Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

On I-5 Southbound Tuesday, passing through Tacoma, WA bound for a West Point-related meeting and observing the mass industrialization of practically everything in sight, a thought occurred from seeming nowhere: “this is grotesque, the churches and schools are not industrial enterprises yet we treat them so; de-industrialize them.”

As I passed the vast factory called Mount Tahoma High School, the thought became the more insistent: “Cripes!, this is terrible!  No wonder we’re in bad shape, unhappy.”

Follow-on thoughts occurred:

• • get small, like a village, at least for education and piety;

• • industrialization is good and necessary but not for everything, not for persons and their associations;

• • people are not things, they cannot be made into things without destroying them and their value to themselves and to the structures in which they work, play, study, etc.

• • family – husband, wife (man, woman) and children – ain’t it a shame that pellucid point requires remark? – is the base of education throughout life;

• • stop wanting to build bigger buildings for church and school;

• • less is more physically; think continual miniaturization, as in electronics and communications;

• • more and bigger for everything is stupid and impossible for most matters, though not for all;

• • use industrialization where it belongs, with things; it helps to foster general prosperity, which is desirable, but, holy crap, not on people!

• • the churches are not buildings, they are voluntary associations of people and not everyone in them belongs in them; today, it is safe to say that most “members” of the churches do not belong in them, starting with the “clergy;”

• • a religion-specific building today is an industrial facility; stop it!;

• • NCAA sports (gambling) – as distinct from athletics (fitness) – should be spun off as the recruiting showcase (sub-division) of professional sports leagues, which they are de facto;

• • if building is desired, make prayer halls for all believers;

• • convert existing buildings to prayer halls for all believers;

• • abhor committees; work is done by pro-active, creative individuals who inspire co-developers to gather round and produce; or, a mess or nothing happens; committees cannot and will not lead, only individuals can and will do that; great managers know this and assign projects not to committees but to inspiring individuals who yearn to accomplish the project and make others feel the same … and accomplish it;

• • the internet cannot deliver [all] the content that is required; all that is required will come from a student’s  own effort selecting from the full array of life’s resources that which fosters his or her interests; people cannot learn everything they want on the internet, and if they think they can, they are diminishing themselves, and stupid;

• • leaders must trust that from free expression/expansion of individuals’ inner necessity (Kandinsky’s term) must necessarily emerge adequate and even superlative replenishment of the leadership cadre and secure expansion of local, regional and national sovereignty; self-replication is the nature of individuals and of existence itself, unless they self-mutilate;  leaders must trust this truth;

• • reverse the economics of education: pay the student to learn and expand, to effloresce their inner necessity; support them in every way so long as they are doing that … and with private money/endowment … not public money; including druggies and criminals … but with public money: consign these to areas outside human habitation where they can be without constraint other than consignment to that area;

• • The Rev. Reinhold Niebuhr memorably wrote: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.; his intellectual heirs posit that absolute power concretized in government is a good deed doer; however, in fact, government money corrupts education and research and absolute government money corrupts education and research absolutely; refuse government money for education and research and convince Congress to shut off its flow.  The truth is that ambition, not power, corrupts so. Niebuhr was ambitious;

• • Use Quintivium to re-form the curriculum.

These thoughts are hardly unique to me.  They are long-standing and press particularly when government and private organizations despise a religion and resolve to extirpate it from their midst: the situation regarding Christianity in the USA since the 1890s and now in the Middle East, Africa and Asia … the greater part of the planet’s habitable surface.

This essay may have helped inspire these thoughts.  I thought to myself: “Yes, specific training when that is what a student genuinely wants.  However, to set the entire enterprise of education on the basis of what employers want is stupid.  The enterprise of life, which is bigger than the enterprise of education as well as the enterprise of industry, depends absolutely on individuals bringing from within themselves, and seeking from externals to foster and thereby help concretize, creations unforeseeable by anyone but vital to the expansion, self-sustainment and coherence of the rich tapestry of life.  Encourage individuals to do what they have in mind to do, from their own impulses.  All will be richly blessed.”

The future is only partially engineer-able.  Conditions are only conditionally control-able.  Paradox – the unexpected – and tragedy – the defeating – are constants of the human experience.  Nor are they enemies.  Indeed, they are to be welcomed or at least accepted resignedly as constants.  At the very least, they are inevitable and, if the full facts were known — they never are — serendipitous.

The individual is the source of the group and therefore the progenitor of life.  The group can help or hinder the individual to do what he or she is here to do but it cannot foresee what an individual should do and has no right to compel their travel in a direction.  The individual’s freedom and opportunity to bring forth from within themselves who they are is the vital force of the group.  The group has no vital force of its own, just as it is not a centered entity, such as an individual, who is a centered self.  A group has no self-hood.  Only an individual has that.  And self-hood being itself is the only morality known to anyone as well as the only power that can effloresce life.

Beyond this, I am not sure with regard to either structure or implementation.  I only say to the younger generations, here is where you want to go, kids.  Buona fortuna, io sono con voi!  Make it happen, starting with yourself.

Update 1: Thanks to Bob Belvedere for his fine blog The Camp Of The Saints and his posted link to this post.

Update 2: Over the weekend we watched You Can’t Take It With You.  Some themes of this post are heard in that celebrated movie from 1938.  The Communist themes are disregard-able.  Marx’s existential analysis of the human condition – in rebellion to Hegel’s totalism, which Marx, of course, eventually recapitulated in different terms (! – beware of hating the teacher!) – placed him among theologians.  His solutions placed him among criminals.  It is the part of discrimination (Paramahamsa – The Swan) to imbibe the one while rejecting the other.

Update 3: Brilliant, and I am embarrassed to say I should have thought of this long ago and did not: separation of education and state.

Update 4: Reverse the economics of education.

Update 5: Belfast Pastor Faces Prison For Grossly Offending Islam.

Update 6: Deformities of this order, and so widely iterated, indicate more than attack on, dysfunction or loss of freedom. They indicate the obsolescence of an architectonic. An old body collapsing from age in normal use. Nothing to lament or stir alarm regarding.

The architectonic expiring is the industrial model of compulsory institutional education. The curriculum is spent and its administration is hysterical. A new body, a fresh architectonic of education must be aborning somewhere, somehow. Probably among homeschoolers and charter schoolers, which means, among mothers and fathers and their children.

The first steps, I should think, are to reacquire the curriculum and de-industrialize the administration thereof.

Update 7: George Handlery: The Structure Of Education Is The Structure Of Faith

Update 8: The Racial Gap in Student Performance

Update 9: We Will Never Fix Campus Indoctrination Until We Cut College Subsidies

Update 10: Elon Musk: Graduating from a college ‘not needed,’ ‘they’re not for learning’

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA