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I’m showcasing some selections from the Encyclopedia of Peaceful Societies at the new website Peaceful Societies: Alternatives to Violence and War. See yesterday’s post for more details.

When projects are proposed or group work is underway, Hutterites are highly respectful of each other. Older men whose pace of work may slow down the operation are respected; when young, inexperienced boys join in the work they are not resented. In group discussions, everyone is highly conscious of rank and quite cautious about advancing proposals; suggestions will be made passively, many proposals considered, and since ideas are not attributed to specific individuals, the group as a whole becomes the author of the proposal that is decided upon. Everyone shares in the decision-making and identifies with the result.

*

The Ifaluk do not often discipline their children with physical punishment–they prefer lecturing to spanking. They fear that children who are hit could “go crazy,” kill themselves, or become aggressive. They teach their children proper values when they are about five or six, and they display song [justifiable anger] whenever the child misbehaves and metagu, fear, in the presence of strangers. To reinforce the feelings of metagu, adults teach children that a ghost will “get them” if they misbehave. Sometimes, one of the women, dressed up in a ghost costume, appears menacingly near the home threatening to eat the wayward child. The terrorized child quickly associates its antisocial and aggressive actions with its metagu and with the parents’ song.

*

The [Utkuhikhalik and Qipisa] Inuit use a form of “benevolent aggression” to foster positive social relationships. They develop ambivalence in their children toward love and fear by acting aggressively at the same time they are loving them–by overfeeding them, by roughly cleaning them while they nurse, and so on. They believe these approaches strengthen children by making them independent and by inculcating uncertainty and caution in their attitudes toward human relationships…. They play games with the child’s feelings by suggesting hostile and aggressive actions to help create their opposite, the positive, loving emotions. Why don’t you keep a choice piece of food all for yourself, one woman suggested to a three-year old, or “Why don’t you kill your baby brother?”

*

Most Ju/’hoansi (pronounced zhut-wasi) were nomadic hunters and gatherers until the latter part of the 20th century. Since they live in a very hostile desert environment, they had to keep moving in order to keep eating, since food and water resources are sparse. Unlike people in other arid regions, they did not have any periods of plenty and thus they had no way of storing food supplies. But since food shortages were likely to be localized, they reduced risk through widespread pooling networks and through the social solidarity of their local groups. In essence, the group’s peaceful cohesiveness was its stored surplus.

*

Kadar society has traditionally accorded equality to the sexes but these beliefs are fast being weakened due to the influence of the surrounding Indian society. Wage labor opportunities are available primarily for men, and when a man is able to afford a sari for his wife, she wears it in order to avoid the stigma of being naked above the waist. Since the clothing may prevent her from foraging in the forest, she becomes increasingly dependent on her husband and his job, losing her independence. Furthermore, the social stigma against bare-chested women has produced an attitude of servility by the women toward outsiders; they feel they have to hurriedly cover their breasts whenever they pass outsiders.

*

Because of the harsh mountain environment of Ladakh, helpfulness and cooperation among families is essential for survival. The Ladakhis establish cooperative groups called phasphuns, in which several unrelated families maintain alliances of friendship, cooperation, and helpfulness. If both parents in a family would die, other adults in the phasphun would adopt the young children. If a family separates, the other members of the phasphun make a fair division of the property. The families in the phasphun usually live in the same village, participate in group religious ceremonies, and worship a common god, though they are not necessarily neighbors and are often not related. The mutual cooperation is carried out under the aegis of the ruling deity, who provides the link for the six to ten families in the group.

*

Love, for the Buddhist Lepchas, is based on the satisfaction of mutual needs for food. When youngsters are asked if they love their parents, they will respond that they do because they are well fed. A young man admitted that he did not get along well with his new wife at first, but then he realized that when he came back to the house after a day of work and she had food ready for him, he loved her. He said, “this is my wife and I am pleased in my belly.”

*

While Malapandaram women gather vegetable foods, haul water, find firewood, and do the cooking, men normally do the hunting and harvesting of wild honey. The divisions are not rigid, however: men may help gather firewood and assist with cooking meat, while women may help hunt small animals. The simplicity of their gathering and hunting economy fosters individual self-sufficiency and economic independence, so social relationships tend to be based on positive feelings rather than economic dependence. Marriage for the Malapandaram is an extremely loose monogamous convention: they do not emphasize long-term, binding relationships. Spouses often exhibit quite warm feelings toward one another–but when the warmth cools, the relationship ends.

Today marks the inauguration of a new website on Peaceful Societies: Alternatives to Violence and War. This is truly a ground-breaking site. There is nothing else like it on the web.

Granted, I’m a bit biased. The site is largely the work of my father, Bruce D. Bonta, a retired academic librarian and peace scholar whose Peaceful Peoples: An Annotated Bibliography (Scarecrow, 1993) was similarly a pioneering effort. As someone with a considerably more slap-dash approach to writing and publishing, I have watched in amazement over the past year as Dad has mastered the technical aspects of website design, corralled some of the most prominent anthropologists in the field to serve as reviewers, and amassed enough material to fill a small book.

I’m sure folks can find their way to the Frequently Asked Questions, Facts About Peaceful Societies, and other introductory materials without my help. Please use the “Contact Us” link to send reactions and suggestions for improvement. And please note that the blog-like News and/or Reviews sections (linked together from the right-hand column on the main page) will be updated weekly. So be sure to bookmark the site and check back often!

The heart of the website is the Encyclopedia of Peaceful Societies, with twenty-five entries up and more on the way. I want to spend the next three days highlighting brief selections from these entries – things that struck my fancy for one reason or another. I hope that anyone who has ever been traumatized by a college anthropology class that spent the first three weeks on kinship systems and the next three on the Yanomamo as interpreted by Napolean Chagnon (The Fierce People) will be tempted into taking another look at some of the riches that the social sciences literature has to offer. It has always struck me as a little bizarre that peace activists, of all people, so often remain mired in ethnocentricity, immune to the possibility of learning from the vast array of other peoples with whom we share this planet.

Even the leftist slogan “Another world is possible,” admirable as it may be, presupposes that our world is, after all, the only one that matters. Here are a few glimpses into other worlds, other ways of living and dwelling and building more peaceful lives.

The leaders of the Amish churches, their ministers, are chosen by a process that combines nomination and lot. At the end of a communion service, men and women file past a deacon and each whispers the name of a nominee. Any man who is nominated by three or more people is included in the drawing. Each of the nominees is then handed a song book, one of which contains a slip of paper bearing a Bible verse. The man who opens his book to discover the verse is overwhelmed to realize that the Lord has chosen him for a life-long added responsibility of service to the community. The divine choice prevents quarreling with the leadership selection process and reaffirms the unity, stability and authority of their community.

*

The Batek believe that one of their diseases, ke’oy, consisting of fever, depression, shortness of breath, and weakness, is caused when someone is angry with another without justification. While there are some spells that may help, the cure for the disease is for the person who is angry to control his or her feelings so the victim can recover. The person responsible for the problem treats the victim with various folk remedies, tells the victim’s heart to be cool, blows on his or her chest for the cooling effect, and grasps and throws away the disease….

The anthropologist Kirk Endicott (1988) once questioned a man about the Malay slave raids that lasted until the early 20th century: why didn’t his ancestors shoot the attackers? “Because it would kill them,” the man answered in shock.

*

The traditional Birhor economy has been based on gathering, hunting, particularly for monkeys, and making ropes out of the fibers of a particular species of vine… Despite decades of [government-sponsored] resettlement efforts, they still abandon their settlements early in the morning to wander in what’s left of their forests, only to return mostly empty handed in the evenings….

When they encounter poisonous snakes near their camps, the adults simply try to shoo them off like pets. They react with respect toward the larger animals, and blame themselves for their fears if they are attacked. Their name for themselves, “Birhor,” means “men of the forest.”

*

The Buid see themselves as part of a mystical continuum, in which pigs eat passive plants, people have to commit aggression against pigs and eat them in rituals which attempt to control the dangers from predatory spirits, and the spirits eat people….

The men and women periodically wrestle together on moonlit nights, in semi-ritualistic gang fights in which the men reach up the women’s skirts, and the women fight back by ganging up on a man, grappling with him and grabbing for his genitals….

The Buid avoid dyadic relationships as much as possible. When two individuals converse, they do not face one another or address comments or questions directly to the other person; instead, they may sit facing the same direction, or back-to-back, making comments that the other person may or may not respond to, depending on whether he or she agrees. Rather than contradicting the speaker, the listener may make his or her own comments on different subjects, to which the first speaker may respond or change the subject again in turn.

*

The Chewong completely lack a sense of rivalry or competitiveness. While the tasks they perform together are few, and some people are naturally better able to do their jobs than others, no one makes a point of one individual’s greater ability. Hunters do not compete in the amount of meat they can bring in, and people do not comment on the abilities of others. Children do not have any competitiveness in their games. When they spin tops, they leave out the competition that characterizes the Malay top spinning game. They do not have races. But while the Chewong do not compete, they also don’t help one another, since they prefer not to be involved with each other’s work.

*

Social advancement among the Fipa is contingent on peacemaking and social skills, symbolized by the twice-daily meals and frequent beer-drinking sessions which men and women participate in together. During leisurely meals people eat and converse, taking food from the central bowls without intruding on their neighbor’s space and without appearing to be too eager to eat. Drinking rituals differ from eating. People carefully pass the bowls of beer around through the assembled group from one to the next, and the same principle of avoiding any appearance of greed or selfishness applies as during meals. Even when people become quite inebriated during their drinking sessions, everyone maintains the correct forms of courtesy, and people rarely if ever become violent.

*

N!adima, the supreme being of the G/wi, is the all-powerful creator of the universe and of all life, a remote, omniscient being who does not necessarily intervene to help people. G//amama, on the other hand, is a mean-spirited deity who showers irritability, misunderstanding, misfortune, and disease among humans. Geographically isolated in the Kalahari, and remote as they are from N!adima, the G/wi achieve security primarily from their own social acts. Their harmonious human relations counterbalance the loneliness of the universe. Harmony among humans is the practical result, as well as the dominating value, that the G/wi derive from their worldview. Their word for human, khwe-, implies friendliness, generosity, wisdom, calmness, and good humor. A person without these qualities, by definition, is inhuman.

After many days of relative quiet, my computer this morning is suddenly sounding hoarse. I wonder if the drop in temperature overnight might have had something to do with it? The floor is uninsulated; it could be pretty chilly down there. Perhaps it caught a virus. I resolve to type as softly as possible, and try to avoid the usually incessant finger-drumming and foot-tapping that helps me think.

Is there a peak in the Adirondacks called Mt. Somewherelse? That’s where my hiking buddy says we should go this spring: mid-May, when the wildflowers are in bloom and the mosquitoes travel about in dense, black clouds that can skeletonize a cow in thirty seconds. I said it sounded like an adventure.

Yesterday I walked down to the bottom to the hollow and ascended the knife-edge to the point of Sapsucker Ridge above Tyrone. If you can picture our end of Brush Mountain as a headless sphinx facing northeast, I was climbing the left paw, which splays inward to give Plummer’s Hollow a charmingly narrow entrance. The recent ice storm devastated the young woods all along the southeast-facing slope of this ridge, clear to the crest. In some places – depending on the scale you choose, of course – up to two-thirds of all trees are down.

But as I predicted based on a preliminary survey the day of the storm, the damage is highly selective. Virtually all the downed trees and most of the downed limbs and branches are maples, black cherry trees, ailanthus (an alien invasive – no loss there), black locust and black birch. I figured I’d be able to walk through the open oak woods on the far side of the ridge all the way back to our farm, which is located just short of the sphinx’s missing head, and I was right. I did see one toppled oak on the steep slope above the railroad, and a few other ridgetop oaks that had lost big limbs, but that was it.

The whole time I was climbing the knife-edge, though, I was thinking back to the way things used to look when we were kids, in the 1970s. We used to come home from school along the ridge crest sometimes, when we got bored of walking up the road, even though it added an extra half-hour to the walk. The first time I ever did it, with my big brother Steve leading the way, I must have been in second or third grade. I remember taking innumerable breaks to rest my heart and lungs, looking up the slope and thinking I would never make it, but he kept saying, “It’s just a little bit farther,” as a good hike leader should.

There were a lot more trees then, of all species. Both sides of the ridge had oaks, before the gypsy moth caterpillars and a succession of loggers conspired against them. We were, I suppose, what you might call poor, though we never thought of ourselves that way – the kind of kids who showed up in school every day wearing the same flood pants and shitkickers we’d worn the day before. My parents scraped together every penny they had to buy out the rapacious absentee owners of the hollow before they could log it down to the stream, otherwise using every legal trick in the book to stave them off. The whole agonizing process took over a decade, from 1979 to 1991, when they were finally able to buy the last hundred-acre section of the hollow – the old McHugh property – but only after 90 percent of it had already been logged.

It’s unsettling to walk through land that’s been so devastated and still dimly recognize features of a landscape that only twenty years before had been like another world. For years I believed a tall tale Steve told me once about finding another hollow parallel to our own, just down off the ridge crest. It always seemed possible, and sometimes I went looking for it. That’s how thick and mysterious the woods seemed to me then. There was plenty of underbrush to thread one’s way through, logs to scramble over, and a few, small jungles of wild grape.

Years later, it occurred to me that I might simply have misunderstood, and that Steve might have been trying to describe the largest of the transverse ravines, which does indeed curve around until it nearly parallels the ridges. But even after coming to this conclusion, I continued to have dreams in which I’d be off wandering the mountain – four times its real size, of course – and suddenly stumble across another hollow, and even another old farm just like ours.

In one such dream, I actually walked in the house and met the lady who lived there. In this parallel universe, the Plummers had never sold the property out of the family, nor had they brought bulldozers in to plow under all the old orchards in the 1950s. Twenty-five acres of ancient, gnarled apple trees: I was beside myself with delight. Ms. Plummer was a woman of my mother’s age, unmarried as Margaret McHugh had been, but not half so paranoid and suspicious. She served me, I think, cookies and a milkshake, just as Mom would have done. The kitchen was a cheery shade of yellow.

Lost in reminiscences, I reached the point and paused to catch my breath. Three pileated woodpeckers flapped off in three different directions, laughing their insane clown laughter. A nuthatch yank-yanked, descending the trunk of a tree head-first, as usual, while a hundred feet away on another tree a brown creeper chirped its way up. A downy woodpecker called. I felt as if I’d just interrupted a party. From a woodpecker’s perspective, I guess there’s plenty to be excited about – things just took a dramatic turn for the better with this latest storm. To the bark gleaners, I guess, it’s all good.

I don’t come this way as often as I might if exercise were my primary aim. I started thinking about why this might be, and decided it’s because I like the hike so well. I don’t want to become so familiar with this stretch of ridge that I’d lose my excitement at seeing, at least on the northwest side, so many fine trees. Of course, I don’t look at them with a forester’s eye. I love the crooked ones and the ones with interesting hollows at least as much as those that are stout and tall, and some of my favorites are from species with no current timber value: sassafras and black gum. Though both trees are common on Laurel Ridge, too, it’s only here on the crest of Sapsucker Ridge that you can find really large specimens. I took mental snapshots of their deeply furrowed bark, looking at them as if they were landscapes viewed from overhead: the tupelo’s block-faulted ranges, higher on the north side of the trunk than on the south, and the sassafras’s long, braided ridges tinged a sunset red.

My computer is slowly quieting down as the house warms up, so maybe there’s something to my theory. For the last ten minutes, a ladybird beetle has been stumbling around the letters A and W, trying to extricate herself from the keypad. But I won’t pause in my typing, so she keeps falling back into the steep declivities between the keys. Yes, Virginia, there always is another hollow.

When you are hidden, count me among the infidels;
When you appear, count me among the faithful.
What possessions do I have, apart from what you have given?
What are you after, thrusting your hands in my pockets?
(Rumi)

Writing about it – even just thinking about it – chases it away. That’s the problem. And there’s nothing you can say that hasn’t been said countless times before, sometimes even by people who knew what they were talking about. The only way to get at it in a halfway authentic manner is to approach it obliquely, without trying – hell, without meaning to. Write about something you saw on a walk, the lint in your own or somebody else’s navel, or maybe the idea of redemption – pretty much anything, so long as it isn’t self-indulgent. Because if this is going to work, you have to care about these things for their own sake, both in an aesthetic and an ethical way (where “ethical” means “hospitable and respectful”).

–Can’t I just issue a blanket repudiation of everything I have written and will ever write?

–Sure, but this is America. People expect other people to say what they mean and mean what they say. ¹ If you keep going the way you’re going, by far the largest proportion of Via Negativa’s readers will forever continue to be transients, people who drop in from god knows where, read for a few minutes or a couple weeks and leave again, vowing never to come back. Can you blame them for feeling used? I mean, what the fuck?!

–Okay, so I’d better just keep the link to that so-called Apologia in place. I mean, I haven’t read it in many months. I don’t want to. I’m sure it’s a whole lot of nothing. But at least it’s there, so people who like to think of themselves as smart and reasonably well-educated can read it and say “Ho-ho!” in a knowing sort of way, like Piglet’s imagined Heffalump, and proceed to plow through a number of posts with relative equanimity, secure in the belief that they know where this is all trending.

Remember, Small was only found after they gave up looking. He ended up somehow in the Heffalump Trap. ²
__________

1. Which somehow makes us the most gullible people on the planet, not only tolerating the pitch and the spin, but actually begging to be lied to and happily paying for the privilege. But that’s a topic for another day.

2. Only the illustration leads us, rather arbitrarily, to believe that Small was a large beetle. Nowhere in the text is his identity spelled out, beyond saying that he was one of Rabbit’s innumerable friends-and-relations. Which is, of course, tantamount to saying that he is that Friend who stands in the same relation to every seeker.

William Matthews was an extremely versatile American poet and translator (of Martial and Jean Follain, among others). Almost everything in his Selected Poems and Translations is quotable: he was one of those poets with a real gift for aphorism and memorable lines. (The complete text of his third book, Rising and Falling, is available on-line; check out in particular the closing piece, “Long.”)

But what I want to do here today is reproduce from the Selected Poems and Translations his selection of “One-liners” – possibly one of the most difficult poetic forms to master.

In the book, these are presented just two per page. I’ll leave a lot of white space around them, to try and preserve the effect.
__________

One-liners
by William Matthews

THE NEEDLE’S EYE, THE LENS

    Here comes the blind thread to sew it shut.

LUST ACTS

    But desire is a kind of leisure

SLEEP

    Border with no country

HOW CAREFUL FIRE CAN BE

    is not for fire to tell

SPIRITUAL LIFE

    To be warm, build an igloo

NO TRUE RHYME IN ENGLISH FOR “SILVER”

    “Pilfer” is true enough for me

DAWN

    Insomnia, old tree, when will you shed me?

WHY I DIDN’T NOTICE IT

    The moss on the milk is white

PREMATURE EJACULATION

    I’m sorry this poem’s already finished

THE PAST

    Grief comes to eat without a mouth

SNOW

    The dead are dreaming of breathing

__________

That’s the lot of them. Anyone care to try an imitation? I’m intrigued by the fact that

EVEN THOUGH IT IS ESSENTIAL

    The title doesn’t count

Whatever happened to the coffee house in the church basement? It’s gone corporate, like everything else. The excuse offered here is that churchgoers need to relax. Silly me, I thought that was the point of the long, boring sermon. And I’ve never thought of caffeine as a relaxant. Perhaps they should try handing out marijuana brownies before the service. Or, I don’t know, just try being a little less white…

These days, along with the usual sermons, places of worship are quenching more literal forms of thirst, too.

Those who crave Starbucks can step over to a kiosk at Grace Capital Church in Pembroke, N.H….

“Starbucks has done what churches should have done a long time ago, and that’s to become more people-friendly,” says the Rev. Peter Bonanno, senior pastor of Grace Capital Church. “It’s not so much the coffee as the environment the coffee and the coffee bar create – a relaxed, relational, and fun place. We hope to create an environment that we believe is more biblical than [conventionally] religious.”

Parishioners seem satisfied. The kiosk opened in July, and visitors say the building that houses it “feels more like a Starbucks … than a church,” says Mr. Bonanno. Since July, average Sunday attendance has doubled to 550.

“More biblical.” What do you suppose that means? Do the baristas sacrifice a fatted calf in between serving up double lattes?

Last night over the dinner table we were reminiscing about some of the things my mother used to say to me when I was a little kid. Well, say and sing. See, Mom made up lullabies for each of us kids when we were a couple weeks old. They were nothing elaborate, just a few lines of her own lyrics set to a short segment of a familiar tune. I still remember my younger brother’s song. I won’t embarrass him by repeating the words, but the tune was taken from Beethoven’s 6th, and it worked like a charm. Not only did he learn to fall asleep on command, he became a huge classical music fan. Mom claims he could hum most of the themes in all nine Beethoven symphonies before he learned to talk.

On one level, they were lullabies, but on another level, they were like the extended or true versions of our given names. Mine she sang to the tune of “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City,” from the musical Oklahoma: “What are we going to do with David Jeffrey? The naughtiest little boy in all the world!”

So that was me: David-Jeffrey-the-Naughtiest-Little-Boy-in-All-the-World-[Patronymic].*

Mom was really pushing the envelope of the lullaby genre with that one. There’s a kind of ironic distancing there that you wouldn’t find in either of my brother’s lullabies. It’s easy to imagine what might have been going through her head when she made it up: “Okay, you rotten little kid. Since you won’t go to sleep anyway, take this!”

It’s true, though, I was pretty rotten. Not mean rotten – except to my little brother, whom I tormented – but tantrum-throwing rotten. I cried constantly. My parents still recall one time when I screamed for two hours straight at a nursery school. From the moment they plunked my four-year-old butt down in the nether regions of that house of God, I began howling at the top of my lungs. My older brother was allowed to attend services, why couldn’t I? They said they could hear me faintly from upstairs in the sanctuary, all throughout the sermon. It is in such seemingly minor incidents, I think, that one can locate the fertile seeds of what would become life-long obsessions.

I didn’t break the crying habit until I reached puberty. We’ve all heard the pop psychological explanation for such behavior: “Oh, he just wants attention!” But I think I was alert enough to realize that in my case, the opposite was true. If I wanted attention, all I had to do was stop crying for a little while. I can still remember the acute pleasure I derived from making myself and others miserable. Misery was more than company – it was a lifestyle. Hence my mother’s affectionate nickname for me as a child: Eeyore.

Nobody worried much about political correctness back in the early 1970s. Whenever we became especially cantankerous, Mom would threaten, “I’m going to give you back to the Indians!” That always seemed like a fairly attractive alternative, however. So sometimes she would change it and say, “I’m going to take you back to the A&P!”

I was always very well behaved in the supermarket.
__________

* Some things you just don’t want Google to pick up, know what I mean?

I’m discontinuing my political blog, dead raccoon in the road. Thanks to everyone who kept up with it and everyone who linked.

Time-wise, there’s no reason why I couldn’t keep it going as an occasional thing, posting whenever the spirit moves me. I imagine it serves a marginally useful social function as a political links blog for a few of my Bloglines-using friends who don’t have the time or patience to keep up with the news otherwise. But it was beginning to feel a bit fraudulent. A blog should be part of a larger conversation, in my view. And I’m afraid I don’t make the effort to keep up with more than four or five political blogs. I can’t, really. I already read 50 blogs, and that – in addition to whatever online news sources I can squeeze in, plus the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and a handful of magazines – is the absolute limit, at least if I am going to continue to put the kind of energy into Via Negativa that it deserves.

Plus, while it was fun playing Grand Inquisitor for a couple of months, I was rarely too happy with the results. Toxic sarcasm makes for good punk and heavy metal lyrics, but beyond that, it’s, well, toxic.

A third motivating factor is my interest in taking on other projects, for which I never seem to run out of ideas. Stay tuned.

The libertarian website LewRockwell.com has a nice retrospective on Ivan Illich – well worth reading for anyone unfamiliar with his ideas. Illich is one of my favorite thinkers. Whether or not you agree with all his positions – and I certainly don’t – I think there’s no denying he is one the most consistently challenging social philosophers of the second half of the 20th century.

Reading this retrospective, which included the first quote below, prompted me to dig out my own copy of Illich’s 1969 classic, Celebration of Awareness. Here’s a brief garland of quotes from two of the most striking essays included in that work.

From “Violence: A Mirror for Americans“:

“The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.”

“Eight years ago I told the late Bishop Manuel Larrain, the president of the Conference of Latin American Bishops, that I was prepared if necessary to stop the coming of missionaries to Latin America. His answer still rings in my ears: ‘They may be useless to us in Latin America, but they are the only North Americans whom we will have an opportunity to educate. We owe them that much.'”

Illich foresaw something like the rise of radical Islamist ideology way back in 1968:

“I submit that foreign gods (ideals, idols, ideologies, persuasions, values) are more offensive to the ‘poor’ than the military or economic power of the foreigner. It is more irritating to feel seduced to the consumption of over-priced sugar-water called Coca-Cola than to submit helplessly to doing the same job an American does, only at half the pay. It angers a person more to hear a priest preach cleanliness, thrift, resistance to socialism, or obedience to unjust authority, than to accept military rule. If I read present trends correctly, and I am confident I do, during the next few years violence will break out mostly against symbols of foreign ideas and the attempt to sell these. And I fear that this violence, which is fundamentally a healthy though angry and turbulent rejection of alienating symbols, will be exploited and harden into hatred and crime.”

Yes, and be used by anti-Western governments to solidify power, as in Libya under Qaddafi, Iran under the Ayatollahs, or Afghanistan under the Taliban.

From “The Eloquence of Silence“:

“The science of linguistics has brought into view new horizons in the understanding of human communications. An objective study of the ways in which meanings are transmitted has shown that much more is relayed from one man to another through and in silence than in words. Words and sentences are composed of silences more meaningful than the sounds. The pregnant pauses between sounds and utterances become luminous points in an incredible void: as electrons in the atom, as planets in the solar system. Language is as a cord of silence with sounds the knots – as nodes in a Peruvian quipu, in which the empty spaces speak….

“To learn a language in a human and mature way, therefore, is to accept the responsibility for its silences and for its sounds. The gift a people gives us in teaching us their language is more a gift of the rhythm, the mode, and the subtleties of its system of silences than of its system of sounds. It is an intimate gift for which we are accountable to the people who have entrusted us with their tongue. A language of which I know only the words and not the pauses is a continuous offense. It is as the caricature of a photographic negative….

“It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missioners, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they ‘speak with the accents of natives’ they remain forever thousands of miles away.”

This is from a talk Illich gave to prospective missionaries learning Spanish, Catholic priests who wanted to work among the then-newly arrived Puerto Ricans in New York City. Illich goes on to classify linguistic silences into three, broad categories: “the silence of the pure listener”; “the silence of syntony,” of waiting for the right words or Word; and “the silence beyond words,” which is equally “the silence of heaven or of hell,” of love or despair.

“There is still another silence beyond words, the silence of the Pietí . It is not a silence of death but a silence of the mystery of death. It is not the silence of active acceptance of the will of God out of which the Fiat is born nor the silence of manly acceptance of Gethsemane in which obedience has its roots. The silence you as missioners seek to acquire in this Spanish course is the silence beyond bewilderment and questions; it is a silence beyond the possibility of an answer, or even reference to a word which preceded. It is the mysterious silence through which the Lord could descend into the silence of hell, the acceptance without frustration of a life, useless and wasted on Judas, a silence of freely willed powerlessness through which the world was saved. Born to redeem the world, Mary’s Son had died at the hands of His people, abandoned by His friends and betrayed by Judas whom he loved but could not save – silent contemplation of the culminating paradox of the Incarnation which was useless for the redemption of at least one personal friend. The opening of the soul to this ultimate silence of the Pietí  is the culmination of the slow maturing of the three previous forms of missionary silence.”

I admit I don’t read nearly as much Christian theology as I should. So perhaps I shouldn’t be as struck as I am by the insight in these last lines, that Jesus’ greatest source of agony was the loss of Judas. (Was this mentioned in The Passion of the Christ?) It seems somewhat at variance with Augustine’s contention that the greatest source of pleasure for the saved in heaven will be to look down on the eternal torments of the damned. It reminds me instead of a line from a poem by Elie Wiesel: “The Silence of God is God.”

For more Illich quotes, scroll down to the end of the aforementioned retrospective. Naturally, the author selects quotes favorable to a conservative libertarian point-of-view. But a lengthy list of links to other online articles by and about Ivan Illich is provided, as well.

I wake around 6:00 and am out on the porch by 6:30, in time for the last 20 minutes of darkness. Most mornings this time of year, the transition from night to day is virtually imperceptible. But this dawn lurches dramatically from dark to light and back again as breaks open and close in the fast-moving clouds. By 6:55 I can see well enough to write between the lines in my pocket notebook. My first page of the New Year, however, will be an almost unreadable mess.

It’s unseasonably warm – 50 degrees (F) – and breezy. By 7:00 o’clock, a large portion of the sky has cleared off, revealing the gibbous moon and one star or planet, maybe Jupiter. A hunter walks up the driveway, headed for his tree stand. (In Pennsylvania, muzzleloader deer season resumed the Monday after Christmas.)

“A little late, aren’t you?” I call out.

He mutters something I don’t catch, then says, “The way I figure it, everyone else probably has a hangover, so I’ll be the first one out here.”

A couple minutes after he heads up into the woods, it occurs to me that I ought to try and watch the sunrise, assuming it will be visible. I tuck a sitting mat under my arm and set off for the crest of the higher of the two ridges, the one to the west, which we call Sapsucker Ridge. Crossing the field, I hear the twitter of waking songbirds, and just as I enter the woods, a white-throated sparrow calls. For once, it doesn’t sound the least bit melancholy. Nor do I hear either of the two popular onomatopoeic interpretations, just the song itself. It stutters a bit at the end, as if the bird still has a bit of sleep stuck in its throat.

I reach the ridgetop by 7:15 and spread the mat at the base of a smallish chestnut oak, some 25 feet away from the mammoth red oak that we refer to simply as the Big Tree. I had thought I might sit against it, but decided I’d rather watch the sunrise through its massive spread of limbs. Who knows how many more years we’ll have it with us? I feel sorry now that I didn’t bring a bottle of champagne to toast the New Year. I would’ve gladly given some to this tree, poured it into the ground around its trunk.

The tree I’m sitting against is a creaker. I look straight up and realize I’ve got company: a dead cherry tree is leaning against it, too. Only one thin branch stands between me and a world of hurt. Fortunately, on this side of the ridge, the wind is erratic, and the rubbing of tree against tree yields only an occasional eeeeeek, or a lower-pitched uk . . . uk . . . uk. A hundred feet to the west, some other creaker is going erk erk erk erk, as regular as a metronome. The whole time I’m sitting there, it doesn’t let up.

Shortly after I get settled in, a crow calls – Here, here – and another answers in the same fashion, like British members of parliament after a stirring speech. Well, what’s not to applaud? As it turns out, I’m very lucky. There’s one, small break in an otherwise solid curtain of cloud above the eastern horizon. From my perspective that break is right in the middle of the Little Juniata Water Gap in Tussey Mountain, some seven miles away as the crow flies. And through that break I’m able to watch the sunrise.

By 7:30 the hole in the clouds has turned deep crimson. At a few seconds before 7:35, the first retina-burning edge of the sun pops into view. It takes only a few minutes to traverse the narrow gap and enter the clouds above. In fact, the leading edge has already disappeared before the bottom of the orb clears the horizon, and at the point where the greatest part is visible, I notice a very thin band of additional cloud bisecting it. I feel as if I’m watching a strip tease through a peephole (not that I’ve ever done such a thing, of course).

Hmm, O.K. – I say to myself – I’m watching the ball rise. By 7:38 the bottom edge is visible above the horizon. Happy New Year!

Less than four minutes later, the sun’s gone and the red is rapidly draining from the aperture through which I was fortunate enough to verify one possible, arbitrary beginning point of another complete circuit of the earth ’round the sun. Is this why the Quiché Maya think of the sun as a mirror, I wonder – because its original radiance has been obscured by the host of calendrical contrivances we read into its (apparent) daily round? The real sun showed its face only once, they say, at the beginning of time. Since then the Day Lords have been ascendant.

I pick up my sitting-mat and continue my walk, heading southwest along the ridge to the so-called vernal ponds. The largest – less than 25 feet across at its widest point – is still just barely frozen. A pool of melt water has formed on top of the ice, which has sunk down so that only the outermost three to four feet of ice are still above the water. The exposed ring of ice bears a striking pattern of what look like the interlocking footprints of large birds. But it’s the water in the middle that draws my attention.

Again, the sense of an aperture: this time, a window into a world of sharper contrasts and greater mutability than the one we know, that dim reflection frozen in the mind’s eye. The tree trunks are silhouettes against a grayish-white sky, with here and there a patch of pale blue or creamy yellow. The slightest movement of air sets the horizontal branches shivering; electric impulses pass from trunk to trunk. It’s never enough to make them really waver, though. They stand, solid citizens, with their heads downward, roots hidden somewhere beyond the edge, behind the clouds.

At 8:20 I leave the pond and circle around behind the grove of Norway spruce at the top of the field. I’m struck suddenly by how quiet it is, apart from a few train whistles. I stop to admire a small patch of milkweed: straight stalks projecting stiffly at various angles to the ground, gray pods still spilling seed-flecked down. A few of the tufts look as if they’re barely holding on, but it’ll take a stronger breeze than this to lift them free.

Half the sky is now clear. In less than a minute the sun will at last emerge into that clearing – and into this one. The milkweed fluff will glisten like snow, which on other years would lie several inches deep by now. In a few seconds the sun will shine full in my face, all of it, for the first time this year. It’s already happening, before I’ve finished writing about it in my pocket notebook. At how many countless points on the planet is another sunrise just now beginning? Sunroot . . . treeshine . . . whatever might have been here, unsayable, in the always present moment – you know – by the time I get it all down, has been here and gone.
__________

A contribution to the Ecotone wiki topic, New Year and Place.