathised with the monks, understanding why they chose the lifestyle they did.
I remember a particular day of commitment to my formative ideal. I was aware of earlier traditions and formulations on the one hand, and my own route on the other. There was a degree of affinity, but also a tangent because of the different cultural conditions.
I did not at first register this commitment in terms of the philosophical life. There were various other associations which I worked through. Eventually I grasped that the strongest link to my own ethnic and social environment was the obscured event of Greek philosophy, and the pursuit of a wisdom since devalued by diverse sceptics. However, I did not opt for the elevation of Greek and Roman culture that is often found in academic commentaries, and continued to study various traditions in combination. In fact, I was a strong critic of the Roman Empire, and was averse to some of the social customs in Greece (e.g., slavery). I did not agree with the tendency of Edward Gibbon to glorify Rome, and was more interested in the contrasting Egyptian phenomenon signified by the Desert Fathers.
My cultivation of philosophy never did amount to the confining "European Enlightenment" paradigm which arose in the eighteenth century. The phase of modern Western philosophy has not arrived at all the answers. Twentieth century Western philosophy was almost exclusively tied to an academic profession, admitting very few points of contact with the population at large.
Some of the ancient Greek philosophers (including Plato) are now associated by critics with a form of ideological elitism. This has seemed ironic to me, in that the critics are academics, themselves a major elite factor in current society. The modern insignia of elitism range from the credentials of Earl Bertrand Russell to Sir Karl Popper (a critic of Plato).
3. Early Studies
At the age of seventeen, I read Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. To me, this book of Russell was very disappointing in some respects, though forming my basic introduction to modern Western philosophy. I also read at that time the Principia Ethica of G. E. Moore and the Enneads of Plotinus, which I obtained in the MacKenna translation.
Plotinus impressed me for his evident commitment to philosophy, even though I did not view the Enneads as being a comprehensive guide. In contrast, I did not believe that Russell was a genuine philosopher, and certainly not in the Plotinian sense. Bertrand Russell was a skilled mathematician, a lucid writer, and a famous sceptic. Yet he was not a wise man or even a prudent one, as his private life demonstrated.
My first real introduction to science occurred when I looked through an astronomer's telescope one night at the age of eighteen. I had spent four years at grammar school with relative indifference to the rote lecturing on physics, chemistry, and biology. Astronomy did not figure in those peremptory classes. Yet now, via the telescope of an amateur astronomer acquaintance, I began to understand something more tangible about matters which pedagogues had obscured. Subsequently, I studied science in a way that linked with philosophy, or rather citizen philosophy, as I did not follow any academic curriculum.
I started to read Western philosophy more intensively at the age of nineteen, especially Kant and Hegel, though in some respects preferring Leibniz and Schopenhauer. However, Leibniz was a difficult subject, and I was not sure how to interpret some of his themes as found in readily available books on this figure. I found the British empirical tradition far less appealing, though I did study John Locke with some interest. I always wanted to know how the diverse philosophers had lived, and was not content merely to read their works.
I was never a Kantian. Nevertheless, I early read every page of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (in translation), though I had to create an improvised lexicon of the antiquated words and difficult terminology. The elaborate reasoning involved did not convince me that the metaphysical realm was unknowable. Kant's famous theme of the phenomenal and noumenal appeared to me as being very much an opinion rather than a reality.
Another book I read throughout was Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I was not a convert, and merely found the contents interesting. Later, I grew more critical when becoming familiar with the overall context. The output of Hegel is notoriously difficult to read, and German Idealism requires the study of background details. Hegel's "pantheistic" version of Christianity is so abstract that different interpretations have arisen amongst academic analysts.
Nor did I believe that Schopenhauer had achieved the perfect philosophy, despite his familiarity with Buddhism and Hinduism in the versions known to him. However, Schopenhauer was in a different category to the academic professors Kant and Hegel. Though he graduated at university, he opted for an independent career of private study and writing, a role facilitated by his inheritance from a wealthy mercantile family. Schopenhauer was indeed fortunate in this respect. His lifestyle reflected the leisured characteristics of the affluent middle and upper classes; there was no manual or artisan work in his schedule.
As a citizen of a different background, I believed that some manual work was necessary for purposes of "grounding" an active intellectual orientation, which can easily become too abstract and impractical. The essential "renunciation" involved an extension in the experience of ordinary life situations, without status role, and without succumbing to the peculiarities of contemporary thinking. I particularly disliked newspapers, and likewise avoided television. Such characteristics are seldom understood in the affluent society. There is no room for distractions in a seven day week version of "doing philosophy," to re-deploy an academic phrase. Defective politics, crime, fashion, and sordid entertainment are not the most commendable or healthy diet.
I continued to study Eastern philosophies in an independent manner, and composed a preliminary manuscript (at the age of nineteen) on Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism. This reflected my enthusiasm for what had supposedly been superseded by Hegelian Idealism. Many years later, I destroyed the inchoate manuscript when I concluded that some details were unreliable, and because of the sources to which I was restricted at that time. Getting to grips with the history of those Eastern traditions is not easy, despite the rather fluent portrayals often found. I always wanted the history, not just the doctrinal exercises that survived to view; yet some parties have glorified the doctrine while neglecting the history, an unrealistic option creating so many confusions, and visible in large quantities of both commercial and academic literature.
I early visited the Vedanta Centre and the Buddhist Society, both in London, and afterwards the specialised library at Downing College, which included many books on Buddhism. The study of Buddhism, in my case, escaped the sectarian confines and gave attention to all the main geographical zones involved. That meant not merely India and Ceylon, but also South-East Asia, Central Asia, Tibet, China, and Japan. Public libraries did not hold all the books I wanted.
In the ethnographic sense, Buddhism is a bigger study than Hinduism, though the popular Western interest in these subjects tended very much to ignore the analytical contributions of specialist scholars. Fortunately, I early grasped that this exclusion was a mistake, an attitude which I later adapted to a similar study of the Islamic Sufism countries, the sweep here meaning basically from India to medieval Spain.
"As a result of my earlier experiences with sectarian psychologies (i.e., the Meher Baba cult and the Ramakrishna Vedanta), I had formed a habit of a critical approach to available materials. This critical attitude did not prevent me from experiencing various empathies with subject matter, but it did preclude conversion to sectarian agendas" (Shepherd, Pointed Observations, 2005, p. 45).
During my teens I became familiar with several of the now well known Eastern mystics such as Shirdi Sai Baba, Upasni Maharaj, Hazrat Babajan, Meher Baba, Ramana Maharshi, Swami Vivekananda, and Ramakrishna of Dakshineswar (only in later years did I read Aurobindo Ghose, and with some reservations). At an early age I commenced to write biographical entries for my own instruction, and in this way came to grapple with problems posed by variant accounts and sectarian biases. My habit of composing these "private manuscripts" eventually gained book format to some extent at a much later time.
Study of mysticism and religion led me to study the life of Mahatma Gandhi when I was nineteen. Confrontation between the British Raj and the Indian independence movement led to my investigation of the history of Europe and America. Later, and in a very different direction, I developed an interest in ancient Mesopotamia, which became an ingredient of my subsequent (unpublished) manuscript Ancient Cultures in Flux, referred to in some of my early books. Indeed, archaeology gained favour with me, and I believed that this subject should have been taught at grammar school.
My first serious encounter with archaeology ironically surfaced in the English class at grammar school, when the rather lazy teacher conveniently gave his pupils a project: any subject of their wish to investigate (in their leisure time) and give a talk about, as clearly as possible. This meant that he could just sit and watch the talks. I was determined to get away from anything British, and chose the pyramids of ancient Egypt, having already read (at my own volition) several works by archaeologists that I obtained from the school library and a public library. The talk I gave (at the age of fourteen) did actually interest the class, who asked an unusual number of questions. Of course, there are still many questions about Old Kingdom Egypt, though the academic record has improved since I first read this subject.
At the age of 23, I was temporarily in the employment of Professor Joseph Peter Stern (1920-91), who lived in Cambridge and who taught German at London University. Born at Prague, he was an expert on German literature, with strong interests in philosophy. He would courteously invite me to his study on occasion, as he knew of my own interest in philosophy. He made plain that he was not very amenable to the Eastern religions, and we talked mainly about Kant, Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche. These were his favoured topics, not mine. He was also keen (to a lesser extent) on Leibniz, whom I actually preferred to the other three.
Joseph Peter Stern |
I agreed that Kant was exceptional for certain formulations (though I was not a Kantian), and agreed to read more of Wittgenstein, who was becoming almost legendary in Cambridge. I was resistant to Nietzsche, whose books I found objectionable for certain doctrines often disputed. However, Professor Stern was an expert on Nietzsche, whom he read in fastidious German, and so I decided to listen rather than argue. He freely acknowledged the non-democratic aspect of Nietzsche, and also other drawbacks. This seemed to confirm my own diagnosis; I remained cautious about his preoccupation with the controversial advocate of "will to power," whom he tended to validate in some aspects of the "superman" concept.
The irony in this situation was pronounced; the Professor himself was very democratic. He did not reflect in his own thinking the disconcerting "strong against the weak" psychology of Nietzsche. Indeed, I will always remember Professor Stern with affection for his democratic latitude. When I entered his study, he treated me as an equal, not as an employee. I remember the long shelves of books in his study, a room which had a very attractive view of the extensive garden. He would sometimes ask me questions, as though he really wanted to know what I thought about a particular subject. Yet I was a nobody, with no status whatever. He responded to my intellectual activity, not to my social background. Not everybody in his position would bother to do that.
I concluded that the Professor desired a citizen reaction, as a change from his discussions with academic colleagues. He sometimes hinted that academics did not get everything right, and that on some points there was such scope for disagreement that the ultimate answer was strangely elusive.
Professor Stern was very critical of Hitler and also Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), whom he viewed as abetting the intellectual validation for the rise of Nazism. He was also critical of Karl Jaspers, Freud, and C. G. Jung in what he deemed a tragic neglect of liberal principles in the face of Nazism. He did associate Nietzsche with Nazi ideology in certain respects; he was critical of some Nietzschean themes and conceded a strong link with the Fascism of Mussolini. His knowledge of the literary background was acute. He later contributed books on these subjects (and in 1987 appeared in the BBC television series on Western philosophers that was arranged by Bryan Magee; see Magee, The Great Philosophers, Oxford 1988, pp. 232ff.). See also Stern, Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People (University of California Press, 1975; rev. edn, 1992); idem, A Study of Nietzsche (Cambridge University Press, 1979).
There was a humorous episode in 1973 when I mentioned that I had undertaken some independent meditation. Professor Stern reacted with courteous aversion, considering this interest to be anti-rational; he clearly associated meditation with the recent popular enthusiasm for TM (Transcendental Meditation). I had to explain the difference in my case, and to assure him that I viewed TM in much the same light that he did. I was a critic of TM and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
In Cambridge at that period, there were many sectarian manifestations, with diverse undergraduates and the local Technical College being conspicuous in some of the enthusiasms. In a road adjoining my home, there was a house displaying the auspices of Guru Maharaji (later Prem Rawat), and the Hare Krishna trend was well known on Cambridge streets. TM was advertised in the local newspapers, and I once attended a public talk just to find out what the Transcendentalists were saying, and with the consequence that I did not attend a second time.
My interest in Eastern religions predated the popular fads which started in 1967, and in England largely because of the trend typified by the Beatles in their attraction to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. That phase of "hip" meditation caused many confusions, and I should clarify the situation here from my own angle of experience.
I left school in 1965. In Britain, there was virtually no interest in Oriental religion at that time save amongst academic scholars. The trigger for the popular craze was the 1967 "summer of love," a hippy indulgence centred in California. The Maharishi gained celebrity at that time, and tourist Rishikesh became a scenario of commercial significance. In Britain, the superstars John Lennon and George Harrison became vocal supporters of Transcendental Meditation (TM).
Transition in Pop Fashion, l to r: the early Beatles, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols |
I was totally removed from these developments. I had ceased all interest in pop music, which to me represented a schoolboy distraction. I had actually seen the Beatles in concert at Cambridge, when they appeared at the Regal cinema while I was still at school. The music was almost completely obscured by the frenzied screaming of the females in the audience.This teenage hysteria had become notorious at pop music concerts by 1964.
The phenomenon of 1960s beat music is associated with a British working class activity (though some of the performers came from a middle class background, e. g., Mick Jagger). The routine cinema venues soon became replaced by high profile gigs, and in terms of a big money attraction via the spread of this nascent "rock" music in America.
The early Beatles became pervasively popular in Britain by 1964. Beatlemania became a national symptom, and even endorsed by many of the older generation. The clean-cut, amiable image sported suits and ties. Subsequent developments proved disconcerting to critics. The Beatles were soon influenced by Bob Dylan, the American celebrity who had become addicted to marijuana (cannabis). In 1964, the Beatles fell victim to the Dylan drug habit (Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, New York 2001, pp. 161-2). However, this was not obvious to many fans at the time. Afterwards, John Lennon (1940-1980) became an intensive LSD user during 1966, and later became addicted to heroin. "The times they are a changin' " was a well known Dylan theme, though transpiring to have an underside of danger and disastrous recklessness.
John Lennon, 1968 |
Lennon was reportedly earning about £100,000 a month in 1967, when he advocated TM. See Wikipedia Lennon (accessed 23/08/2010). Some working class people, such as my father, reacted strongly to the amount of money that certain pop stars were acquiring. The monetary figures were high even when substantially understated.
The popular trends were glorified by undiscerning commentators. In contrast, I was strongly critical. I had formerly reacted to the British Empire mentality and the conventional straitjacket of education, but the "new age" of supposed "progress" was far worse in too many respects. This conclusion arose not merely because too many of the pop music icons became drug victims. Nor merely because the famous Woodstock concert in 1969 gained the repute of being an LSD event attended by the most unrealistic conceptions of social evolution.
The American "new age," beginning in hippy California, was the death of public health in many directions. In Britain, promiscuity became rife, and law and order suffered hitherto unknown breaches. A new breed of adolescent emerged who gained notoriety for an aversion to customary civilities. In 1967-8 many of these newcomers were observed to neglect the convention of saying "thank you" in elementary social exchanges. Shopping now gained a doubtful perspective. The new liberated humanity considered themselves to be set free from cumbersome conventions. Why should they express thanks for anything, when all was theirs by right ? Everything should be freely available, and everybody should be able to do just what they wanted. That was the basic gist of their attitude. Free love became a new convention and one parent families mushroomed. In just a few years, too many British streets became dangerous after dark.
There are different versions of how the violence started. In 1969, the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont (in California) became notorious as a scene of violence. The Californian Hells Angels were hired as a security factor. Wikipedia Altamont relates:
"The Angels had been drinking their free beer all day in front of the stage, and most were highly drunk. Fuelled by LSD and amphetamines, the crowd had also become antagonistic and unpredictable, attacking each other, the Angels, and the performers....Numerous fights had erupted between Angels and crowd members and within the crowd itself....The Angels proceeded to arm themselves with sawn-off pool cues and motorcycle chains to drive the crowd further back from the stage.... The Rolling Stones waited until sundown to perform.... Within a minute of starting their third song, 'Sympathy for the Devil,' a fight erupted in the front of the crowd.... Footage from the documentary shows [Meredith] Hunter drawing a long-barrelled revolver from his jacket, and Hells Angel Alan Passaro, armed with a knife, running at Hunter from the side, parrying the gun with his left hand and stabbing him [Hunter] with his right.... Hunter's autopsy confirmed he was high on methamphetamine when he died" (accessed 23/08/2010).
Hunter was only eighteen years old, and is thought likely to have aimed for performers or attendants on the stage. Passaro was arrested and and tried for murder, but afterwards acquitted when the jury saw concert film footage and concluded that the killer had acted in self-defence.
In Britain, some people blamed the mounting problem of social aggression on the skinhead population, but that opinion was distorting. Some episodes of danger were revealing. I can speak here from my own experience. In 1973, I found myself under attack one night from a group of six thugs, none of whom were skinheads, and all with hair over their collars. I was physically fit, having taken up a basic course in judo, and so forth; I dodged the first assault, and then decided to run from the rest of the pack, who were unable to keep pace. Discretion is the better part of valour in some situations.
That pack of thugs had been drinking alcohol, but many in that category were also users of various drugs, including the underestimated amphetamines. Later, when the "punk" craze arrived in the late 70s, the bad example of Sid Vicious replaced the Lennon and Jagger extremisms. The Sex Pistols guitarist gained a reputation for violence, and overdosed on heroin in 1979. He is known to have cut graffiti on his chest with a razor. Knives menacingly appeared in London pubs at this period, and violence became an accompaniment to pervasive burglaries and muggings in the provinces. Cambridge streets of the 1980s became a milieu of fear for too many people of all ages.
I never took LSD or amphetamines, and disliked the smell of cannabis that I sometimes encountered in public places. In 1973, for several months, I attended a number of "rock" concerts in Cambridge, endeavouring to ascertain what was in occurrence. The music was very loud, and the audience were perhaps predominantly teenagers. The decibel level was sometimes painful, and some "bands" (of musicians) were more exhibitionist than others. There was indeed a mood of raw excitement created by the guitar and drum voltage, but my conclusion was that this music risked a dead end without sublimating factors.
At the Corn Exchange, there was no screaming as in the Beatles concert a decade earlier, and the audio amplification system was far more acute. The audience could clearly hear the performance, which might be deafening. Males in the standing audience were subject to impromptu dances (there was no seating). The performers varied from Wishbone Ash and Genesis to early exemplars of the "heavy metal" trend. Some of the performers did attempt to make their lyrics more meaningful than rivals, though others relied upon the sensation of noise level and a rather provocative form of shock effect. However, there was nothing comparable to the subsequent mood of defiance associated with the Sex Pistols.
Outside concerts, some forms of ideology that had become commonplace were objectionable. Even one of my friends in Cambridge, who was averse to drugs, had fallen prey to the notion that psychedelic and related contemporary art was the height of aesthetic perfection. This meant, to him and many others, that earlier forms of art were simply old hat to be dismissed. My attempts to persuade him differently, were to no avail. He did not read much, preferring television, and was deceived by the contemporary "progressive" slogans. The "progressives" were frequently domineering; they knew better than anyone else what counted most. Their fashionable sense of values was all the proof they needed.
During the 70s, art colleges became notorious venues for cannabis and promiscuity. Pornography escalated to record levels, but all such developments were generally pardoned as progressive by the new wave of indulgents. In matters of "mysticism," the occult vogue for Aleister Crowley was too often a reminder of the extreme confusions which had become ascendant. Backward novelists were praised for depraved fiction, including the four letter word variety.
"By the end of that critical decade [the 1960s], pornographic films were being imported into Britain from Scandinavia which depicted young girls having intercourse with donkeys and dogs. That is Crowleyan taste, or rather perverse taste." (Shepherd, Pointed Observations, 2005, p. 110). The triumph of bad taste was an inseparable component of the supposed Aquarian new age.
Over many years, American cinema cultivated bad language and violence, and British television gradually followed the damaging example. The unrestrained appetites of affluent hedonists should meet with resistance from those who exercise the unfashionable intellect. Standards of media decency, serving to restrain crime, were initially undermined by the late 1960s wave of subcortical barbarians, who influenced uncritical politicians and other suggestible persons working for a high salary at the public expense.
There were varied manifestations of the new "progressive" complex. One that I found particularly fascinating was the changed British attitude to India. This was not uniform, and many of the older generation were puzzled by it. I was in a different category, being one of the younger generation, though not identifying myself with the fashionable tendencies relating to the pop reception of Eastern religion. I had been studying that subject of religion (and Indian philosophy) for longer than the new wave of enthusiasts, and in quite a different way. This factor was difficult to convey in some interchanges, and most of the time I never actually attempted to do so.
From 1967 onwards, a fairly large number of young British tourists travelled to India. All sorts of notions and beliefs were attendant upon these expeditions and pilgrimages. Some visitors drove to famous places in a jeep, while the more hardy ones travelled by foot. Sometimes a two week holiday, and sometimes a sojourn of a year or more. A proportion of the visitors came back disillusioned, while others became fervent supporters of diverse gurus and/or doctrines.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi |
Most of these people did not appear to read much about the historical and religious background of the country they were visiting. They took their cues primarily from acquaintances with similar inclinations, from pop stars and other celebrities like Richard Alpert, and not least from television. Some were influenced by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (section 3), but without understanding very much about meditation.
One day I happened to encounter one of my former acquaintances in Cambridge, whom I had not seen for many years. This was in the early 1970s. He told me that he had decided to make the journey to India, believing that "it must be very peaceful out there," unlike England. I tried to introduce a note of caution into this romantic theory, but rather unsuccessfully. He was convinced that he must be right. He appeared to have read virtually nothing about India, and had taken all his directions from the popular media. I doubt whether he knew the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism. Some while later, I heard from others that he had indeed made a trip to India, but had encountered problems and much regretted the difficulties he experienced.
Some visitors to India were in the habit of taking drugs, a factor which may have blunted their sensitivities or prevented due perceptions of what was occurring. Details emerged that Richard Alpert (alias Ram Dass) had travelled to the desired country in 1967 with a supply of LSD pills, contacting one of the more doubtful gurus, and subsequently becoming a teacher of Yoga and "present-centredness," a theme evident in his book Be Here Now (Shepherd, Minds and Sociocultures Vol. 1, 1996, pp. 63-4). The Now could be a very disconcerting phenomenon. I preferred the historical past, and the realistic present.
On one occasion in the mid-1970s, I happened to visit the home of an acquaintance who had a number of bohemian friends. A couple of those were present, along with another far more conventional person who clearly felt, as I did, more than a little sceptical of the conversation. A talkative young man with long hair was reclining on a sofa in a graceful posture that was not customary in England. He was sitting on one leg, and resting on the other, with both knees bent, one drawn up to his chest. He remarked to those present: "I learned to sit like this when I was in India."
"Oh, did you really," commented the conventional person (who had very short hair and who adopted the normal sitting position). The sofa inhabitant mistook this sarcastic remark as an invitation to describe his distinctive posture and the circumstances which had created it. He had visited Indian ashrams, and had there learned things like this special posture, apparently Yogic. I noticed that there was no elucidation of metaphysical subtleties, such as one might have expected. The context was rather extroverted. The references to ashrams were vague. I was not clear as to where he had been, or when. I suspected that no such consideration weighed heavily upon him; the timeless moment was all that counted, perhaps. Plus the pose, of course.
There were also some more intellectual persons involved in the odyssey under discussion. A fair number of these were attracted to Buddhism. Instead of visiting Hindu ashrams, they made a beeline for Buddhist monasteries or affiliated sites. Tibetan Buddhism was much in favour during the 1970s. There were some drawbacks in evidence with the Western enthusiasms. The pro-Buddhist contingent perhaps tended to read more books than the average pro-Hindu enthusiast, though the diet was quite often restricted to popular names like D.T. Suzuki and Lama Anagarika Govinda (a Western author). Those topical writers denoted Zen and Vajrayana respectively.
During the late 1970s, I encountered a British meditator who had sojourned in Indian monasteries for about two years, and who had furthermore committed himself to a form of training in Tibetan Buddhism at a monastery in the West. He was not a drug user. His attempt to study the background involved an assumption that the extensive Tantric ritualism (attaching to Vajrayana) was of contemporary relevance. He adhered strongly to the view that the Vajrayana Buddhist sources were of uncontestable validity. In his view, it was not appropriate to question the documents or customs in any way, or to adopt any critical attitude of enquiry.
When I presented my own view in abbreviation, as politely as possible, the abovementioned meditator rejected this totally, implying that his partisan stance was well on the way to enlightenment, whereas my outlook was much inferior. I was not a votary of the canonical formats, and had not undergone any Tantric initiations. Whereas he accepted the unassailable authority of medieval texts, Tantric mantras, and orthodox modes of transmission in contemporary Buddhist curricula. I was not against Buddhism, though I did adopt an attitude of philosophical analysis. This was unacceptable to the partisan orientation.
My father, Burma 1945. Copyright Kevin R. D. Shepherd |
A quite different assessor of the Asiatic scene was my father, an atheist who eventually admitted a more relaxed agnostic identity. A hard-working builder and beer drinker, he reacted strongly to the contemporary drug culture. He said that the younger generation were too often seeking an escape route from the realities of life. My father could be relied upon to give a gloomy picture of India. He had been a volunteer in the RAF during the Second World War, being posted to Burma in the struggle against the Japanese. He had travelled across India in circumstances of illness induced by the climate, and had searing war memories that he would rarely refer to. He had seen many corpses (British, Burmese, and Japanese), together with other grim situations, and all this left him with nightmares for several years afterwards.
My father depicted India adversely in terms of the heat, the flies, the disease, the snakes, the poverty, and the superstition. He could not understand why there was so much new interest in Hinduism. He regarded the Beatles as commercial and superfluous superstars who had too much spare time to indulge their imagination. He understood well enough the pre-war situations in northern England; he was reared in Yorkshire poverty at Middlesbrough, while the increasingly super-rich Beatles came from Liverpool.
When my father was a young boy, he was present when his own father (my grandfather) was subjected to a ritual excommunication by an irate Roman Catholic priest who cursed the house and inmates (including several children). This act of severity occurred despite the fact that his mother (my grandmother) was a loyal Roman Catholic. The female did not count; she was cursed as well. My grandfather was a very independent and self-taught Irishman who had become a marxist under the pressures of poverty (section 1 above). My father never forgot that episode of the 1930s, and himself inclined strongly to marxism, though he was not an activist and merely held private views.
In his later years, at one period my father read a few books on Indian saints, and conceded that he had ignored some dimensions of Indian religion, which he did not profess to understand. He could be refreshingly honest in his disclosures, contrasting with the tendency to assume knowledge elsewhere. Yet he had allowed his temper to upset his domestic life, berating my mother for her religious views (she had become a follower of Meher Baba in 1962). That attitude created grounds for a divorce. Ironically, my father acknowledged that Meher Baba (1894-1969) was the only contemporary Eastern mystic to make an open dismissal of LSD, the others appearing lazy in this respect.
With the divorce, there was danger of an estrangement between myself and my father, who moved to London. I had comprised what he deemed a threat to his outlook, as I had supported my mother. I therefore made efforts to bridge the gap between my own temperament and his, even visiting public houses in his company, despite my strong aversion to those places (an aversion for which he had resented me). He insisted that it was necessary for me to see "how the other half [of the population] live," meaning the working class, though I tended to remain one of the intellectual minority he was implying.
However, I was working class in basic ways, taking manual jobs in addition to working in Cambridge bookshops. Indeed, when I met Professor J. P. Stern (section 3), it was in the capacity of a gardener. He had a spendid house and garden in Newnham, and I was employed to maintain the garden. He seemed very surprised to learn of my interest in philosophy and religion. I believe that he associated me in certain ways with Wittgenstein, though I tended to resist the latter on some ideological grounds. Many academic philosophers could not easily come to terms with aspects of Wittgenstein's early career, in which he lived outside academe and worked (though briefly) as an assistant gardener with the monks at Hutteldorf, near Vienna. Yet Professor Stern admired that trajectory. His wife was an academic translator, and said that she did not believe I would remain a gardener. Her intuition, or reasoning, was quite soon proven correct.
Ludwig Wittgenstein |
The more immediate matter here relates to a philosophical issue evoked in my conversations with Professor Stern. He was a supporter of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), and he soon grasped that I was cool in my reception of this work. In contrast, a fair number of Cambridge academics and undergraduates were becoming enthusiastic about that early treatise of the "language philosophy" exponent.
I am prepared to credit Wittgenstein with a degree of originality, plus the influence of Schopenhauer, but my criticism was (and is) that his way of "doing philosophy" is constricting, and ultimately evasive. So much of the subsequent academic talk he inspired about "language and reality" has ignored the metaphysics often implied by the vague term "reality," and also the social issues that enveloped modernity.
Professor Stern deemed the conceptualism of "Eastern religions" to be irrelevant; he and his colleagues also veered well away from discussion of such pressing social matters as drug ingestion. He was brilliant in the field of German literature, and commendably tackled Nazism. Yet he would not venture into other areas, including the contemporary. Of course, he was circumscribed by his specialist discipline, which was German literature rather than philosophy.
India did not exist in the predominantly Eurocentric world of the philosophy professors, apart from scathing references to Transcendental Meditation in private conversation. China was a communist country of no effective interest. I remember once mentioning Zen Buddhism to Professor Stern, though he dismissed that subject as being irrational. This seemed ironic in that he was committed to expounding Nietzsche, the anti-rationalist whose mood of anarchy and "will to power" can be strongly disputed (though Stern's version was not typical of Nietzsche commentators, and he was in some respects a critic).
Citizen philosophy can, in my case at least, press for a different way of "doing philosophy," one that can hope to encompass more subjects rather than less subjects, and one in which the boundaries are not defined by European "language and logic." The format of philosophy does not have to be restricted by "linguistic" aphorisms or by Nietzschean themes, and nor even by Kantian categories.
See further Philosophy, Richard Tarnas, and Postmodernism.
My occupation as a gardener transited into a sole trader business activity during the mid-1970s. I became part of the antiques trade, which initially involved much hard work and graduating from a small van to a Luton van. I was only a very small cog in a big wheel, operating as a wholesale merchant without a shop, but I earned enough to be completely independent.
One advantage of this phase was that it enabled me to give only a part-time attention to the business activity, while other days of the working week I devoted to study and writing. This contrasted with the orientation of other dealers, who viewed their business as a compulsory full-time career, with profit as the sole objective.
A disadvantage was the transient nature of the demand for merchandise, which could vary with the particular market involved, and even the season of year. I sold furniture, mainly of the Victorian variety, and which very often became an export commodity, being in more demand abroad than in England.
Eventually I grew exasperated with the fluctuations, and made a decision to terminate my business. I sold my Luton van successfully in Bury St. Edmunds, and came back to my home in Cambridge via the railway. On the return journey, I grasped to what extent I had committed myself in this “second renunciation.” For instance, I did not have a car, and thereafter walked or used public transport.
The decision to retreat was made in 1977. I continued my private studies, interspersed with occasional visits to London museums, as I now had a sideline project in the study of arts and crafts. I was content to live very simply, on the funds I had saved from my ex-business, and in the hope that somehow I would be able to survive in the pursuit of my intellectual commitments.
A relative suggested to me that, in view of my studious temperament, I might obtain an academic qualification, in order to make my life easier. I declined the prospect. For one thing, this recourse would have involved a narrowing down of my independent syllabus to the straitjacket of official career requirements. I regarded the official career mode in the same way I viewed the compulsive business activity of the dealers. The ultimate ends were the same: a comfortable and secure career. In my perspective, the career role was a subtraction, amounting to a distraction.
In Cambridge there were several large bookshops, to which I was no stranger (I had formerly worked as an assistant in two of them). Heffers of Trinity Street expanded at this time to become a major university bookshop, but nevertheless continued to sell some of the trivia found elsewhere, meaning commercial novels and “fad” literature. I disliked especially the burgeoning “alternative” genre which included promotion of such topics as therapy, occultism, and almost anything bizarre.
As a consequence of the commercial “new age” trends, the subject of “mysticism” could now mean whatever the entrepreneurs preferred. Anybody who has made a serious study of religion should distance themselves from the deceptions in vogue.
For the record here, I do not believe that the recently popular meditation confers any ultimate enlightenment, nor that psychedelic drugs are spiritually liberating, nor that supersensory experiences are obsessively to be desired, nor that “powers” like clairvoyance and hypnotism are to be cultivated, nor that "workshop" sessions produce "transformation." I do not believe in the Jungian archetypes, so prevalent in the sphere of fantasy. Some of the people active in this field of imagined "spirituality" are surely manic. The state of popular education at this level is so dismal that only the retarded nature of contemporary socioculture can be sufficient as an explanation.
At the same time, I do not deny that metaphysical experiences may be possible, but the mode of operation is surely not as commonly depicted. The complexities could never be compressed into the span of a commercial video featuring some new age celebrity expounding the presumed arcana. Only a mentally disabled audience could take the doubtful chatter seriously. Of course, this is a function of contemporary commerce: to fog blanket the attention of customers to the point of providing supine clientele for the latest gimmick, craze, or lunacy. The fashionable ploys of big business are to be avoided, no matter how many dollars can be squeezed out of the public.
After forty years and more of the new age, there is so much confusion on the various media that only a pursuit revived from the old age can be worthwhile.
Philosophy is an unpopular subject, and therefore deserves some credence, even though innovations might be legitimate. In 1977, then as now, I was unable to see that academic philosophy had improved the thinking habits of the majority. Bertrand Russell’s fashionable (and hedonistic) liberalism was only one of the prototypal new age drawbacks. In strong reaction to such trends, I resolved to focus in areas that are customarily considered too difficult or too obscure by new age indexing, and which are treated as no man’s land by academic philosophy.
The history of Western philosophy is long and involved, and extends into the Islamic sector, now so unwelcome to mentalities which work by association of ideas (i.e., current religious fundamentalism, originating in relatively recent times). Selecting the Islamic sector as a priority, I attempted a map of what had actually happened over the centuries, at first in the traditions of “Sufism,” which is a blanket term for diverse phenomena (two separate manuscripts were the eventual outcome, the second being Sufis, Batinis, Scientists and Philosophers of the Early Islamic Era). By 1980, I had moved into anthropology and archaeology, and commenced a study of ancient civilisations, including Mesopotamia and Egypt. The third manuscript involved was entitled Ancient Cultures in Flux, and rapidly assimilated more events and cultures than originally anticipated.
The uncertainties prevailing about many aspects of ancient life were substantial. The phrase “whether or not” frequently occurred in my manuscript, meaning whether or not this particular event actually happened or which interpretation was correct. How far could such matters be resolved? With such an interest in varied subjects, by a combination of circumstances, I found myself continuing my citizen researches on the premises of Cambridge University Library, which certainly had enough books and journals to sustain my interest for a number of years.
The Ancient Cultures ms was the original location of some basic data later incorporated in my book Minds and Sociocultures Vol. One (1995). This was subtitled Zoroastrianism and the Indian Religions. Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and Jainism are still living religions, and hence my decision to detach these from the “dead religions” encompassed in the parent manuscript.
In the (1994) Preface to Minds and Sociocultures, I commented:
“I could hope that the present work might at least contribute to the recognition that not all non-professionals are unstudious clods helplessly moulded by the video boom and commercial novelism, trends which flourish in deteriorating socioculture.... My non-academic philosophy includes the role of a revisionism which jettisons any assumption of being incapable of error. The aim is to constantly improve one's existing level of performance and knowledge.... [the present book] merely represents the attempt of a philosophical man in the street to compress within one volume what cannot generally be found in such compact form.... I have no credentials, and do not aspire to importance, for which I am unsuited” (p. vii).
That book was annotated, and comprised a thousand pages. The lengthy introduction afforded a critique of various contemporary theories and trends, including the new age counterculture. This preliminary exercise was entitled Complexities and Setbacks in Sociocultural Evolution.
8. Sectarian Authority Figures
In the early 1970s, I happened to visit the Meher Baba Association in London, curious to learn about the situation of Pete Townshend, who was giving a low profile talk about his recent visit to India. Townshend was a "rock" megastar, the energetic guitarist of The Who, and celebrated at Woodstock and elsewhere. In 1968, he had surprised many people by his professed allegiance to Meher Baba (1894-1969), whom he had never met.
Pete Townshend |
In his London talk, given to the very small audience who turned up for the occasion, Townshend eulogised the tomb of Meher Baba at Meherabad, the ashram in Maharashtra that had commenced in the early 1920s. Using a film projector, he showed scenes of Meherabad, and talked very enthusiastically of his pilgrimage. I concluded that he was genuine in this interest. I did not ask for his autograph, and there was no personal encounter. I merely observed the event, though I stood quite close to him. I do not remember there being more than about twenty people present, and perhaps less.
Yet I remained wary of Pete Townshend's background. He had a reputation for former drug usage and onstage violence, frequently smashing his guitar, apparently a gimmick encouraged by his manager. However, he was unusually articulate for a rock musician, as I found on the sole occasion that I saw him. There were no four letter words of the type which so often accompanied "music celebrity" expression, and to which I was averse.
In 1977, my mother (Jean Shepherd, alias Kate Thomas) gained a private meeting with Townshend in London, to discuss a matter of disagreement. She was less reserved than myself, and was prepared to believe that Townshend could resolve some outstanding misconceptions. She had been a follower of Meher Baba during the 1960s, and was still sympathetic towards that deceased figure. She had recently visited Meher Baba Oceanic, the new London centre established by Townshend in 1976.
A prominent visiting devotee from India, namely Adi K. Irani (alias Adi Senior), met her for the first time at Oceanic, but afterwards proved to be biased by his former mistaken assumptions about 1960s events relating to her. This authority figure received adulation from the other guests at Oceanic. However, his mode of speech did not impress my mother, who wrote much later: "Adi Snr was like some high priest, zealous for converts to the faith and highly disapproving of the slightest departures from the orthodox thought of the surviving mandali [ashram devotees]" (Thomas, The Destiny Challenge, Forres: New Frequency, 1992, p. 714).
The same apostle from India tried to have her banned from Oceanic after the occasion mentioned above, though she had not said anything against him. She accordingly contacted another senior authority figure, namely Meher Baba's brother Adi S. Irani (known as Adi Jnr). The latter was resident in London and knew far more about her than the dogmatic visitor. Adi Jnr intervened on her behalf, but unfortunately he was now an invalid, and the impact of his disclosures appears to have been muted in effect. Certainly, Townshend ignored the informed party, and instead supported the inflexible Adi Snr, who was prominently active at an international level amongst devotees in these final years of his life.
At the private meeting with my mother, Townshend was something of an ogre, rejecting her early autobiographical record of 1960s events, and maintaining that she should be banned from his new centre. Townshend was himself now an authority figure in this movement, being lionised by young British and American devotees, discernibly because he was a rock celebrity. He tipped the scales in the Adi Snr versus Adi Jnr issue. "He [Townshend] concluded that my reconnection with the movement was undesirable, and that he would have to ban me from other than the briefest of visits to his Centre, which he did. Needless to say, I made no attempt to go there again" (ibid., p. 715).
Townshend was rather emphatic on that occasion about his cordon of supposedly undesirable influences. "He said he had trouble enough on his hands already" (ibid.) He spoke of problems caused by ex-drug addict devotees who attended Oceanic, people who were subject to hallucinations. His rationale of the confrontation was that he had to shield the hallucinators from any further trouble. Yet my mother had no drug problem whatever, never having resorted to drugs; she was a mystical type whose experiences and outlook did not converge with the rather narrow "orthodoxy" upheld by Townshend. She had been opposed to the use of drugs years before Townshend's decision to reform his 1960s surfeit of LSD and other drugs. There are some who think that she set a much better example, both in the 1960s and later, than the Oceanic authority figure (for instance, in the Grof controversy, she has made a point that LSD hallucinations do not equate with spiritual experiences).
Not long after the episode of suppression in 1977, Pete Townshend relapsed into his own drug problems, following the death of the eccentric Who drummer Keith Moon, who in 1978 killed himself with "a potent sedative used both to curb his appetite for alcohol and control the epileptic fits the drummer experienced during his various institutionalised dry-outs" (Geoffrey Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes: A Life of Pete Townshend, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996, p. 174). Townshend himself began to consume excessive alcohol (in the form of brandy), though his closely related plight became a struggle with cocaine and heroin addiction. He is reported to have said in his more lucid moments circa 1980 that "I'm very heavily into Meher Baba, but I also drink like a fish; I'm not the most honest person in the world" (ibid., pp. 189-90).
In London,Townshend supplied about fifty hangers-on with cocaine (ibid., p. 188), and added amphetamine to his unhealthy diet. Amyl nitrate and cannabis were supplements. His appearance at parties and nightclubs included an episode in which he stopped breathing and had to be connected to a life-support system (ibid., p. 195). His crisis period was 1980-82. With the assistance of a doctor, he broke the lethal pattern of habit. After two years of recovery via psychotherapy, Townshend emerged to mount an anti-drug crusade in the mid-1980s, even liasing with the British Conservative party and turning round on his earlier theme of ("My Generation") rebellion. Townshend said at this time: "It's only by becoming part of the establishment [that] you can actually do anything" (ibid., p.222).
Meanwhile, he had receded completely from the Meher Baba movement, and Oceanic had ceased to function. Many people thought that Pete Townshend no longer credited his spiritual hero, though Wikipedia Townshend (accessed 20/12/2010) states that "his discipleship continues to the current day." The same article asserts: "His stardom quickly made him the world's most notable follower of Meher Baba." In 1970, as a consequence of Meher Baba's inspiration, Townshend declared himself "opposed to the use of all psychedelic drugs, making him one of the first rock stars with counterculture credibility to turn against their use" (ibid.)
As a commentator with no countercultural orientation, I can here note my affiliation to the Meher Baba movement during the years 1965-66, when I was in the mid-teens. Being then familiar with Meher Baba's anti-drug message, this was, however, a secondary feature for my own psychological landscape, as I never used drugs and felt no inclination to do so. Further, the anti-drug emphasis of Meher Baba amounted to only a fraction of his varied communications, which in general were never assimilated.
I grew out of the "devotee" phase in a recognition of the difference between Meher Baba and authoritarian devotees who claimed to speak for him. The growth of "Meher Baba Centres" never meant anything to me, especially in view of the figurehead's own rather critical remarks on that subject. I never visited Oceanic or Meherabad. I remain independent of all movements and sects.
Authority figures often transpire to be less authoritative than they believe. Adi K. Irani became invested with great importance in the eyes of devotees in his role as secretary to Meher Baba. However, the latter stated in 1954 that "advice you can have from Adi, but not as from Baba through Adi" (Shepherd, Meher Baba, an Iranian Liberal, 1988, p. 53).The figurehead clearly recognised that the secretary was not infallible, and was obviously distancing himself from distorting assumptions.
"I have not understood what work you are doing for me" is another statement from Meher Baba's repudiation of "Baba Centre" activity in 1954 (ibid., p. 52). At that time he made clear to devotees that he wanted all the new "Baba Centres" in Andhra to be dissolved. What he would have said about the posthumous Meher Baba Oceanic in London, is anybody's guess. Certainly, his austere code of living in India did not equate with the route to self-destruction that was demonstrated in the affluent New York-London circuit of indulgent consumerism.
My interest in Meher Baba rapidly became one of ascertaining the facts of occurrence. Such a pursuit was difficult to find elsewhere in milieux governed by devotional sentiment, and also by the dogmatism and opinion of diverse authority figures. To repeat: I remain independent of all movements and sects.
9. Cambridge Library Phase
Cambridge University Library |
My unofficial and independent research project encompassed philosophy, history of religion, psychology, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and the history of science. My incentive was confronted and encouraged by the vast number of books and learned journals available at CUL. Surprises were in store from the start. The history of religion gained a detail that I had never thought possible. I had read a fair number of basic works, but the scholastic background was now overpowering. For every book I had read in earlier years, there were now so many more. Plus the journals, which were a necessary commitment. I accumulated notebooks by the dozen, eventually totalling over seventy. Nevertheless, many areas of sparse information and questioning remained.
The archives on philosophy similarly revealed extensive data generally beyond public reach, including the debates and disagreements which attend the academic discussions. Though perhaps the biggest surprises were in the direction of science, where well known themes were endlessly argued and contradicted by the experts. At first I was dizzy with all the variations, but afterwards I became accustomed to tracking the minefield.
One of the many philosophers I studied in CUL was Spinoza, who had now become my favourite amongst the modern Western thinkers. I had not formerly been able to locate the more detailed academic studies of Spinoza, and certainly not at journal level. However, I am still not a Spinozan (or Spinozist) in any strict sense of the word, recognising some limitations in the approach of Spinoza, and being critical of the enigmatic aspect of his writings which has prompted such divergent interpretations (e.g., the "atheist" versus "pantheist" inflections).
Furthermore, I was just as much interested in certain other philosophers of earlier eras, including (Friar) Roger Bacon, Eriugena, Farabi, Ibn Rushd, Suhrawardi Maqtul, Plotinus, and Plato. Not to mention the daunting figure of Aristotle, who has been viewed through so many different ideational lenses.
There were also yet other philosophical traditions in prospect. I had formerly made a preliminary acquaintance with Chinese philosophy, but CUL holdings quite eclipsed my early studies. There were many shelves of books in the Chinese and Japanese languages, though fortunately for me, there were also numerous English and French publications bearing on this Far Eastern heritage. Confucius, Mencius, and many other ancients gained fresh profile, as did neo-Confucians such as Chu Hsi. Of course, the study of Chinese Buddhism was also an advantage, and Taoism was no stranger on those extensive shelves.
In my citizen perspective, the focus had to include Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Islamic, and other mentation heritages, not just the British and American acquisitions in analytical philosophy.
Scientific extensions are always advisable in philosophy. The problem is finding out which version of science is accurate or viable. To give one illustration here. During the 1970s, at citizen level I encountered some available books on brain studies, varying from Robert Ornstein's The Psychology of Consciousness (1972) to the more exacting verdict of Colin Blakemore entitled Mechanics of the Mind (1977). There were obviously differences of opinion amongst academics about brain function.
Transiting to CUL, I found that the brain debates were interminable, and initially required learning a new terminology converging with the substance of medical dictionaries. Anglo-American neuroscience jargon was on the increase. Very briefly, cognitivist and other theories about the brain left scope for prodigious disagreement in scientific journals. That was nearly thirty years ago, and the situation is rather more complex today.
I have since encountered the upsurgence of dubious brain lore in more popular vehicles of expression. For instance, there are technological allurements of how the brain creates God. The subject of hemispheric synchronisation is currently so facile that virtually anything can be sold in capitalist countries by entrepreneurs.
"Altered states" and "alien abduction" fantasies are now convergent in neuromagnetics. The computer can be elevated to a key control position, which may be bad news for independent minds. An alternative is the malaise of "technoshamanism." Other reductionists promote psychedelic experiences, which remain at the 1960s level of LSD obsession. See Grof transpersonalism and the Bache controversy. Some psychedelic enthusiasts portray themselves as mystics, while some disillusioned psychedelic subjects become atheists railing at all forms of religion. One strongly suspects that "God" has nothing to do with the numerous contemporary states of acute mental subjectivity.
The Western vogue for meditation is meaningless in pseudoscience. Those who are unable to meditate are now given the commercial short-cut option of, e. g., "yogatronics," resorting to a CD and headphones. Of this alluring sidetrack, one American commentator says that "you may not become immediately enlightened, but hemispheric synchronisation helps with a whole host of problems." Others conclude that commercial socioculture tends to create an excess of problems rather than solving them. Observers have noted several commercial companies recently promoting "self-regulation technology," exhibiting elaborately trademarked auspices. The dustbin is the best place for so much exploitive technology.
11. Citizen Philosophy
After nearly three years spent at CUL (Cambridge University Library), I managed to self-publish a book relating to the history of science. One of the persons who read this work (Psychology in Science, 1983) was Professor Glen Schaefer, a Canadian physicist working in Britain. Having strong interests in ecology, he was also an expert on bird flight. He worked at Cranfield University, establishing the department of Ecological Physics. He pioneered the use of vertical radar for tracking insect pests such as desert locusts, and also researched alternatives to chemical crop spraying.
Professor Schaefer liked my book, and offered of his own accord to arrange a Ph.D syllabus on the basis of content. I grasped that he was quite serious, and pointed out that I had no academic background. He waved that factor aside, saying he had many international contacts, and could easily arrange something for me that would make me an academic. I then objected that I would have to stop my interdisciplinary project for the purposes he was urging, and so declined the offer, as courteously as I could.
The Professor was surprised, and warned that I would encounter financial difficulties if I did not adjust my project in a more advantageous economic context. He associated my “scholastic” output (using annotations, as distinct from basic references) with a British and European mode; American scholars used the medium of annotations, though scientists generally did not. I emphasised that my book was self-published, and he said that just did not matter; all that mattered was the content, and the commitment demonstrated. I had used annotations, and had cited serious works and journals not generally available. “You can build on that in an academic vocation, and get paid for it,” he stressed.
I remained an interdisciplinary private researcher at CUL. Funding was indeed a problem, as the Professor had rightly said. Many years later, I emerged with the publishing logo of Citizen Initiative, and in 2005 described myself in print as a “citizen philosopher.” Let me here apply some of the reasoning underlying that brief description, which was made twenty-five years after entering CUL and 12 years after terminating my library phase.
I do not claim to be a scholar. I chose not to be an academic, or an academic philosopher. A citizen who is interested in philosophy, and who studies that subject (with extensions, and some published output) for 25 years and more, could conceivably be called a citizen philosopher. No status is implied by that description, but rather the reverse.
Neither deductive or inductive method, and nor the diverse combinations, is necessarily dependent upon an academic degree in philosophy. Strangely enough, modern Western philosophy was founded by citizen philosophers, especially Descartes, whose project ran counter to the prevailing academic curriculum of his time. In the twentieth century, philosophy tended very much to be identified with the academic sector, an exclusivist situation which may not be totally representative of the human species.
One point I have to make here is that I am not anti-academic, unlike some “new age” writers in Western countries whose themes are markedly anti-establishment. I have generally made allowances for academic viewpoints that may not agree with my own, and I have always respected as much as possible the contributions of conformist academics, as found in books and learned journals. If disagreements occasionally occur, I trust that is not a crime by the very standards of academic dispute, which can be intensive.
My dispute has not been with establishment academics, but with the alternative factions often called “new age,” though sometimes the word “holistic” has been claimed in those directions. I do not believe that the interests designated are truly holistic, and for reasons I have explained and indicated elsewhere at some length. The true holistic paradigm will attempt a more thorough research than the nominal parties have done, and without the complicating trends to commercial entrepreneurialism that are so obvious to observers.
My mother, Jean Shepherd (Kate Thomas), 2002. Copyright Kevin R.D. Shepherd |
In my own case, the fate of a dissident relative has served to make clear why I have taken such a critical angle with the trends under discussion here. See Kate Thomas and the Findhorn Foundation (2009) and Letter to Robert Walter MP (2009). See also Findhorn Foundation (2010). Direct and firsthand information has contradicted what elsewhere passes as "spiritual education."
In associated quarters, the subject of "integral studies" has afforded some scope for disagreement. See, e. g., Integral Studies, Ken Wilber and Integralism, and Integral Theory. Ken Wilber's promotion of the Integral Institute has met with criticism from ex-supporters like Frank Visser, and includes endorsement of a controversial American guru. Also associated with integral studies is the academic philosopher Richard Tarnas; his promotion of LSD psychotherapy and astrology has evoked disagreement. Tarnas has long been a colleague of Stanislav Grof, likewise connected with the California Institute of Integral Studies, and innovator of psychedelic and holotropic "therapies" which have been considered dangerous by critics.
My resistance to "new age" trends goes back to a published disagreement with the academic philosopher Paul Feyerabend (d. 1994), the "against method" exponent who was influenced by Californian alternative ideas of the 1960s. In Psychology in Science (1983), I closed with a support of method against the relativism of Feyerabend, who argued for alternative medicine and voodoo in the same context as science. Relativism gave further scope to therapy entrepreneurs. Moving in the opposite direction, I formulated philosophical anthropography.
13. The God Debate
One of the criticisms made of philosophy is that philosophers have very often disagreed in their concepts and conclusions. The objection does not invalidate philosophy, which is fundamentally not a dogmatic pursuit, unlike religions and sects. There have also been many differences of opinion amongst scientists, as any study of the background data will abundantly reveal. Furthermore, there have been extensive differences of view in evidence amongst theologians and mystics. The history of religion bears out my contention. Theists, monists, pantheists, and numerous varieties of denominational and sectarian persuasion, are surely testimony to the contrasts as distinct from the unity.
My own version of philosophy includes an attempt to extend treatment across divisive parameters, investigating statements and events in philosophy, religion, and science, and in a cross-cultural context.
l to r: Richard Dawkins, John Cottingham |
There are pronounced and ongoing debates within academic ranks. For instance, the controversy about God is currently strong in Britain. Professor Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion (2006), is basically criticising Christianity, though with references to Judaism and Islamic fundamentalism. One chapter is entitled Why there almost certainly is no God, and this spotlights a Cambridge conference on science and religion sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. Dawkins was the only atheist among the eighteen invited speakers, twelve of whom were Christians. The audience comprised "a small number of hand-picked science journalists from Britain and America.... they had each been paid the handsome sum of $15,000 to attend the conference, on top of all expenses" (Dawkins, The God Delusion, London: Bantam Press, 2006, p. 151).
In relation to the same conference, Professor Dawkins reports that "several discussants at Cambridge claimed that God spoke to them, inside their heads, just as vividly and as personally as another human might" (ibid., p. 154). This aspect of religious belief has often been criticised, though not always in such a context of Cambridge conference activity and a paid audience.
A critic of Dawkins is Professor John Cottingham, who commented on The God Delusion that: "Dawkins seems more interested in polemics than in careful scrutiny of arguments.... Dawkins ends the book by venturing into the domain of ethics. Much of his discussion here is, I regret to say, simply a travesty of proper philosophical debate.... This is a deeply disappointing effort, when compared, for example, with Dawkins' brilliant earlier work, The Selfish Gene. Some of the earlier energy and ebullience remains, but the book is too hectoring, too insistent, too one-sided, and too irritable to change the views, let alone the life, of any fair-minded reader." See A Review of Dawkins. Compare the Richard Dawkins website.
One can conclude that the "God debate" is attended by strong disagreements amongst academic authorities, accompanied by financial considerations in some sectors, and aggravated by the issue of subjective experiences.
The present writer is not a Christian, nor an academic, and is thus removed from the arena of debate about God. I take the view that metaphysics is a far more complex subject than is generally admitted by various parties. With regard to religious sectors, I have concentrated upon minorities, and not the modes of aggregate belief (which harbour fundamentalism). Many details about those minorities are still obscure and/or unresolved. For example, see my webpages on Zoroastrianism and the early phase of Sufism. Even a few Western philosophers of the modern period have an enigmatic complexion, e.g., Spinoza, despite ready reckoner labels like "atheist," "pantheist," or "deist."
For many years I was resistant to being featured on the web, disliking most aspects of the internet scene, and preferring an authorial low profile. Some friends eventually persuaded me that this attitude was a drawback in disseminating information. I capitulated to the persuasion in 2007, launching the Citizen Initiative website which opposed some "new age" problems. Some notice was taken of this contribution, and so my friends were doubtless correct. In more general directions, I still maintain that I was justified in my earlier diagnosis of the web malaise. The web so often confuses citizens, presenting a kaleidoscope of unmonitored materials. Scams and pirate viruses are some of the more obvious deterrents to a computer lifestyle.
I discovered that sectarian animosities are a further hazard on the web, and that Wikipedia is a harbour for such activities (see the article Wikipedia Issues). On a Wikipedia user page, a sectarian blogger (SSS108, alias Equalizer) repudiated my publishing project known as Citizen Initiative, dismissing this as being of no relevance, due to some reported criticisms in one book of a controversial Hindu guru (Sathya Sai Baba) by discontented ex-devotees. The blogger was an apologist for the guru. Yet there is reason to assert that citizen publishing initiatives are valid in the current commercial climate dominated by big business and deficient web transmission.
The pseudonymous American apologist had not read any of my books, but proscribed them via a strongly visible Wikipedia User page, and because an appendice in one of those books was favourable to his ex-devotee opponent in sectarian issues. SSS108 was subsequently banned from Wikipedia because of his sectarian activist editing, though nothing was done about the offensive User page on Google.
The vindictive apologist later resorted to the jibe that I was not an academic and had left school at the age of fifteen, this being considered cultist proof that I have no validity as a writer (though SSS108 was not an academic, and had no credentials or study history; he did employ several web pseudonyms such as Equalizer and joe108). See Internet Terrorist. The studious non-American citizen may be obliged to resist American democracy, at least of the type created by the capitalist web giants who take no responsibility for libels.
I should perhaps add that my book Minds and Sociocultures (1995) was a thousand pages in length; a basic investigation revealed that no similar annotated book on Zoroastrianism and the Indian religions was composed by a non-academic citizen during the 1990s, and nor even during the 1980s. Furthermore, not even during the 1970s, when publishing costs were lower. Nor has there been any sequel to date.
There was, however, the rather curtailing insistence of an American librarian (DGG) on Wikipedia, who had not read any of my books, but who effectively endorsed the contention of sectarians (and sectarian afiliates) that I was not sufficiently notable; a Wikipedia article about my output was accordingly deleted by pseudonymous administrators with no obvious interest in philosophy, religion, or sociography. In their mood of new age indulgence, anthropography is of less relevance than favoured Wikipedia articles like the banal Egg and chips or the more violent subject Clockwork Orange. See further Wikipedia Anomalies.
The Wikipedia moral here could even be something analogous to a notorious scene in the Kubrick (and Warner Bros.) film just mentioned: get booted in the groin or raped by decadent public taste cultivated by the pseudonymous wiki caste, your mouth being sealed with deletionist tape to ensure that you are never heard.
"The new incursion of adolescent terrorism may require a public militia to deal with the inciters.... The 1990s became a horror story for the British police force. The high incidence of rape and other violent crimes have gone hand in hand with decadent cinema and television.... Some videos in legal circulation should never have been made. Since the time of Clockwork Orange, psychological disturbers have been popular diet.... As contemporary society is almost solely run on economic lines, moral considerations amount to absolutely nil in many spheres" (Shepherd, Pointed Observations, 2005, p. 112).
I do not claim notability, being merely a citizen who has avoided career prospects. I have nevertheless repudiated the pseudonymous identity preferred by many denizens of the American web. People who do not accept due scrutiny of their real name personal identity should not be invested with any role as judges of publishing standard, cultural value, and public relevance (and such abilities are implied by the Google status attaching to the Wikipedia "citizen" encyclopaedia).
The British citizen objection can be lodged here that American democracy is a contemporary myth on Wikipedia. This myth is accompanied by a form of capitalist exploitation of the rest of the world, achieved through various means such as the Californian new age and Hollywood (plus related) video debacles.
Windows and Google are renowned for their capitalist strategies. Computer manufacture has rather speedily changed model specifics to obvious commercial advantage. Other factors also change suspiciously for convenience. Google Search name listings no longer reveal the bulk or length of internet entries. A trite feature comprising only a few paragraphs can easily score in ascendancy over a lengthy article with annotations. Such drawbacks invite criticism for encouraging superficial assessment of web materials. The 10k versus 200k issue is just one of the glaring deficiencies in evidence.
Independent citizen action has a precedent in my family history. My Irish grandfather, domiciled in Yorkshire, was self-taught, teaching himself to read and write at an adult age while living in poverty induced by the economic depression that followed the First World War. He abandoned his Roman Catholic beliefs and became a marxist; he also became a supporter of the hunger marches, in which he participated, believing that the working man was a victim of the social malaise afflicting Britain. He detested politicians, royalty, the wealthy upper class, and the wealthy clergy.
I am not a marxist, and nor an atheist. Both religious sects and atheist commentators frequently tend to dogmatism, albeit of different kinds. The truth can be elusive. God is still an open question, despite all the attempts to close down queries and probings. There are many other open questions too easily foreclosed, such as what progress actually comprises.
I have not had to live with hunger or malnutrition like a former unemployed generation in the north of England. Yet there is much to complain about in the permissive technological society, where educational standards in Britain have in general fallen well below the 1960s performance. English grammar, for instance, is said to be at a low ebb, facilitated by a variety of causes, including some bad performance standards of the internet. Yet more alarming are some of the juvenile attitudes found about law and order. A British policeman was recently blinded when shot in the face by a murderer; a nascent fan club for the murderer subsequently occurred in web dimensions. Some adults say that there is too much decadent cinema and novelism glorifying criminals.
The situation in ecology has frequently been misrepresented. A recent facile argument implies that a cold winter means global warming must be a myth. Too many citizens have subscribed to such glib contraction, influenced by widespread confusions.
My coverage of ecology in the book Pointed Observations (Dorchester: Citizen Initiative, 2005) was accompanied by the reflection:
"The incentive on the part of citizens to dispute or query official and public matters, and to extend educational horizons, might be described as a democratic prerogative. That incentive may involve supplying information frequently neglected" (page 343).
That book gave information about philosophers, religious traditions, alternative therapy, the countercultural "workshop" commerce, the drugs problem, and ecology. One aspect of ecology is global warming, a subject currently prone to denials and reductionism.
During the 1980s, it was still possible to encounter people in Britain who admitted an ignorance of what the word ecology signified. One citizen actually told me that he had never heard of the word. Fortunately, I had registered that word during the 1970s, though I did not begin to study the subject in any depth until I started my project at Cambridge University Library in 1981. In addition, Professor Glen Schaefer relayed to me in the early 1980s various discoveries familiar to him in his research role as an ecological physicist, his contacts extending from China to America. He said that some of the resistances encountered were formidable, especially in his own part of the world (meaning America and Canada).
Global warming was being discussed by scientists during the 1970s, and was predicted to increase substantially by 2000. In my first book, as a commentator on the Club of Rome outlook, I mentioned that "such an alteration is theoretically sufficient to reduce the ice masses at the poles - with the consequence, remorselessly enough, of raising the level of the oceans and creating climatic disturbances at all latitudes" (Psychology in Science, 1983, p. 153).
In America, the political debates obstructed prudent action. The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 was ignored by politicians and oil economists in a country creating the strongest degree of climate pollution in the world. The cost of regulating "greenhouse gases" was the major stumbling block. Many years passed before the American media gave a changing view, reflecting an improved information. In 2006, California became the first state in America to impose limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Opposition to the theme of man-made (anthropogenic) global warming remains strong.
For thirty years I have been observing the apathies in political action, and the confusion afflicting the public mind. I am sometimes asked what my current position is with regard to climate change. I have not changed course from my earlier comments. The denials of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming have not impressed me. For criticism of sceptics, see RealClimate. A relevant book is Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010).
Greenland and Antarctica are key subjects for assessment. The current flow of glaciers into the sea is a contributor to the rise of sea level. The pace of glacier-melt is far more crucial than the political and commercial agendas which seek to explain away problems in ecology.
For those interested in such matters, I have not voted for any political party in Britain for many years, and feel that any ideal or viable party would refuse the high salaries and instead work for a more frugal livelihood, like so many citizen volunteers to worthwhile causes.
By 2007, important discoveries revealed that summer ice on the Arctic Ocean was shrinking too quickly, and exposing seas formerly anticipated to remain ice-bound for further decades. Satellite surveillance has confirmed global warming.
Climate scientists refer to two important features of sea phenomena that are influenced by global warming. The thermal expansion of sea water is a big potential problem, sufficient to create up to two feet of increased sea level, quite enough to disrupt and deluge low-lying deltas in Asia and Africa by the year 2100. However, the IPCC (the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) initially underestimated the potential rise in sea level by failing to take into sufficient account the factor of additional water created by melting sources of ice. The Greenland ice sheet could create enough water to raise global ocean levels by seven metres (23 feet). The accompanying factor of melting Antarctic ice sheets accentuates the potential drama.
Antarctica |
Scientific investigations by both American and British teams have profiled the ecological importance of Antarctica. In January 2009, Reuters reported that American scientists had reviewed satellite and weather records for that continent, which is bigger than the United States. The results showed that freezing temperatures had risen by about 0.5 Celsius since the 1950s. This study disproved the popular idea that Antarctica is cooling.
The "cooling" myth has been a favourite with sceptics of man-made global warming, who have employed this as evidence for their position. The myth has blocked due recognition of the fact that Antarctica is home to ninety per cent of the ice on this planet. An intensive thawing action would be devastating.
West Antarctica "will eventually melt if warming like this continues" said a representative of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. A 3 degree Celsius rise in temperature could precipitate a wide melt. Greenland is also very vulnerable. West Antarctica, combined with Greenland, hold enough potential ice-melt to to raise sea levels by 14 metres. "Even losing a fraction of both would cause a few metres [of increased sea level] this century, with disastrous consequences" said a director of climate change research at the University of Adelaide (Australia).
Substantial Antarctic ice-melt would be sufficient to threaten coastal cities from Beijing to London, not to mention Pacific islands. The situation is already grave. Since the 1990s, ten ice sheets on the Antarctic Peninsula have receded or collapsed. The Wilkins ice-sheet is now also on the verge of collapse, "held in place by a sliver of ice 500 metres wide compared to 100 km in the 1950s." There is the further consideration that the total ice mass of Antarctica contains sufficient frozen water to raise world sea levels by 57 metres (187 feet) or more. In such an eventuality, there could be more than one Atlantis.
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has contributed to an extensive report on global warming. BAS member Professor John Turner divulged that scientists were now "very confident" in their comprehensive assessment of a discrepancy which had been causing confusion. While rapid ice loss had been occurring on the Peninsula, other areas of Antarctica had been cooling, with a 10% increase of ice in the surrounding seas. This contradiction had been used by sceptics as evidence against global warming. But the supposed "evidence" is eliminated by interpretation from another angle.
Briefly, the huge ozone hole over Antarctica has been shielding that continent from the worst effects of global warming. The apparent anomaly is caused by the ozone hole, the ultra-violet radiation having changed atmospheric factors, increasing the winds in the Southern Ocean region and keeping the temperature down compared with the Western sector. The ozone hole was caused by man-made CFC gases, which have since been banned, and scientists expect the hole to repair within the next fifty to sixty years. By that time, the cooling effect will have ceased, and the Antarctic will experience the full effects of global warming. Temperatures could rise by 3 degrees Celsius, with melting ice contributing to a global sea level increase of up to 1.4 metres.
The danger from warming seas is already underway, with melting Antarctica ice sheets being estimated to have produced about 10% of a general rise in global sea-level in recent decades. See Antarctica may heat up dramatically. Important data was published by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), featuring BAS and international experts. See Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment (Cambridge, 2009). SCAR is closely linked to the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge (England). The lengthy SCAR report confirmed the conclusions of climate scientist Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, working at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (Germany); the average global rise in sea-level by the end of the century was here proposed at approximately 1.4 metres, exceeding the IPCC prediction of 2007, which had been based on more limited data.
Scientific findings and estimates are greeted with jeers by hostile bloggers. Ongoing and adamant denials of anthropogenic global warming are not impressive. The inverted arguments include the accusation of arrogance at finding humans to be in error. The extremist opponents evidently wish to maintain their consumerism at all costs to nature. The human perfection league are too complacent.
A sceptical British citizen contacted me in 2008 with a list of sources designed to prove that global warming is not man-made. He was not a web rowdy, and believed in decorum and literacy instead of blog curses. At the top of the list appeared the controversial book by Danish academic Bjorn Lomborg entitled The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). I remained unpersuaded by the contention of the list-maker, who cited one other book (by a politician), one DVD, and three misleading websites. There are many other books on ecology and warming, together with numerous detailed academic articles, plus websites of a more authoritative kind. The DVD was dismissed in scientific circles as being mistaken and unreliable.
Lomborg gained repute as a severe sceptic, becoming notorious for attacking climate scientists, citizen campaigners, and the media, alleging that global warming was an exaggerated issue, and that funding was best diverted elsewhere. His book aroused much controversy and rebuttal, though it was disastrously influential in misleading an international readership.
The supporting book in the list abovementioned was An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming (2008) by Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain. The independent British ecologist James Lovelock has sympathetically observed on the media that Lawson's book is not a diatribe or polemic, and that "he tries to reason his case." There is nevertheless prodigious scope for improved reason.
Other assessments by climatologists have been less flattering. Lord Lawson's short book follows a conservative economist orientation. He does not deny that global warming has been occurring, but thinks that the impact will be minimal. Climate change scientists are here viewed as alarmists for predicting catastrophe in the absence of due rectifications. Lord Lawson relies upon the mistaken deduction that temperature has not increased during the past decade. He thinks that the term climate change is a cover-up, and favours the suggestion that global warming has almost stopped. His appeal to reason is superfluous, and also very misleading. It is not alarmist to reasonably emphasise, for example, that sea level is rising due to increasing ice melt and related factors.
Lord Lawson was Chancellor for the British Conservative Party in the 1980s. He later contributed to The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007), which was the DVD in the abovementioned list of a confused citizen sceptic. That programme was shown on Channel 4, and featured politicians, economists, scientists, and others; the basic intention was to depict man-made global warming as a fiction and scam. The documentary was strongly criticised by scientists who "argued that it had misused and fabricated data, relied on out-of-date research, employed misleading arguments, and misrepresented the position of the IPCC." Quote from Wikipedia (accessed 03/09/2010).
The widely declared failure of the Copenhagen summit meeting (in 2009) on global warming is no denial of climate change. That conference was accompanied by a significant report from 26 international climate scientists entitled The Copenhagen Diagnosis (2009). There were doubtless some politicians who did not really want to see the contents. One verdict was that by 2020 the industrial nations must reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide by around 40% below 1990 levels to achieve any realistic chance of avoiding dangerous repercussions. In the absence of sufficient mitigation, the high danger warming threshold of 2 degrees Celsius could be crossed as early as 2040. Deep emission cuts are imperative due to recent emission increases.
The Diagnosis emphasised that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate, and already contributing to the rise of sea level. Arctic sea ice is also melting much faster than formerly assessed. Without a substantial reduction in greenhouse gases, global warming could contribute as high as 7 Celsius by 2100. Sea level has risen more than 5 centimetres over the past 15 years, about 80% higher than the tentative IPCC predictions from 2001. Furthermore, if the climate is to be stabilised, global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases require to decline rapidly within the next five to ten years.
Some observers know that I am critical of "non-accountable bureaucratic" trends in ecology such as those involved in CIFAL Findhorn (e. g., see my Second Letter to Tony Blair PM). That drawback does not affect my support for the exposition of climate scientists, who are not the bureaucrats condoning commercial activities in sustainability, alternative therapy, and pop-mysticism.
See also my web article Climate Change Complexities (2010) and the item Climate Change Problems (2011).
Kevin R. D. Shepherd
December 2011
Copyright © 2011 Kevin R. D. Shepherd. All Rights Reserved. Page uploaded May 2010, last modified December 2011.
