I will add my two cents with a short footnote from Coomarasawamy, commenting on William Morris and the “end of [mechanized] times”, followed by a long quotation from the Committee (our young friends out there on the street, where their tomorrow will be decided) bringing clear overtones from St Augustine, Eckhart, TSE, Melville’s Bartleby.. and so many voices from the Eastern Tradition.
The fact that the end has already happened, as correctly pointed out by Kingsley, renders our standpoint in history as extremely privileged, the turning point “where the blessing passes into the curse”. We can see behind our shoulders what Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul only feared, and feared right; and what other great minds only theorised about at the dawn of the industrial era (Blake, Morris, Ruskin, Butler). The fact that most people haven’t realized that this is over already is entirely irrelevant, the machine will carry on doing the only thing which is capable of doing. That process of turning everything into concrete efficiency, treating the sacred as a souvenir, or what Marcuse used to call “desublimation”, will continue its own course without anyone to attend to it. For the very simple reason that those who have reached the end of that line, being in 2008, 2011 or 2020, are not “there” anymore. You can clearly see it on their faces.
Now those quotations:
"I have no more faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future history of 'civilization,' which I know now is doomed to destruction: what a joy it is to think of!" (William Morris). "For by civilized men we now mean industrialised men, mechanised societies... We call all men civilized, if they employ the same mechanical techniques to master the physical world. And we call them so because we are certain that as the physical world is the only reality and as it only yields to mechanical manipulation, that is the only way to behave. Any other conduct can only spring from illusion; it is the behaviour of an ignorant, simple savage. To have arrived at this picture of reality is to be truly advanced, progressive, civilized" (Gerald Heard, Man the Master, 1937, p. 25). It is also to have arrived [continues Coomaraswamy] at what has properly been called a "world of impoverished reality" (Iredell Jenkins), and one that can only impoverish those to whom we communicate it.
(Ananda Coomaraswamy, “What Is Civilization?”)
“They always try to portray us as desperate individuals, on the grounds that we act, we build, we attack without hope. Hope. Now there's at least one disease this civilization has not infected us with. We're not despairing for all that. No one has ever acted out of hope. Hope is of a piece with waiting, with the refusal to see what is there, with the fear of breaking into the present -in short, with the fear of living. To hope is to declare one self in advance to be without any hold on that from which something is expected nonetheless, It's to remove oneself from the process so as to avoid any connection with its outcome. It's wanting things to be different without embracing the means for this to come about. It's a kind of cowardice. One has to know what to commit to and then commit to it. Even if it means making enemies. Or making friends. Once we know what we want, we're no longer alone, the world repopulates. Everywhere there are allies, closenesses, and an infinite gradation of possible friendships. Nothing is close for someone who floats. Hope, that very slight but constant impetus toward tomorrow that is communicated to us day by day, is the best agent of the maintenance of order. We're daily informed of problems we can do nothing about, but to which there will surely be solutions tomorrow. The whole oppressive feeling of powerlessness that this social organization cultivates in everyone is only an immense pedagogy of waiting. It's an avoidance of now. But there isn't, there's never been, and there never will be anything but now. And even if the past can act upon the now, this is because it has itself never been anything but a now. Just as our tomorrow will be. The only way to understand something in the past is to understand that it too used to be a now. It's to feel the faint breath of the air in which the human beings of yesterday lived their lives. If we are so much inclined to flee from now, it's because now is the time of decision. It's the locus of the "I accept" or the "I refuse," of "I'll pass on that" or "I'll go with that." It's the locus of the logical act that immediately follows the perception. It is the present, and hence the locus of presence. It is the moment, endlessly renewed, of the taking of sides. Thinking in distant terms is always more comfortable. "In the end," things will change; "in the end," beings will be transfigured. Meanwhile, let's go on this way, let's remain what we are. A mind that thinks in terms of the future is incapable of acting in the present. It doesn't seek transformation; it avoids it. The current disaster is like a monstrous accumulation of all the deferrals of the past, to which are added those of each day and each moment, in a continuous time slide. But life is always decided now, and now, and now.
Everyone can see that this civilization is like a train rolling toward the abyss, and picking up speed. The faster it goes, the more one hears the hysterical cheers of the boozers in the discotheque car. You have to listen carefully to make out the paralyzed silence of the rational minds that no longer understand anything, that of the worriers who bite their nails, and the accent of false calm in the exclamations of the card players who wait. Inwardly, many people have chosen to leap off the train, but they hesitate on the footboard. They're still restrained by so many things. They feel held back because they've made the choice, but the decision is lacking. Decision is what traces in the present the manner and possibility of acting, of making a leap that is not into the void. We mean the decision to desert, to desert the ranks, to organize, to undertake a secession, be it imperceptibly, but in any case, now.
I would be wary of taking much that Peter Kingsley says too seriously. First of all, he seems to have a soft spot for the perennialists. Orthodox Christian theologian and self-described “Vedantic Christian” (and great admirer of Sri Aurobindo) David Bentley Hart had no illusions about their love of fascism (Evola in particular, but Guenon and Schuon as well; Cutslinger explained to me personally why the Supramental was an impossible, ridiculous idea, because “man” is the fulcrum of creation, the”measure of all things.” Another of the Perennialists, Nasr, described Sri Aurobindo’s entire vision as “the darkest most evil manifestation of the Kali Yuga.”)
Second, I spoke briefly to Kingsley when he visited Asheville, and asked him about Sri Aurobindo. After going on a tirade about how the evolution of Consciousness was absolute self contradictory nonsense, his face flushed and he began ranting about how Sri Aurobindo was “a horrible poet, a horrible philosopher and horrible person.”
I quoted him in a comment on Amazon (back in the days when you could add comments to Amazon reviews) and his wife wrote a reply saying I was lying and she would sue me personally if I didn’t delete the comment.
that he put it up on his own website. In an email he wrote to me:
"Sri Aurobindo is particularly important and dear to me, and has been for many years. My college (King’s College) at Cambridge back in the 1970s was the same one that Aurobindo went to; and there was a secret little library at the back of the college which no one seemed to know about, where I went to write and meditate. It had a beautiful large photo of Aurobindo in his old age, and it was as if he and I were alone there together."
The day after I got his email, I went to pick up my copy of The Golden Chain (the alumni quarterly magazine of the Ashram School) and what was on the cover? King's College! I scanned the cover and emailed it to him, speculating that the secret little library at the back of the college was not the same as the library described in Sunayana's cover story, and wondering if it still exists. He was curious to read to whole article, so I scanned that too. His reply: "Part of me wishes I had been there to help guide the writer. You are right: the library described in the article is not the very private library I described to you, which I am sure is still there..."
So, what happened to him since then? Cognitive dissonance?
I now better understand why he objected to my four Substack pieces on Parmenides, which he asked me to take down. Luckily one cannot recall emails once sent!
I will add my two cents with a short footnote from Coomarasawamy, commenting on William Morris and the “end of [mechanized] times”, followed by a long quotation from the Committee (our young friends out there on the street, where their tomorrow will be decided) bringing clear overtones from St Augustine, Eckhart, TSE, Melville’s Bartleby.. and so many voices from the Eastern Tradition.
The fact that the end has already happened, as correctly pointed out by Kingsley, renders our standpoint in history as extremely privileged, the turning point “where the blessing passes into the curse”. We can see behind our shoulders what Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul only feared, and feared right; and what other great minds only theorised about at the dawn of the industrial era (Blake, Morris, Ruskin, Butler). The fact that most people haven’t realized that this is over already is entirely irrelevant, the machine will carry on doing the only thing which is capable of doing. That process of turning everything into concrete efficiency, treating the sacred as a souvenir, or what Marcuse used to call “desublimation”, will continue its own course without anyone to attend to it. For the very simple reason that those who have reached the end of that line, being in 2008, 2011 or 2020, are not “there” anymore. You can clearly see it on their faces.
Now those quotations:
"I have no more faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future history of 'civilization,' which I know now is doomed to destruction: what a joy it is to think of!" (William Morris). "For by civilized men we now mean industrialised men, mechanised societies... We call all men civilized, if they employ the same mechanical techniques to master the physical world. And we call them so because we are certain that as the physical world is the only reality and as it only yields to mechanical manipulation, that is the only way to behave. Any other conduct can only spring from illusion; it is the behaviour of an ignorant, simple savage. To have arrived at this picture of reality is to be truly advanced, progressive, civilized" (Gerald Heard, Man the Master, 1937, p. 25). It is also to have arrived [continues Coomaraswamy] at what has properly been called a "world of impoverished reality" (Iredell Jenkins), and one that can only impoverish those to whom we communicate it.
(Ananda Coomaraswamy, “What Is Civilization?”)
“They always try to portray us as desperate individuals, on the grounds that we act, we build, we attack without hope. Hope. Now there's at least one disease this civilization has not infected us with. We're not despairing for all that. No one has ever acted out of hope. Hope is of a piece with waiting, with the refusal to see what is there, with the fear of breaking into the present -in short, with the fear of living. To hope is to declare one self in advance to be without any hold on that from which something is expected nonetheless, It's to remove oneself from the process so as to avoid any connection with its outcome. It's wanting things to be different without embracing the means for this to come about. It's a kind of cowardice. One has to know what to commit to and then commit to it. Even if it means making enemies. Or making friends. Once we know what we want, we're no longer alone, the world repopulates. Everywhere there are allies, closenesses, and an infinite gradation of possible friendships. Nothing is close for someone who floats. Hope, that very slight but constant impetus toward tomorrow that is communicated to us day by day, is the best agent of the maintenance of order. We're daily informed of problems we can do nothing about, but to which there will surely be solutions tomorrow. The whole oppressive feeling of powerlessness that this social organization cultivates in everyone is only an immense pedagogy of waiting. It's an avoidance of now. But there isn't, there's never been, and there never will be anything but now. And even if the past can act upon the now, this is because it has itself never been anything but a now. Just as our tomorrow will be. The only way to understand something in the past is to understand that it too used to be a now. It's to feel the faint breath of the air in which the human beings of yesterday lived their lives. If we are so much inclined to flee from now, it's because now is the time of decision. It's the locus of the "I accept" or the "I refuse," of "I'll pass on that" or "I'll go with that." It's the locus of the logical act that immediately follows the perception. It is the present, and hence the locus of presence. It is the moment, endlessly renewed, of the taking of sides. Thinking in distant terms is always more comfortable. "In the end," things will change; "in the end," beings will be transfigured. Meanwhile, let's go on this way, let's remain what we are. A mind that thinks in terms of the future is incapable of acting in the present. It doesn't seek transformation; it avoids it. The current disaster is like a monstrous accumulation of all the deferrals of the past, to which are added those of each day and each moment, in a continuous time slide. But life is always decided now, and now, and now.
Everyone can see that this civilization is like a train rolling toward the abyss, and picking up speed. The faster it goes, the more one hears the hysterical cheers of the boozers in the discotheque car. You have to listen carefully to make out the paralyzed silence of the rational minds that no longer understand anything, that of the worriers who bite their nails, and the accent of false calm in the exclamations of the card players who wait. Inwardly, many people have chosen to leap off the train, but they hesitate on the footboard. They're still restrained by so many things. They feel held back because they've made the choice, but the decision is lacking. Decision is what traces in the present the manner and possibility of acting, of making a leap that is not into the void. We mean the decision to desert, to desert the ranks, to organize, to undertake a secession, be it imperceptibly, but in any case, now.
The epoch belongs to the determined.”
(TIC, “Now”, 2017)
I would be wary of taking much that Peter Kingsley says too seriously. First of all, he seems to have a soft spot for the perennialists. Orthodox Christian theologian and self-described “Vedantic Christian” (and great admirer of Sri Aurobindo) David Bentley Hart had no illusions about their love of fascism (Evola in particular, but Guenon and Schuon as well; Cutslinger explained to me personally why the Supramental was an impossible, ridiculous idea, because “man” is the fulcrum of creation, the”measure of all things.” Another of the Perennialists, Nasr, described Sri Aurobindo’s entire vision as “the darkest most evil manifestation of the Kali Yuga.”)
Second, I spoke briefly to Kingsley when he visited Asheville, and asked him about Sri Aurobindo. After going on a tirade about how the evolution of Consciousness was absolute self contradictory nonsense, his face flushed and he began ranting about how Sri Aurobindo was “a horrible poet, a horrible philosopher and horrible person.”
I quoted him in a comment on Amazon (back in the days when you could add comments to Amazon reviews) and his wife wrote a reply saying I was lying and she would sue me personally if I didn’t delete the comment.
Just sayin’.
Hilarious.
Has he gone bonkers? Too many incubations in dark places?
In 2007 I invited him to contribute an article to AntiMatters. He so much liked
<https://antimatters2.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/1-2-kingsley_excerpts0.pdf>
that he put it up on his own website. In an email he wrote to me:
"Sri Aurobindo is particularly important and dear to me, and has been for many years. My college (King’s College) at Cambridge back in the 1970s was the same one that Aurobindo went to; and there was a secret little library at the back of the college which no one seemed to know about, where I went to write and meditate. It had a beautiful large photo of Aurobindo in his old age, and it was as if he and I were alone there together."
The day after I got his email, I went to pick up my copy of The Golden Chain (the alumni quarterly magazine of the Ashram School) and what was on the cover? King's College! I scanned the cover and emailed it to him, speculating that the secret little library at the back of the college was not the same as the library described in Sunayana's cover story, and wondering if it still exists. He was curious to read to whole article, so I scanned that too. His reply: "Part of me wishes I had been there to help guide the writer. You are right: the library described in the article is not the very private library I described to you, which I am sure is still there..."
So, what happened to him since then? Cognitive dissonance?
I now better understand why he objected to my four Substack pieces on Parmenides, which he asked me to take down. Luckily one cannot recall emails once sent!
Who knows? He seems to thrive on being mysterious, so who knows which time - if either - he was being honest!
He certainly has the intellectual skillset to justify anything whatsoever, including his absurdly irrational outburst you describe.