10/16 Philosophy of Money and Banking

Texts for this class

(1) HR6550 Bill to Reform the Banking Industry
(2) "Beyond Greed & Scarcity: An Interview with Bernard Litaer"

Recommended 

10/9 Ethics & Worldview of Traditional Societies

Texts for class
1. Interview with Helena Norberg-Hodge
2. Four Arrows, "The Continuing Saga of Anti-Indianism in America"
3. Clare Brant, "Native Ethics & Principles"

Other documents for your interest
4. Chief Seattle's speech to Chief Washington
5. Justin Vood Good, "Walking in Beauty: Why Higher Education should be Indigenized"
6. J. Good "Indigenized Education teaches Democracy" 
7. Peaceful Societies database
8. Iroquois Confederacy: Oldest participatory democracy in the world.

Ask of Me and I shall Give to thee the Heathen as Thine Inheritance and the Uttermost parts of the Earth for Thy Possession. -Psalms 2:8

Final Notes for PH1104

Dear Philosophers,

Congratulations on all of your hard work this semester. I invite you to take time to acknowledge your efforts and I salute your choice to pursue education and mental liberation. Below are some things I wanted to share with you.

1. First, Jen and I wanted to extend a warm invitation for you to visit us at our center, The Sanctuary at Shepardfields in East Haddam. We do host a weekly meditation group including a discussion group on the practice of forgiveness via A Course in Miracles, most Sundays from 3-5 PM. We are also having our first larger event, a Tiny Hermitage Open House on June 15th. If you’d like to be included on our email list, please email us at info@oursanctuary.org.   

2. On the topic of capitalism versus socialism, there was recently an epic debate between two famous public intellectuals: Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher and Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. Their discussion on the theme of capitalism, socialism and human happiness, is generating much discussion and offers a very deep analysis of these questions. 

In a recent book Zizek lays out what he takes to be our basic political choice: “Cynical conformism tells us that emancipatory ideals of more equality, democracy and solidarity are boing and even dangerous, leading to a grey, over regulated society, and that our true and only paradise is the existing ‘corrupted’ capitalist universe. Radical emancipatory engagement starts from the premise that it is the capitalist dynamics which are boring, offering more of the same in the guise of constant change, and that the struggle for emancipation is still the most daring of all ventures. Our goal is to argue for the second option.”
    (Slavoj Zizek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism)

3. Secondly, a topic that I was thinking of including in our class but did not get to: the topic of extraterrestrial visitation. This may not seem like a serious topic for philosophy, but I assure you it is. In fact, the advent of this new reality is creating the newest branch of philosophy, called “exo-philosophy.” I teach one of the very first academic classes in the US dedicated to this topic, which you can check out here. 

If you want to delve into some reliable documents, you can visit a recent blog post from another class I teach here. 

4. Finally, I made use of many fantastic books while teaching this semester. If you would like to pursue further any of the topics we looked at, I could recommend any of the following books.

I thoroughly enjoyed teach/learning with you this semester and wish you the best in your pursuits! 

Sincerely Yours, Justin

Books I used this semester while teaching the class that I found useful and inspiring

Anarchism and Direct Democracy

David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement

David Graeber, The Debt: The First 5000 Years

Mass Incarceration and Prison Abolition

Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and The Road to Repair

Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

George Jackson, Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

Abolition Now: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex

Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice

Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.

David Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice

Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

White Supremacy and Structural Racism

Angel Davis, Freedom Is A Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

Patrice Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

Robin Diangelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro

Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Fredrick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglas

Ta Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power

The Deep State

David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK

Haitian Revolution

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

Jacob Carruthers, The Irritated Genie: An Essay on the Haitian Revolution

Notes on Gnostic Ethics, Restorative Justice, Forgiveness & Interbeing

§1. From Marianne Williamson’s 2020 Presidential Campaign Website

“American politics today is disconnected from the heart. Our economic system is disconnected from the heart. Our criminal justice system is disconnected from the heart. Our educational system is disconnected from the heart. Our national security agenda is disconnected from the heart. And where there is no heart, there is no wisdom.”

§2. Revenge is not Justice. 

A retributive-punishing system is rooted in the mistake of using emotional pain as a basis for public policy. This system does too much punishing (i.e. the mass incarceration phenomenon) and not enough protecting and “making right.” (e.g. Out of 1000 people who rape, 200 are reported, 20 are moved forward to trial, less 5 are convicted, out of those 1 ends up behind bars, while 83% get away with murder.) (Ref.)

§3. Restorative Justice  

Based on an old, commonsense view of wrongdoing as a violation of people and interpersonal relationships. All indigenous cultures use restorative practices, as do many families. Whereas criminal justice sees humans as separate, autonomous beings, restorative justice sees individuals as part of an interconnected web of relationships. People who are harmed are centered in terms of the their harm being seen and valued and addressed, bystanders are called in to encircle the person, the person who harmed is called in to take accountability for what was done.

§4. Two different views of justice

Criminal Justice	Restorative Justice
Crime is a violation of the law and state	Crime is a violation of people and relationships
Violations create guilt	Violations create obligations
Justice requires the state to determine blame (guilt) and impose pain (punishment)	Justice involves victims, offenders, and community members in an effort to repair the harm and ‘put things right’
Central focus: offenders getting what they deserve.	Central focus: victim needs and offender responsibility for repairing harm.

§5. Three different questions

Criminal Justice	Restorative Justice
What laws have been broken?	Who has been harmed?
Who did it?	What are their needs?
What do they deserve?	Whose obligations are these?

(These charts from Howard Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice) 

Common Justice in Brooklyn NY as a model of using restorative practices to deal with violent crime.

§6. Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ (All Are Related) - Lakota prayer. 

Are we separate from each other or are we inter-related and inter-connected? The concept of interrelatedness is key to understanding why needs, roles and obligations are so essential to restorative justice. “In this worldview, the problem of crime - and wrongdoing in general - is that it represents a wound in the community, a tear in the web of relationships. Crime represents damaged relationships. In fact, damaged relationships are both a cause and an effect of a crime. Many traditions have a saying that a harm to one is a harm to all.” (Howard Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2015), 29.) 

§7. The Meaning of Forgiveness as a Spiritual Path and Method for Philosophical Liberation

“The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.” Each human being is a strand in an interconnected web of relationships (an expression of Love) which perceives itself as separate and autonomous (an Ego, a ball of fear). 

§8. The Ego - Principle of Self-denial or Self-hatred, an image which replaces, and needs to suppress our awareness of, our true Self. “The ego is the mind’s belief that it is completely on its own.” “The ego is certain that love is dangerous, and this is always its central teaching.” “The ego literally lives by comparisons. Equality is beyond its grasp. The ego never gives out of abundance, because it was made as a substitute for it.” Narcissism as a form of self-hatred. (From A Course in Miracles)

§9. Two basic emotions of Love versus Fear, corresponding to two systems of thought, two perceptions of reality (fear-based view that we are all separate from each other versus the love-based view that we are all One.) The Ego is sustained by fear, and is dissolved by love, oneness, the fading of the illusion of separation.

§10. Forgiveness Practice (The Six Steps to Freedom derived from the Choose Again model, as created by Diederik Wolsak 

1. I am upset. Step 1 in the conflict/upset resolution dance is to acknowledge, own, that I am in conflict or upset. The conflict serves a purpose and will lead to a joining if resolved.

2. It is about me. The conflict is not about the other person. (In comes the little voice, “yea, right” ). The conflict is never about anyone but me. Trust this step even if you don’t believe it yet. Without this step, peace and joining will not happen. It is about me. Ok, ok, so it’s about me. I know that blaming anyone for the conflict will not get me what I really want and that is: to be happy.

3. Feel the feeling. How do I feel? It is surprising to see how hard it is to really know how I am feeling. This is where commitment to honesty is essential. I have to know how I feel in order to go to:

4. Remember when I felt this way before. How is that feeling familiar? Now I have to become a detective. I am looking for the source of this feeling. When did I first feel this way? Go back as far as I can in my memory. And after a little searching I’ll remember an incident when someone said or did something that made me feel that way. Now follows:

5. Establish what my judgement of myself was in that moment? What was my perception? How did  I interpret the situation? What was my judgment of myself in that situation? What did it say about me that that person acted or spoke that way? I’m not important. I’m not supported. I’m ignored. I’m not heard. I’m inadequate. What kind of person deserves to feel this way?

6. Embrace the Truth about me. Now I must shift my old perception. Who was the “i” that made that judgement about myself in that moment (eg.- I’m ignored)? Was it the real “I” or the false “i”? If it was the false “I”, the conclusion I made about myself in that moment was also false. My judgment of myself in that moment was wrong. It said nothing about me. Whatever happened way back when was not about me. Who I am is unchanged and unchangeable. The belief I formed about who I am is wrong and doesn’t serve me. It is easy to forgive myself for believing a falsity about myself.  

“Forgive me for believing I was _______. Forgive me for believing I am ______.” You name it; most of us have at least one of more of these limiting beliefs. So there it is. Now, I’M FREE.

4/30 Gnostic Ethics, Restorative Justice, Forgiveness & Interbeing

Sources for this class

1. Marianne Williamson on forgiveness (and A Course in Miracles) and her 2020 campaign position on criminal justice

2. Howard Zehr on RJ (co-founder of modern restorative justice movement)

3. Primer on Restorative Justice from Center for Justice and Reconciliation

4. Common Justice, a truly ground-breaking organization, the only one in the country using restorative justice to deal with violent crime as an alternative to incarceration.

5. Charles Eisenstein on Interbeing

6. Twelve Principles of Attitudinal Healing (Jerry Jamplolsky)

The essence of our being is love.
Health is inner peace. Healing is letting go of fear.
Giving and receiving are the same.
We can let go of the past and of the future.
Now is the only time there is and each instant is for giving.
We can learn to love ourselves and others by forgiving rather than judging.
We can become love finders rather than fault finders.
We can choose and direct ourselves to be peaceful inside regardless of what is happening outside.
We are students and teachers to each other.
We can focus on the whole of life rather than the fragments.
Since love is eternal, death need not be viewed as fearful.
We can always perceive ourselves and others as either extending love or giving a call for help.

Final Paper Topics

Due: Friday, May 10th
Length: 6 pages
Format: Argumentative, posing a thesis or question and offering sustained argument.
References: Use at least two sources from class and two outside sources.
Submit: Via email to justin@oursanctuary.org

1. Neolithic Economist Marshal Sahlins argued that hunter-gatherers remain the ‘original affluent society’ in the sense that their needs were easily met. Are these undeveloped peoples really wealthier than modern individuals? In your answer, explain what you mean by ‘wealth.’

2. Does evil exist? If so, what is it? If not, why should we deny its reality?

3. Do the activities of the CIA and the American Deep State contradict the belief that the US government is the leading edge of freedom and democracy? If not, in what sense are they consistent with that description?

4. In what sense is Climate Change an ethical question? How can it be understood as a question in distributive justice? What are our ethical obligations, and to whom do we owe them, regarding climate change and global ecocide generally?

5. Does climate change and related environmental challenges facing the human race require merely better energy technologies, or do these challenges call for a new ethics? If the latter, what ethical principles are required?

6. Does the present carry obligations towards the future? If so, how do we quantify the duties that presently existing peoples have to future generations?

7. In his essay “Buddhist Economics,” E. F. Schumacher argues that modern economics denies the inherent value of work. What have been the implications of this for how modern economies are structured and what might we do to create a system which values people?

8. Do the ethical principles of indigenous cultures differ significantly from the ethics of modern societies? If so, what are the relevant differences and which principles ought we to choose for our current circumstances?

9. The ethical principles of indigenous cultures, for example as described by Mohawk philosopher Clare Brant, reflect the different social and economic structures of traditional societies. How do these ethical principles rest on, and support these more traditional social and economic structures?

10. In her study of Ladakh, Helena Norberg Hodge argues that the root of all our key social and environmental problems is the global economy. Is she correct? If so, why? If not, why not? Explain and analyze her arguments.

11. Are human societies becoming less violent or more violent? Explore and analyze the relevant arguments for and against, including Four Arrow’s article from our class discussion.

12. In her study of dominator systems and partnership societies, Riane Eisler draws a distinction between two kinds of hierarchy: hierarchies of power, and hierarchies of actualization. What is the relevant difference between these two structures and how does the distinction help us understand the solution to equality between genders and/or classes?

13. Prison abolitionists argue for a restorative approach to justice to replace the adversarial model of justice currently institutionalized in what Mariame Kaba calls our “criminal punishment system.” How does this restorative model differ from our current carceral approach? What are some of the practices? What is its view of human relationship?

14. Are humans separate from each other or are they spiritually interconnected and inter-existent? What are the moral and social ramifications for how we answer this question?

15. Does civilization inevitably bring with it social inequality, violence and domination?

16. Have men always dominated western culture? If not, what evidence suggests the contrary?

17. Are Neolithic figurines evidence of a fertility cult or do they have a deeper meaningfor how we understand the possibilities for human culture?

18. What problems might be solved by adopting a new social guidance system based on partnership rather than domination?

19. Make up your own question but be sure to check it with me first.

20. What is forgiveness, and is it possible?

Good Luck Mighty Companion!

4/25 Dominator Systems / Partnership Solutions

Reading for this class
1. Finish Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade

Recommended
2. Interview with Ruth Gilmore on Restorative Justice
3. Chris Hayes Interview with Mariame Kaba