Note from Kathie: You do not have to be a Mother Theresa, a Martin Luther King Jr., a Gandhi, or a Nelson Mandela to make the world a better place and help preserve the planet. To inspire you, we will continue with our series of portraits on less well known people around the country, maybe right in your backyard, who are portraits in moral engagement. Here is one.
Guest Author Teddy Malley
I move along my own path, striving to honor the Earth and the future generations of all beings who would call it home. I live off grid, run my truck on waste vegetable oil, plant gardens and orchards, and in general try to figure out how to not give my money to the fossil fuel companies and not pay federal taxes.
I see it this way: We can hope for the people in power to listen and do the right thing or we can all work together to learn how to live without being completely dependent on them. If we don’t give them our money, they will not have any power.
This position is simple, but it is also incredibly complex, as it means that we need to majorly re-vamp our ways of providing for our basic needs like food, water, and shelter. That is what independence and dependence really boil down to.
As Permaculture guru Bill Mollison once said “The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack…”
Bill McKibben does an excellent job of pointing out where we are headed in a culture madly bent on growth and super short on maintenance. This tends to be just as true on an individual level as a cultural one. Learning to take care of stuff and not lose it, break it, or throw it away is one of the things I find most challenging in my own quest to take responsibility for my own life.
For me, I like to think mostly about what I can do as an individual and not worry too much about Donald Trump. It is every little decision that each and every person on the planet makes every day that will determine our fate. A REALLY great book – The Message from Forever– by Marlo Morgan, has helped me to stay positive in what has been in many ways a trying year.
It is time for all of us to step up and learn to do for ourselves or we are going to be in for a major let down when we learn how expendable we are in the minds of those in power. God bless the child that’s got its own.
Teddy Malley bio:
I had my first garden as an environmental science student at the University of Vermont. Beginner’s luck with that garden led me to a self-designed major in “Permaculture Community Building” at UMASS Amherst. There I started a student-run community garden called the Gardenshare Project, where students are now harvesting fruit from trees we planted over a decade ago and continue to work the gardens. I am now pursuing my dreams of Permaculture Community Building and Homesteading in Carson, NM, where I live off grid in a passive solar strawbale house and try to live and grow food in the high mountain desert from water catchment of our 12″ annual rainfall.
5 – Vietnam was America’s ally in World War Two. After Japan’s defeat, Vietnam persistently sought American friendship. Vietnam was, briefly, an independent and united country with a newly written constitution and plans for democratic elections. If post-war America was paranoid about Chinese communist expansion into Southeast Asia, no better ally could be had than the Vietnamese, who had fought the Chinese for two thousand years. Yet, shortly after Japan’s surrender, President Truman helped the French do to the Vietnamese what the Nazis had just done to them.
6 – Note the moral contradiction in saying that German, Italian, and Japanese imperialism is not OK, but that British, French, and American imperialism is just fine. Most American citizens remain oblivious to the ethical absurdity of presidents saying for decades that we have to support dictatorships to make the world safe for democracy.
7 – The Eisenhower Administration, in direct violation of the Constitution, promoted the insertion of “In God We Trust” on America’s coins. The Eisenhower Administration walked out of the Geneva Peace Conference of 1954 after the Vietnamese won their eight-year war against the French; then the U.S. undermined the 1956 Vietnamese democratic election guaranteed by the Conference, installing in a mostly Buddhist “South Vietnam,” an American financed Catholic puppet dictator who immediately began killing and imprisoning those Vietnamese who fought the eight-year war of independence – 1946 to 1954 – against the French.
8 – The Eisenhower Administration overthrew social democracy in Iran in 1953, supporting a subsequent, 26-year dictatorship that profoundly contributed to Middle Eastern hatred of America. Eisenhower’s CIA did same in Guatemala in 1954.
9 – Nelson Mandela spent 26 years in a South African prison thanks to the Central Intelligence Agency’s informing the South African apartheid government of Mandela’s whereabouts, leading to his arrest and imprisonment.
10 – After the assassination of President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson had a full two months to respond favorably to a South Vietnamese call for peace and the withdrawal of America’s military. Instead of making peace possible, Lyndon Johnson did what President Kennedy never did: he launched a full scale war, during which, in violation of international law, and constituting an indisputable war crime, America sprayed 20 million tons of Agent Orange across the Vietnamese landscape, and dropped more bombs on Vietnam than all the bombs dropped everywhere in World War Two.
Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon. He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts.
The “Call to Conscience” is a noble call, sanctified and consecrated by the sacrifices of peacemakers.
With uncommon courage and conviction, notable peacemakers, including Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Helen Caldicott, Glenn Paige, Bell Hooks, Mairead McGuire, Antonio DeRosa, Dalai Lama, Daisaku Ikeda, and scores of others, modeled “conscience” as a way-of-life, accepting the quest for peace must be nurtured and sustained with the totality of one’s being . . . each breath an affirmation of commitment.
When Jesus of Nazareth, in his “Sermon on the Mount,” stated: “Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall inherit the earth,” Jesus invited all to assume the role of peacemakers. Those accepting his anointing have refused to be silenced in the face of oppression. From Jesus to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., peacemakers have endured criticism, condemnation, and persecution from those with wealth, power, and position, those benefitting from the outcomes of war.
To the wealthy, powerful, positioned, and war-hawks content with distance from human suffering, indifferent to the pains and sorrows of victims of violence, war, and prejudice, oblivious to the consequences of self-indulgence, I say you risk eternal damnation as your children behold with contempt your lack of conscience, your failure to model peace.
The “Call to Conscience” requires courage amidst abuse. There is, however, no lamentation among peacemakers. This is the paradox! For peacemakers, the rewards of advocacy ensure their legacy will endure because it affirms human dignity. For peacemakers, mockeries of justice, inequalities of opportunity, denials of hope, distortions of truth, and corruptions of law, compel advocacy!
Peacemakers are not idealists; Peacemakers are realists! Peacemakers awaken humanity to “consciousness!” This fact is testimony to the promise: “Peacemakers will inherit the earth.”
Consciousness
“Conscience” cannot be separated from “consciousness,” nor can “consciousness” from “conscience.” What do I mean?
The very act of seeking and making peace releases us from normal states of human existence. The release sanctions a state of “transcendence,” a state of “consciousness,” a new level of being. It is a release from an isolated self pre-occupation to an awareness of connection to each other and to the cosmos in which we live.
“Consciousness” compels exercising responsibilities, duties, and obligations to speak and to act for peace; implicit within “consciousness,” is a moral impulse to advance and benefit the human condition. Inherent within this recognition, is the awareness “life is sacred!”
The splendor and majesty of “consciousness” is the liberation of our being. “Consciousness” brings a new way-of-knowing (i.e., epistemology), and new way of behaving (i.e., praxiology). It unleashes new ways of understanding human nature (i.e., ontology).
Can anything more be asked? “Conscience” and “consciousness” are the keys to awakening the human spirit, too long subdued and contained by comforts of convention. Peacemaking is the path! Discover its virtues! Join the icons of peace, finding in them, and with them, a transcendent vision and experience of the grandeur of life. Accept the “Call to Conscience.”
Author: Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus, University of Hawaii, Manoa Campus, Honolulu, Hawaii, 96822. He is the author and editor of twenty books, and more than 300 publications noted for challenging the ethnocentricity and biases of Western psychology and psychiatry, and for advocating peace and social justice.
In my last post, I discussed homogenization, a dangerous ideology. Today I discuss a competing ideology, Multiculturalism. An ideology is a systematic set of beliefs that define a preferred or favored vision of a way-of-life or governance or social formation. In many known ideologies, specific assumptions, premises, and historical foundations and arguments are advanced to promote and defend the ideology’s adoption or empowerment. Uses are often made of symbols, myths, and historical events and forces to enhance the appeal of ideologies, sometimes bringing them to mythic proportions. Scores of ideologies exist, especially within the economic, social, and political areas of thought and action.
Examples of ideologies shaping individual and nation behavior include capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism, feminism, Zionism, Marxism, militarism, libertarianism, state-ism, and anarchism. These examples embody different disciplinary (e.g., philosophy, economic, history, theology) and societal sectors (e.g., government, judicial, military, education, religion/faith-based) areas.
Often times, ideologies co-opt religious/faith based, moral, and media resources to further favored goals and ambitions. Nothing is as powerful as beliefs rooted in self-righteous justification in the cause of god or a supreme being. The use of force, violence, vilification, valorization, and legal advantages to promote “causes” is not uncommon. The concentration of power in an ideology’s movement can lead to excessive control and domination, gathering force as they become “crusaders” buoyed by good intentions and purpose.
The ideology of Multiculturalism is based on an appreciation and promotion of diversity among various cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. Multiculturalism considers diversity an essential resource for survival because it adds the virtues of resiliency derived from variation, alternatives, and choices in belief, behavior, and world views. It keeps options open.
When Octavio Paz, Mexican Noble Prize winner in Literature, claimed, “Life is diversity, death is uniformity,” Paz was calling attention to the fact that diversity is the very nature of life — an expression and revelation of life’s abundant manifestations and displays. I share this view, and have written of Lifeism, an ideology positioning “humans” as a part of life, rather than life’s dominant and preferred expression.
Multiculturalism as an ideology evolved in response to the events, forces, and personalities of the turbulent years and tears of change and social upheaval between 1950 and 1980. The post WWII years witnessed major socio-political changes and upheavals in the United States and the world, converging and consummating in new awareness and appreciation of the importance of diversity, justice, inclusion, political correctness, and the politics of identity. All found support in a multicultural ideology respecting human rights, equality, and dignity.
Multiple and Varied Cultures
These years experienced major cultural changes and massive social movements. There was a rising awareness — consciousness — that “culture” was a critical concept, and a major force in shaping individual and collective behavior. It became clear that “culture” was too critical to be reserved for esoteric studies of exotic tribes by anthropologists. Culture was present in the lives of all human beings, both internally and externally.
Table 1 lists some major social, economic, and political events, forces, and people shaping the emergence of contemporary Multiculturalism as an ideology.
Table 1:
Examples of Forces, Events, and People Associated with Multiculturalism
(Circa Post WW II Period – alphabetical order)
Assassinations and Overthrows
Civil Rights Movement
Consciousness of Ideologies
Counter-Culture Movements
Developments in Information and Communication Technologies
Drug Subcultures (e.g., Marijuana, Cocaine, Hallucinogens)
Ethno-Cultural Conflicts/Ethnic Cleansing
Fall of Berlin Wall
Feminist Revolution
Globalization
Liberation Psychologies
Massive International Migrations Waves
New Political Alliances and Unions (e.g., EU, NATO)
New World Order Efforts
Post Modernism
Racial Protests and Riots
Post WWII Colonial Wars and Liberations (Africa, India, Indonesia)
Refugee and IDP Problems
Vietnam War, Balkan Wars,
Wars and Conflicts in Middle-East and West Asia
War on Poverty (Johnson Era)
Understanding Culture
Although culture had long been a topic of study, especially in anthropology and history, social upheavals of the 1950-1980s brought an acute awareness of the socio-political contexts of culture. Colonialism was revealed not as an inevitable unfolding of change as “civilized” progress but as invasive and exploitive abuses to control and suppress mind, behavior, and social position formations. Minority populations, conquered people, and occupied nations understood the cultural relativism, and the possibilities of release and escape from the chains of dominant social, political, and economic orders.
The term “culture” became applied with accuracy and regularity as a noun/adjective: the culture of poverty, the culture of racism, the culture of violence, the culture of oppression, the culture of colonialism, the culture of war. Culture was no longer confined to an ethnic tradition or identity; it was recognized as a complex clustering of self-perpetuating historical, societal, and moral forces, shaping and being shaped, by hidden ethoses, institutions, and definitions of personhood (e.g., “institutional racism”).
Culture was now to be studied, understood, and scrutinized as an explanation for understanding past, present, and future. Social, political, and economic leaders with insights into the abuses of history maintained in dominant cultures challenged sources of domination and control. Leaders became lightning rods for social change – voices crystallizing protests, and illuminating abuses and violence inherent in power asymmetries. It was a time for change in the social fabric and the moral order.
The tolls of raising consciousness regarding marginalized people brought violence and death to many leaders. Consider the examples of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Caesar Chavez, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Black Panthers, Ignacio Martin-Baro, as well as elected national leaders considered threats to existing Western social orders, including Mossadegh in Iran, Allende in Chile, Mandela in South Africa, Zapata in Mexico, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. Here William Blum’s (2004) book, Killing Hope, Stephen Kinzer’s (2006) book, Overthrow, and Chalmers Johnson (2010), book, Dismantling the Empire, become essential reading – harbingers of our future, by acknowledging past crimes and offenses. The social, economic, and political roots of “culture” became the path to for understanding injustice and resisting oppression. Multiculturalism became an ideology for correcting for history’s abuses. Colonization is always colonization of mind (Goodman & Gorski, 2014).
Multiculturalism in Counseling, Psychology, and Psychiatry
It was only a matter of time before revolutionary thinkers–including Paulo Friere (1997) in his volumes on pedagogies and Ignacio Martin-Baro (1994), in his volume Writings for a Liberation Psychology– recognized the inherent abuses associated within Western psychologies of political domination, repression, and control. Tod Sloan (1997) acknowledged this reality when he concluded Western psychology was a source for perpetuating “Westernization” as an ideology, replete with its ill-suited values and methods for a changing world.
Multiculturalism acknowledges and emphasizes the role of the distribution of “power” in every domain of human activity. All relations are ultimately about power and its distribution. Even those areas claiming immunity from political interference and power distribution are, in fact, subject to it by guiding thought and practices according to the preferences, wishes, and concerns of those in power.
The term “inclusive” became popular to describe to the importance of “including” people – giving them access and acceptance – because they had been ignored or denied a spectrum of opportunities and services. The playing field was being expanded, but it did not guarantee those in power would yield their largesse. We know that “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and this was the case in our nation and around the world as Western political and economic dominance pursued hegemony.
With hegemony came abuses of invading and occupying another nation — often a third- world nation — by imposing and infusing cultural values and traditions. It was a new way to conquer and control using American popular culture as the strategy for control and domination (e.g., individualism, consumerism, commodification, competition, materialism, celebritization, corruption, technology). This was now the pathway for forcing a “homogenization” of world cultures. Differences existed, but efforts were made to deny them because they challenged the hegemony of those in power. The task for the government/corporate system was invasion by “cultural” conquest, and “colonization of mind” (e.g., Goodman & Gorski, 2014).
Amidst an ocean of ideological struggles in a global era, it is clear “Multiculturalism” was, and is, the essential ideology for a global era! Accepting and implementing this ideology among individuals, groups, and nations remains the task of our times. In contrast to homogenization, the preferred ideology of those in power and position seeking control and domination, Multiculturalism embraces the reality of life’s diversity and differences – the beauty of variation. All other ideologies “pale” in complexion, complexity, and comparison.
Author: Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus, University of Hawaii, Manoa Campus, Honolulu, Hawaii, 96822. He is the author and editor of twenty books, and more than 300 publications noted for challenging the ethnocentricity and biases of Western psychology and psychiatry, and for advocating peace and social justice.