Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us, by Philip Rieff (Pantheon, 2007)

The inevitable thrust of the cultural elite in western civilization, certainly from 1750 on, though many would date it back to the earlier emergence of empirical science as a licit activity, has been the destruction of any viewpoints not based on empirical observation, well expressed in many statements but driven home very strongly by Courbet’s statement: “Show me an angel and I’ll paint you one.” The very fact of basing a world view on such a position threatens faith, belief and of course their object: religion.
Science itself, the reformation, the industrial revolution are all a part of a long historical process that de-centered the Catholic Church and turned it into a fossilised object of abjection, no matter what residual power it is able to draw from outside the west.
The church that Gibbon saw as a major factor in the decline of Rome became the sheltering force under which life found its meaning for well over 1,000 years.
For most there was no choice: to live in what we now call Europe meant that one was a Christian within the confines of the church. Life was focused upon subsistence and salvation and the promise of the after life controlled all of the energy directed towards the pursuits that we now call knowledge acquisition.
Thus all one needed to know was contained in the Bible that most could not read and those who translated it into the vernacular, for those who could, were burnt. The Catholic Church burnt vernacular bibles well into the eighteenth century. One could obtain knowledge and salvation only through the church. Monopoly gathers power, and is of course corrupting.

The Reformation that Martin Luther began in the second decade of the sixteenth century was certainly a response to this corruption, shifting the focus of salvation to a more direct encounter between the individual and God. He questioned the way in which religion was organized; he certainly did not criticize the object of salvation.
Yet, his criticism and the change of focus that the Reformation brought about, lead to the Bible becoming an object of study rather than one of total veneration as the word of God brought to the people under the aegis of the church.
It inevitably lead to what is known as the higher criticism which brought the Bible to earth and demonstrated by assiduous gathering of fact, the process by which it was created, when and how. This process inevitably ate into its power and began a long process of what we now call secularisation.

At the highest cultural levels this process culminated in the works of Nietzsche, the product of a long line of German Protestant pastors, whose entire opus can be viewed as a continual questioning of the basis of western Christian civilization and the values upon which it is founded.
He was an offshoot of the tradition of higher criticism as is all of the German academic tradition that still reigns in the west and governs the activities of those scholars, whether Protestant, Jewish or Catholic who have broken the link between knowledge and salvation.
Anyone who seriously engages with Nietzsche encounters a mind that shakes the very foundation of any faith or belief that our religious tradition is the last word on the nature of reality.

Science, of course, has triumphed in the empirical realm, though perhaps ultimately based upon the habits of mind engendered by over 1,000 years of theology, as Whitehead points out in one of the great books of the twentieth century: Science and the Modern World.
The western world is now secular. The magic has fled and for most the bread and wine is just bread and wine. Yet faith and belief seem integral to our humanity, and in spite of total disenchantment, refuse to go away.

Philip Rieff s Charisma speaks to these issues with a depth and intensity that few can muster, for he has been musing upon the effects of what I outlined above for over sixty years.
His recent death did not cause the stir that the death of his one time wife, Susan Sontag caused, but I have no doubt that Rieff will be read long after Sontag is a distant memory.
Think for a moment upon the continual fuss – mainly media generated – for that is our indication of importance (an appearance on TV), around Brittney Spears, Paris Hilton or Amy Winehouse. It is the attention paid to them and their supposed charisma that is the focus of Rieff s book, though of course he never mentions them.

Rieff s focus is the use of the term ‘charisma’ and the employment of it by one of his historical mentors – Max Weber, one of the great scholars of the twentieth century and an emblem of German culture that two world wars destroyed, to the benefit of NASA, the Institute of Advanced Study and umpteen American Nobel prizes.
Weber and his fellow German mandarins created a culture whose last reflection can now only dimly be glimpsed in a few fossil remainders.

Having been fortunate enough to spend seven of my formative years with a man who lived the American version of that German intellectual life, I have some sense of what has been lost and just how debased our life of the mind, or what is left of it, has become.
Rieff lived in our tradition of the professor whose task is to maintain the standards that tradition has bequeathed to us. Yet all his early work – work that earned him a chair and a University Professorship at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania – was about the creation of a new type: the therapeutic.
It is the path that Protestant scholarship has taken us on from Luther on through Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Weber and of course Rieff and my close companion and mentor: Morse Peckham.

The therapeutic, which is of course associated with Freud and his work on the unconscious, projection, transference and those childhood pattern which determine how we encounter others for the rest of our lives, is akin to the post-modern which Derrida made so popular among academics looking for a way to destroy the grund upon which their own disciplines were formulated.
Those who wish to grasp the real power of this erasure – to borrow a term from Derrida that goes back to the Schwartzwald mortal dwarf, Martin Heidder’s SEIN – must go back and read Nietzsche, for as ‘deep’ as Derrida and Heidiger might seem at times, they are both water carriers for Nietzsche, who has yet to be fully grasped, though his work is the most influential source of what Rieff is deeply upset about in Charisma.

The 60s brought Nietzsche to a popular conjuncture by taking his proclamation about ‘The death of God” into every aspect of life. The challenge still reverberates as so much of USA history, 1972-2008, has been a response to the fear brought to the surface by the shock administrated to the entire culture by the 60s eruption.
The 60s was about the death of the father in both a symbolic and a literal sense. Father had disappeared from the American home in terms of actual time spent and the deeper and related symbolic sense of authority.
Rieff’s concern is about the loss of this authority as it relates to the very root of our Judeo-Christian culture. And let me be clear about this: Rieff, as all western thinkers tend to do, speaks in universal terms, though his data only refers to the west.
A religious structure is promulgated by a leader who inculcates a mode of existing in the world and whose charisma transmits a code of conduct that forms a consistent framework of interdicts that give structure to the lives of those who call themselves by the name of the charismatic figure: Christians, Buddhists, etc.
Those who live within these interdicts form a covenant that is a structure of moral demand. To violate these demands, to transgress, is to experience guilt.

The culture that is maintained and transmitted is the means by which a transgression is severely limited, produces guilt and is quickly punished. That Rieff is talking about a limited spectrum of such situations should be obvious from the above.
The conscious intention of the therapeutic is freedom from this internal structure of authority, for true guilt is produced by the ‘police’ who live within and were inculcated with the imbibing of our mother’s milk and our father’s NO!
The Freudian analytical situation is designed to create a situation in which the unconscious forces that control are re-enacted and thus objectified in such a way, by analysing their transference with respect to the analyst, and thus depotentiated, thus ideally doing away with the projections that lead to the submission to authority, producing an individual who can’t be manipulated or interdicted in a charismatic matter.

The manufactured charisma of our present moment is to Rieff an indication of our loss. I don’t disagree. What could any semi-mature adult want with a Paris Hilton or a Brittney Spears besides the administration of a good spanking.
Rieff is also correct when he looks upon a great deal of modern art as being transgressive, not a surprise to anyone who has fully grasped Nietzsche, the strongest nineteenth century influence upon the art of the last 100 years.

Rieff’s analysis bodes well for the eventual triumph of Islam, in the west, for Europe now mainly lives outside the covenant that reinforces the interdicts that Rieff rues the passing of and feels to be essential to the maintenance and transmission of culture. The elite, for the most part, has long said goodbye to religion.
The USA is a parody of interdiction, for the Catholic Church lives in paedophilic incipient bankruptcy, both actual and moral and ever proliferating Protestant sects may do lots of good works, but are drifting into a consumer religion that is a parody of the original charismatic transmission and can live quite happily with pornography and wife swapping.
And alas the kicker: eight years of a supposedly religious president whose continual lies could only disgust a genuinely religious person.

Rieff possesses a depth and intensity that dwarfs most of the scholars that I have spent a lot of time reading.He is addressing questions that will determine our very future.
Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and their ilk pale in contrast to his more refulgent light as do the Catholics who give up meat for lent in light of the martyrs who were roasted on slow fires.
The utter triviality of our culture is what comes off of each page of Charisma and reflects the experience I have had in seven years back in the United States.
If one searches for American Innerlichkeit, one quickly discovers that it is akin to Gertrude Stein’s Oakland: there is no there there.
Rieff is posing questions of utmost importance: can a culture live without religion and the interdicts that flow from such charismatic structures? Can rational authority replace charismatic authority? And perhaps most important: can love survive the dissolution of authority? His answer is no and I tend to agree.

We don’t seem to be able to live without a real sense of sin and evil. That conjecture is deeply substantiated by the fact that one in every hundred American adult is now in prison.
Something is broken and the utterly immoral behavior of our last two presidents seem indicative of the fact of the breakdown, and alas I am totally unmoved by the thought of an Obama presidency, though I have nothing but good feeling for the man.
I feel as if the ‘help’ is being brought in to clean up the mess or be a caretaker as in Detroit, Newark or Philadelphia.

In Defense of Food: an eater’s manifesto
by Michael Pollan

Watching, without a great deal of surprise, the destruction of the world’s economic system and of course the calling into question of the ideology: American capitalism, that has sustained, created and destroyed it, can only reflect on the years 2001-2008, the period of time during which I wrote thousands of letters of alarm about the unsustainable way of life that I discovered during those years in the USA after 20 years of absence.
Now at a pivotal point, when Americans have reached out to an “other” to save them, I can only hope that the burden place on such slim shoulders does not break them.
American hypocrisy has become so constant in the only pursuit that matters: MORE, that everyday living for a great percentage of the population has become contradictory on the face of it.
An economic system geared to producing more money, rather than a secure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all, is now in tatters.
To break bread together is a ritual that binds. The pace of American life has destroyed that ritual and helped to destroy the family that both sustains and has sustained the ritual of the communal meal.
People now fuel up, often on the run or in their car, alone. They fuel up on manufactured food that is akin to mainlining sugar to its close biochemical containers, producing quick energy that the body can’t handle.
“We’re in the middle of a national experiment in the in the mainlining of glucose.” (p. 113)
For many this leads to diabetes II and its attendant by-products: obesity, hypertension, heart disease and certain cancers. Young with kidney stones are showing up, increasingly, due to the amount of salt found in what has become known as the Western diet.
All part of the Western diet and the metabolic syndrome that has produced the explosion in weight that people carry and the problems, mentioned above, that flow from it. Young obese children appear to be, when the cell walls of their heart is examined, 40 or older. A ticking health time bomb.

The root of all this is our economic system and the advertising Leviathan that sustains it. I am not a Marxist, though his analysis of capitalism is still the best we have. It should be dusted off and read. His philosophy of history and predictions should be quietly bypassed.
The history of modern industrial life in the West has taken place within an environment that has increasingly downgraded Christianity and the idea of God that fills The Divine Comedy with light we can bathe in as we read, but can’t really understand.
We are frail and weak creatures, forced out of amniotic paradise, slapped into breath and then set loose into a world we hardly understand; thus when the overriding comfort of god disappears, few of us are able to believe in nothing and sustain ourselves; as G.K. Chesterton saw so clearly, we tend, once our major sustaining belief is lost, to grab hold of another: almost anything will do.
Thus for so many Americans, still mouthing Christianity, and going to church, as John McCain doesn’t, the real God is MORE.
That MORE is part of the most unrelenting system that human beings have ever created; contemporary capitalism. It melts everything, no matter how sacred. It is a dragon that must be bridled, so that its positive productive possibilities can be used in the service of human well-being, not difficult to define, instead of profit, another name for more.
Go back and read Adam Smith’s two books. What has been done in his name would infuriate him. The crimes of our present band of thieves must be carefully documented, so that we can see the linkage between our ideology and CDOs, sub-prime mortgages and the other instruments of our present destruction. Greed, the desire for MORE, lies at the basis of it. The willingness of thousands of people in positions of fiduciary responsibility to skip their required reading of the fine print and go for it with dollars not their own, so that Whitefish Bay Wisconsin will do without teachers, northern Norway towns can’t afford to staff its libraries and New York’s MTA will raise prices and do without needed maintenance. Three examples among tens of thousands.
In Defense of Food deals with the destruction of our food history. The substitution of that which has sustained us for millennia for a unsustainable quick hit. With reason, the more complex an ecology, the more sustainable it is. It is similar to an oriental carpet. Count the number of threads per square inch.

If I ear from that complexity, I am also imbibing protection from the predators that are everywhere, for what the plant has developed to sustain itself can sustain me. To denigrate that garden, to produce a monoculture for cash is to rip the carpet apart, loosen the threads and destroy the complexity that sustains. Thus we then must add to that mono-culture chemicals to kill the predators that previously were held off by the plant itself and then use that denatured product as a basis for manufacturing food that is less nutritious and must have other chemicals added to it to be able to sustain long distance shipping and time on the shelf.
That is what the application of capitalism has done to our food supply with the secondary effects to our health and well-being described above. Complex foods take time to digest and thus allow the body time to assimilate them; they nourish and give us feedback that tells us to stop eating.
Something that fast food does not do, hence the obesity epidemic and as Pollan feels, the constant eating to satisfy body needs that our denatured foods can’t satisfy.
“Our ancient evolutionary relationship with the seeds of grasses and frit of plants has given way, abruptly, to a rocky marriage with glucose and fructose.” (p. 114)
We are what we eat. What we eat is killing us, but it provides PROFIT and the opportunity for those interested in this to make even more money, by producing products for those made ill by the previous food products.
“Diabetes is well on its way to becoming normalized in the West – recognized as a whole new demographic and so a major marketing opportunity. Apparently it is easier, or at least more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way the civilization eats.” (p. 136)

There is only one cure for our exploding health care costs: health itself. A great part of that health can be achieved by eating well. Contemplate these statistics. In 1960, the USA spent 17/6% of its income on food and 5.2% of its national income on health care; now those figures are: food 9.9%; health care 16%.
The basic rules are simple:
1. eat more complex foods;
2. eat more whole foods;
3. eat for quality not quantity;
4. shift from seeds back to leaves;
5. pay attention to what grandmother ate rather than food science.

Pollan does not tell you what to eat, but how to choose what you eat. His book is clear, well-documented and full of life-saving info. Reading it and gradually adapting his common sense ideas would add years to your life and slowly destroy the industrial system of food that is killing us.

The New Pearl Harbor, David Ray Griffin, Olive Branch Press, 2004

Americans appear to have an attention span that is relevant to the flicker on MTV.

Remember ENRON?

I grew up in a slower time when focus and concentration was the rule and multi-tasking, which research has shown to be counterproductive, was unheard of let alone desired.

The assassination of J.F.K. brought my American bred innocence to an end. I spent two years (1964-1965) working with an international team of researchers, helping to develop the unwanted facts that made it clear that our young president was gunned down by a group of men, as part of a conspiracy that included parts of our own intelligence community.

The researchers I worked with focused on forensic minutia, failing, at least in the beginning, to focus on the larger picture; the context of politics and economics that led to Kennedy’s death.

Facts are important; they are essential to proving any assertion or raising questions about incorrect assertions. And facts you will get in The New Pearl Harbor, but as the title’s reference to Pearl Harbor indicates: today’s researchers are not neglecting the broader context.

9/11 was a great crime. It was done for reasons that the title indicates: to provide the rationale for previously planned invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Invasions that the American people would not have approved without the anger fuelled by 9/11.

We have a tradition of such events: The Maine, Tonkin Bay, Pearl Harbor, and now 9/11.

9/11 allowed previously desired invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to go ahead. Invasions that have to do with “Peak Oil” (we are running out of oil: the petroleum age is coming to an end; America is positioning itself to grab what it can). There is also the small matter of this year’s opium harvest: $7,000,000,000. Money which is often laundered through the New York Stock Exchange.

9/11 allowed for the hurried passage of the Patriot Act, elevating national security above all of our constitutional due process and other rights; rights that our fore-fathers spent their blood to achieve. It made toilet paper of the Constitution.

It created a large pork barrel called Homeland Security which has a Nazi ring to it, and in an emergency is allowed to end all of our disappearing freedoms. The rather dim leader of this department of fear created a color alert system that has nothing to do with the natural spectrum. His pronouncements have been ludicrous. He acted like a character out of Alice in Wonderland who has produced mainly fear and confusion. And alas, laughter with his famous duct tape suggestion.

We also have an endless war on terrorism that a misinformed and heavily stressed-out populace has allowed itself to be taken in by, thus allowing an incompetent presidential administration to continue the war in Iraq, the killing of our young and the bankruptcy of our future.

All of the above and more is a direct outcome of 9/11; a traumatic event that has so many eager to give up precious liberty to guarantee an elusive security that is nowhere to be found. Such cowardice is despicable, portending ills for us all.

“Waving the American flag became a substitute for critical and independent thought, and slogans such as ‘united we stand’ were used as blankets to smother whatever critical impulses existed.” (Richard Falk, Foreword, P. IX)

Thus 9/11 deserves a scrutiny equal to the Kennedy assassination.

But now is not 1964. A major technology has intervened: the Internet.

It allows teams of people to communicate effortlessly and often. It allows new facts to be quickly shared, checked out and discarded when found to be wanting.

It allows official lies to be quickly brought into the sunshine. It is a marvelous new form of the Rousseauian General Will when utilized in an open, sharing manner. It provides a means by which the perps can be flushed out before the issues go cold.

The New Pearl Harbor is a worthy contribution to this task.

Anyone who looks at some of the basic facts has to be suspicious:

1. The President sat and read to school children for 20 minutes, though he knew, for quite a while, that the nation was under attack, and that he was therefore in danger. A danger that he evaded for the rest of the day.

2. The hole in the Pentagon could not have been made by a Boeing 757.

3. The Pentagon is the most protected building in the world. How did anything get by that protection?

4. Why were planes not scrambled to shoot down at least two of the hijacked planes?

5. How did steel frame buildings suddenly collapse from fire?

6. All indications are that buildings 1, 2 & 7 were brought down by carefully placed explosives.

7. Why was the forensic evidence - the steel members - immediately sold and shipped out of the country? 9/11 was a crime scene. Those steel beams were evidence.

These are a few of the basic questions that Griffin raises and discusses. Questions that patriotic hand waving or loose talk about conspiracy theory can’t dispel.

They are questions that official reports avoid.

In addition, there are a number of individuals within the intelligence and law enforcement communities who are being gagged, for they have information that would upset the applecart.

The book, now in its second edition, is just 200 pages.

It is clear and to the point.

It makes a devastating case in a calm and logical way.

Griffin has been a professor of philosophy of religion at the Claremont School of Theology in California for over 30 years. He is the author and editor of over 20 books.

His book is essential reading for anyone troubled by the present direction of the USA: over 50% of the nation according to the polls.

If The New Pearl Harbor convinces you that 9/11 must not be allowed to be buried, you are then ready to read Mike Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon, which details the context in which 9/11 operated, in much greater detail, and points a long finger in the direction of those responsible.

The leader of these men was re-elected for mainly moral reasons. What irony.

The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the cover-up, and the exposé, David Ray Griffin, Olive Branch Press, 2008

I have previously reviewed two of Griffin’s meticulously researched and written books. This book is an update as many are researching 9/11.
Any honest reading of Griffin’s work will call forth suspicion of the 9/11 report that Griffin demonstrates: WAS WRITTEN IN OUTLINE PRIOR TO ANY RESEARCH.
The fact alone is devastating.
The man who controlled every aspect of the report, Philip Zelikow, was acting as an agent of the Bush Administration and was in contact with both Condoleezza Rice, a friend with whom he has previously written a book, and Karl Rove. An obvious breach of trust as both of them were implicated in the events leading up to 9/11.
The various 9/11 research groups should strive to make Philip Zelikow very famous.
Other facts also convince this reader that we need a new 9/11 investigation: immediately;
1. cell phones in 2001 did not work at the heights that the plane was at during the times the calls were made. This has been confirmed by tests, research and FBI work presented at the Moussaoui trial.
2. anyone who knows any physics can immediately tell you that the fall of all three buildings could not have happened as a result of fire.