“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. “
–Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often referred to by his initials FDR (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945), was an American politician who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. Wikipedia
Academy of Ideas Become a Supporting Member (Join us with Paypal or Credit Card) Learn More here ► http://academyofideas.com/members/ **Gain access to Membership videos and courses!** === Carl Jung believed that anxiety disorders, and other forms of neuroses, were not solely negative phenomenon. They may produce much suffering, but according to Jung, they also provide us with crucial information concerning our current way of life and how to improve it.
Academy of Ideas Become a Supporting Member (Join us with Paypal or Credit Card) Learn More here ► http://academyofideas.com/members/ **Gain access to Membership videos and courses!** ===
In the 2nd video of this series we explore Carl Jung’s ideas on how to recover from an anxiety disorder. Link here: https://youtu.be/WBAFPbypyn4
By Wade Lee Hudson
Professor of Educational Policy, Democracy and Leadership at the University of Hertfordshire in England, Philip Woods offers a comprehensive worldview — holistic democracy — that complements Elizabeth Anderson’s democratic equality. Though focused on educational institutions, his perspective can be applied throughout society. Woods’ contributions are extremely valuable, but he seems to overlook that not all conflicts are “win-win” and his idiosyncratic definition of “ideology” is questionable.
As a member or leader in multiple European professional associations and projects, as well as a member of the US-based Democratic Ethical Educational Leadership network, and the author of more than 120 publications, Woods is highly regarded by his peers internationally. An American, Jill Bradley-Levine, recently described his work as
a relatively new theory to frame the ways that teacher advocacy creates a space for the development of collaborative leadership where teacher advocates influence their colleagues’ practice. When teachers advocate on behalf of students who are marginalized, they place their students’ needs above their own. This approach becomes a way of acting not only with their students, but with their colleagues as well. Teacher advocates challenge other teachers to meet students’ needs more fully while supporting teachers as they try new instructional approaches. Collaborative leadership [promotes] co-development….
Teacher advocacy demonstrates a way of carrying out teacher leadership that can be framed through collaborative leadership theory. Collaborative leadership consists of the view that leadership is intentional and emergent. School leaders have choices about what intentions they bring to their work…. Such leadership develops from intentions motivated by moral and ethical standards. Woods and Roberts argue that the “core values of democracy and social justice are essential measures of intentionality.” As an emergent process, leadership arises “from numerous, ongoing actions and interactions.” Further, leadership roles and responsibilities are fluid where all participants of organizations may actively engage to lead intentionally. When leaders emerge to act ethically, codevelopment may occur. The philosophy of co-development unites the application of holistic democracy and social justice to the intentional and emergent practice of collaborative leadership. Thus, the process of collaborative leadership occurs when leadership…is deliberately directed toward achieving social justice as defined here, and members of the organization allow leadership to emerge through collaborative processes so that individuals are given opportunities to develop in a holistic way.
In his essay, “Holistic Democracy,” Woods summarizes his perspective as follows:
Holistic democracy is a way of working together which encourages individuals to grow and learn as whole people and facilitates co-responsibility, mutual empowerment and fair participation of all in co-creating their social and organizational environment.
Four dimensions of practice are at its core:
Woods affirms “the study, practice and development of leadership that effectively fosters learning, social justice and collaborative agency.” He argues:
Holistic democracy responds to key trends in society, education and organisations, and what we know from research about learning:
Collaborative School Leadership
In Collaborative School Leadership: A Critical Guide (2018) Woods and Amanda Roberts present a comprehensive overview of their philosophy.
Schools need to respond to rising expectations and the imperative to release the creativity of educators and learners to achieve more socially just education. Yet, strongly hierarchical structures and reliance on the idea of ‘great’ leaders are persistent features of much school education. This book offers an alternative vision of leadership. Collaborative leadership as we examine it in the book is a deeper conception than the idea of distributed leadership that is often applied or studied. We see collaborative leadership as both emerging from the perpetual process of complex interactions across the school involving not only school leaders but teachers, support staff, students and others (hence as emergent), and shaped by individual intentions which express meaning, purpose and goals and the will to make a difference (hence as the product of intentionality). Our concept of collaborative leadership draws attention to both the context that gives rise to leadership and the human sparks of creativity and freedom generated by teachers, students and others as they work together. The book argues that integral to a desirable conception of collaborative leadership is an explicit value-base — a philosophy of co-development rather than dependence. It explains how collaborative leadership practices can be guided by co-development values, where progress is achieved with and by helping others as co-creators of the learning environment of the school. The practical process of developing collaborative leadership is explored through ideas on reciprocal learning, values clarification, reframing leadership and collective identity construction. The book is a crucial aid in developing distributed leadership practice, through teacher leadership, for example, that is more collaborative, innovative, critically reflexive and capable of advancing social justice.
In their review of this book, Paul H. Smith and Melanie J. Blackburn write:
Philip Woods and Amanda Roberts offer a valuable exploration of how leadership that is based on a deep commitment to social justice can improve the experiences of school children as well as those who are employed to support their development, It productively focuses on two key questions that all school communities should reflect on: (1) what is leadership? and (2) what should leadership be? In response to these questions, collaborative leadership is offered as an “alternative vision” to a top-down approach.
Distributed Leadership
In recent decades, many management consultants have promoted “distributed leadership,” which encourages recognizing and harnessing “the expertise and insights of diverse organisational actors,” not just topmost leaders. However, Woods cautions that this approach “is capable of being subjected to and instrumentalised by the performative and competitive agendas” of the dominant culture. Holistic democracy aims to avoid this pitfall by deepening distributed leadership. Woods argues:
Educational institutions internationally are encouraging distributed leadership, collaborative working across networks, greater creativity, more innovation and student voice, pushing against traditional boundaries. These boundaries can be opened further by working towards holistic democracy.
Woods’ approach is founded on three elements. The first is “the appreciation of social phenomena as emergent and complex,” an ongoing interaction between structure, person and practice (or action).
The second element
is the recognition of an innate human capacity for ethical agency and the aspiration to, or a feeling for, an idea of human perfection — however difficult this may be to articulate or practice. This is the capacity for ethical and spiritual awareness…. An essential point in this line of thinking is the view that there is something in the nature of “ordinary consciousness” that lays the basis for ethical and spiritual progress.
The third element
is an appreciation of conceptions of democracy that see the democratic process as more than clashes of narrow interests — in particular the idea of deliberative democracy, which seeks ways of transcending difference and enhancing mutual understanding and developmental democracy, which highlights both the ability of people to discover and bring to fruition “innate potential excellence” and the policy imperative to provide the necessary conditions for self-development.
In these ways, holistic democracy is about
both meaning and participation. Holistic democracy describes a way of working together which facilitates the growth and learning of individuals as whole people (meaning), as well as co-responsibility, mutual empowerment and fair participation of all in co-creating their social and organisational environment (participation).
As touched on above, the meaning dimensions involve:
And the participative dimensions involve
In these ways, holistic democracy deepens “distributed leadership.”
The Human Interaction Sphere
Woods’s conception of holistic democracy affirms that people are able to become more authentic, and this capability gives “ethical validity to challenges to unjust power inequalities.” This affirmation is based on three beliefs:
These interactions make demands on the participants, with “potential consequences for feelings such as guilt, status and self-esteem.” The need for restitution and forgiveness often results.
Since skill and subtle responses are essential, many sociologists argue that socialization must teach individuals how to engage in effective social encounters. But an exaggerated emphasis on socialization denies the importance of “the inner work of social agents through their internal conversations and orderings of ultimate concerns and their capacity for ethical and spiritual awareness.”
The exaggerated emphasis on socialization overlooks “the human interaction sphere,” the “experience of being with and interacting with other human beings,” which is “qualitatively different from interaction with the natural environment.” Others are experienced not merely as symbols of social structures, “but as a subject which shares human-ness,” which leads to “fundamental ethical impulses.”
Feeling connected to other human beings who are like one’s self generates the unique feeling of being responsible to those others — ”an unconditional, inexhaustible command on the person, which requires them to be permanently ready to rise to its requirements and, however often they may do this, is never diminished.”
Feeling connected to others also generates “tacit knowledge about our own human-ness,” our shared humanity. This knowledge “consists of unarticulated insights and understandings” generated by feeling connected — knowledge that may later be translated into theories. But “the moral element is not socially constructed.”
This human interaction differs from “social interaction,” which involves fulfilling certain roles, such as being a teacher or having a working class background. “At the same time as people are, in interaction, engaging their social identity with that of others, they are also engaging their human self with those same others as human selves…. There is a mutual recognition of…the sense of self that makes us each human.” This awareness and feeling connected “give a more profound and enduring meaning…than changeable social rules and statuses.” These interactions are essential to the possibilities of non-ideological, sacred, holistic democracy, including in economic, legal, political, sexual, and other realms.
“A radical challenge to ideology requires an opposition from a framework of thought that offers some degree of transcendent validity,” based on a worldview, such as holistic democracy, that is grounded “in the individual and intersubjective capacities of people” and “the desire for a better way of being.”
These emotional roots of democracy, which are both individual and intersubjective, include “the individual human capacity for ethical and spiritual awareness.” Feeling connected to and interacting with other human beings generates emotional “calls for a human, ethical response to the other.” These emotions are “intrinsically compelling.” They are not “the product of a reasoned construction of moral responsibility” — though “critical discourse and analytical thinking” are important in order to test actions.
Systemic Ethics
With his systemic analysis, Woods embraces the need for a peaceful “social order” (as discussed for instance in the 1940s by Karl Mannheim). Intersubjective interaction is an important corrective to focusing solely on individual awareness and change. The belief that mere awareness “will dissolve systems [overlooks] the importance of context, including the effects of social inequalities and the distorting influence of ideologically driven discourses.” The social order “can be a conduit for the formation and exercise of power differences and the shaping of identities that are not consciously chosen but imposed.”
The human and the social sphere operate simultaneously. “We are constantly processing both social and human interactions, and the influences of instrumentalising trends are strong and often insidious…. More often than not,” the human sphere must “be consciously struggled for.”
“The capacity to recognise and nurture the affective and ethical value of the human interaction sphere within the context of other pressures and influences” contributes to “the evolution of values and ideas with enduring validity that transcend narrow interests.” This evolution “also involves co-creation through transforming dialogue and holistic learning” in a process that is intersubjective and collaborative.
He writes:
There are interests and groups who are marginalised and systematically disadvantaged… Rich democracy addresses systematic social injustices. The full power of democracy, however, is not only as a vehicle for championing the weaker interests and aspiring to inclusive participation. [It counters] a performative and neo-liberal ideology that appears so dominant in many countries.”…
Holistic democratic practice involves an “expansive notion of social justice [that] spans four dimensions” — “fair distribution of respect, participation, development opportunities (that is, the opportunity to learn and grow as a person with a capacity for independent thinking and connectedness with others) and resources….”
This approach affirms
day-to-day life values such as justice, tolerance, mutual understanding and a concern for the welfare of others, and to ensure that no-one is excluded from opportunities to participate and learn. Integral to collaborative leadership is a concern for inclusion — who is able to speak and be heard, who is able to help shape change, who benefits; and who is marginalised in all these things.
“Systemic ethics goes beyond company values and individual leader morality” that ignore “social inequality, the downstream impacts of pollution and supply chain workers, world poverty and environmental sustainability” and acts “in ways consistent with a self that is defined by the values and priorities of neo-liberal, competitive governance, measured by narrow calculations of achievement.”
Systemic ethics pays attention to “‘community and friendship’ and to ‘the unconscious and non-rational, creativity and imagination’”, and draws “upon the beauty and vitality within human relationships and the natural world.” It’s rooted in “a philosophy of co-development [and] social justice.”
Social justice is thus sketched as a four-fold scheme. Participative justice concerns people’s rights to participate in the decisions which affect them…. Cultural justice is concerned with the absence of cultural domination, lack of recognition and disrespect…. Distributive justice focuses attention on eradicating unjustified socio-economic inequalities and deprivation,… Developmental justice…is concerned with factors that facilitate or hinder growth as a person and the development of a person’s knowledge and capabilities….
Eco-leadership focuses on connectivity and interdependence; it encourages distributed leadership at local levels, leadership from the edge and the building of strong networks, coalitions and collaborative relationships that are responsive and adaptive to change…. [It] integrates a view of values and ethics that…challenges and subverts the narrow logic of the market…. This stance is not only about personal conduct but also addresses organisational and systemic issues…. Equally important are the ways in which the overarching co-operative ideas (the participatory culture) and institutional arrangements for co-operative practice (the enabling institutional architecture) are designed….
The book’s central focus has been relational freedom — freedom with others. Self-awareness and critical reflexivity are essential constituents of individuals exercising self-direction as social beings. Relational freedom entails both developing in the self and supporting in others growth towards autonomy, as well as responsibility that reflects a deep relatedness to other people, the natural world and those experiences and elements of life, from music to expressions of community, that feed the human spirit….
The core purpose of holistic democracy is, then, to enable people to develop a capacity for freedom as social beings…. Leadership may in its practice be guided more by values associated with dependence or by values associated with co-development.
The System
There’s some ambiguity about whether Woods embraces the notion of “the System” as affirmed by the Systemopedia — that our institutions, our culture, and ourselves as individuals are woven together into a dominant social system that encourages everyone to climb social ladders, envy or resent those above them, and look down on and dominate those below. Some people resist these pressures and strive to relate to each other as equals — that is, individuals with essential equal worth, all of whom are precious and priceless.
Throughout history, some individuals and organizations have pushed to make their society more equal and democratic, and have made steady progress. But this tension will never be fully and permanently resolved. Perfection is not possible. The best we can hope for is to move toward achieving our highest ideals.
Woods doesn’t use the phrase “the System” and often speaks of “systems.” Many people believe we only have many systems, not one integrated system. Woods may be one of them. But the whole thrust of his work strongly implies he believes all of our systems are interwoven into a single, coherent, dominant social system.
He speaks of “the social order,” refers to “the performative and competitive agendas” of established organizations, and questions whether practices serve those “performative and competitive agendas…[that are] dominated by instrumental rationality.” He writes about “the dominant literature on leadership and education” that reflects “a performative and neo-liberal ideology that appears so dominant in many countries” and “dominates what is taken-for-granted truth…because its interests are able to dominate the discourse.” He concludes that the purpose of ideology is to “justify the interests of dominant groups,” laments that “there are interests and groups who are marginalised and systematically disadvantaged,” which calls for a “rich democracy [that] addresses systematic social injustices” with “an alternative framework” rooted in a “systemic ethics” that distributes “leadership at local levels” and cultivates “the participatory culture” and designs “institutional arrangements for co-operative practice” — that is, “the enabling institutional architecture.” These remarks and others lead me to believe that Woods does affirm that personal, social, cultural, and political dynamics reinforce each other systemically, which calls for fundamental, systemic transformation, as proposed by the Systemopedia.
Ideology
In “Against Ideology: Democracy and the Human Interaction Sphere,” Woods addresses the struggle between the dominant society’s “instrumentalising trends” (which reduce humans to objects) and “drivers to democracy” (which nurture whole people). On the one hand, the dominant instrumentalising trends comprise:
The promotion and justification of these trends form an ideology… — specifically, a performative and neo-liberal ideology that appears so dominant in many countries.
This dominant, “performative” ideology is based on a “managerialism” that aims to justify the interests of dominant elites. Woods argues:
Ideology, from whatever political perspective, implies a system of ideas and values that purports to make sense of the context and choices facing people as organisational actors. Ideologies act to construct and shape knowledge, and its presentations, in the interests of a particular power grouping…. The essential purpose of ideology, however, is to shape and present ideas in ways that favour certain relationships of power.
The function of ideology is to “protect and promote” relationships of domination in a non-transparent manner. “Its fundamental aspiration is not the enlargement of truth and understanding.”
On the other hand, as Woods sees it, a non-ideological framework “offers a guide to social action with greater validity and more robust understanding.” It transcends particular interests and enables antagonisms to be acknowledged “and for suffering, inequalities, and aspirations to social justice to be articulated as parts of the critique of ideological representations.”
This holistic-democracy perspective argues that democracy has “some degree of transcendent validity” because it is rooted in deep feelings related to the human “capacity for ethical and spiritual awareness.” Woods’ “extra-ideological, critical viewpoint” is informed by two dynamics.
The first dynamic — ”critical illumination” — comes from
a concern with interests and the antagonisms that these underpin. These include inequities of distribution and (unequal) access to material resources, social capital, cultural acceptance, status, and so on. This illuminates the portion of real experience that is repressed by a necessarily distorting ideology. This first direction of critique gives a voice to marginalised and disempowered interests.
The second dynamic — ”positive illumination” — comes from
the positive view of humanity, centering on humanistic potential, and the recognition of the communicative capabilities and the spark of goodness and wisdom that enable and entitle everyone to have their say in the conduct of social life. This direction is grounded in some sense of transcendent validity. That is, it is supported by a basis for judging experience that is not simply personally subjective or the arbitrary product of a particular community, group or culture.
Holistic democracy thus “provides a framework within which to critically and positively illuminate that which ideology systematically overlooks.” Drivers to democracy counter ideology. These drivers include participative drivers that nurture broader participation, and expressive drivers “that are fueled by impulses to extend opportunities to express spiritual, artistic and creative drives, enjoy the warmth of caring human bonds, live ethically and to learn and grow as full human beings.”
Woods declines to characterise this democratic,, countering set of ideas as ideological. He argues that a counter-ideology would present itself “as being rooted in partial interests with its superiority dependent on enabling its power and interests to become dominant.” With this approach “validity becomes a function of power.” Holistic democracy, as Woods sees it, is “an alternative framework” that challenges the “interests-bound” basis of ideology. This perspective gives holistic democracy “greater warrant and power than seeing democracy as a counter-ideology.”
Reservations
A system of ideas, a worldview, is needed to help mobilize political power. It seems reasonable to call such a worldview an “ideology” — that is, a system of ideas and ideals. The problem is not ideology per se, as Woods asserts. The problem is authoritarian ideology. A democratic ideology is a legitimate alternative.
I concur with Woods placing high value on democratic deliberation that results in “win-win” solutions embraced by all participants. He’s right to emphasize transcending narrow self-interest in a way that affirms our common humanity. He’s right to question the urge to dominate and the use of ideology to serve that purpose — many people become addicted to power for its own sake. He’s right to advance “power with” rather than “power over.” He’s right to constantly seek reconciliation; even those involved in heated confrontations can still hold out hope for eventual unity.
But some dilemmas are black-and-white and cannot be compromised. The state either has the death penalty or it does not. It either outlaws all abortion or it does not. The President can either do whatever he wants or Congress and the courts can exercise countervailing power. Black lives matter or they do not. With regards to matters like these, the power to dominate is decisive. Society must take a stand and enforce it.
With these exceptions, Woods is incisive and inspiring. His “holistic democracy” pulls together a solid foundation for forward-looking work throughout society.
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RESOURCES:
“I can conceive of no better service,” Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) wrote in contemplating the mightiest force of resistance in times far more troubled than ours, “than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.” To Whitman, who declared himself “the poet of the woman the same as the man,” the gravest weakness of democracy was the artificial, culturally manufactured inequality of the genders, which he recognized not only as a corruption of democracy but as a corruption of nature. Equality for him, be it of the genders or the races, was never a matter of politics — that plaything of the human animal — but a matter of naturalness. Because he saw how thickly interleaved our individual dignities are, how interdependent our flourishing — saw that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” — he took it upon himself, a century and a half before his society did, to save democracy from politics, standing up for the rightful balance of dignity and power. Anne Gilchrist — the unheralded genius whom Whitman admired as “a sort of human miracle” belonging “to the times yet to come” — spoke for the epochs when she asked: “Who but he could put at last the right meaning into that word ‘democracy,’ which has been made to bear such a burthen of incongruous notions?”
Walt Whitman (Photograph by Mathew Brady, early 1860s)
Whitman threw himself at righting — naturalizing — the gender imbalance of democracy not despite his maleness but precisely because of it. At the heart of his devotion to equality was an astute insight into the paradox of power: the understanding that no socially and politically marginalized group — not even a biological majority — moves to the center solely by its own efforts; it takes a gravitational pull by those kindred to the cause who are already in relative positions of power or privilege. It was a countercultural understanding in his time, and remains a countercultural understanding in ours, its negation ahistorical: Citizens helped us immigrants obtain legal rights and protections; white women like astronomer Maria Mitchell and literary titan Margaret Fuller were on the ideological front-lines of abolition, some even on the literal front-lines of the Civil War.
Long before the term feminism wove itself into the modern lexicon, America’s most celebrated poet (though perhaps the second-greatest) became an outspoken feminist. In his 1888 poem “America” — a reading of which is the only surviving recording of his voice — Whitman eulogized his homeland as a “centre of equal daughters, equal sons.” He added this poem to his continually revised and expanded Leaves of Grass in the final years of his life, but coursing through it was the pulse-beat of a longtime conviction: As a young man, Whitman was greatly influenced by Margaret Fuller — one of the central figures Figuring — whose epoch-making book Woman in the Nineteenth Century catalyzed American women’s emancipation movement. Clippings of Fuller’s columns for the New-York Tribune, where she became the first female editor of a major American newspaper and America’s first foreign war correspondent, were found among Whitman’s papers after his death.
Nearly two decades after Fuller radicalized society, but long before her legacy helped women win the right to vote, Whitman composed a remarkably prescient essay on the obstacles to democracy, included in the indispensable Library of America volume Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose (free ebook | public library).
Art by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)
Insisting that no democratic society could exist in which women are not afforded the same rights as men, he wrote:
I have sometimes thought… that the sole avenue and means of a reconstructed sociology depended, primarily, on a new birth, elevation, expansion, invigoration of woman… Great, great, indeed, far greater than they know, is the sphere of women.
[…]
Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn — they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.
A century before Adrienne Rich argued for literature as a force of women’s empowerment and a form of resistance to male capitalist society, Whitman called for the creation of a new American literature that would be as much an original art form as a tool of social change. Among “the most precious of its results,” Whitman envisioned, would be “achieving the entire redemption of woman… and thus insuring to the States a strong and sweet Female Race.” Art, he resolutely believed, was the ultimate catalyst for social transformation and betterment:
The literature, songs, esthetics, &c., of a country are of importance principally because they furnish the materials and suggestions of personality for the women and men of that country, and enforce them in a thousand effective ways.
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)
Whitman’s first serious biographer, the great nature writer John Burroughs, notes in his exquisitely beautiful and loving portrait of the poet, Whitman: A Study (public library | free ebook), that Whitman always heralded woman as man’s equal and never his plaything, property, or unpaid domestic servant, always as capable of embodying the qualities Whitman most celebrated in human nature. Burroughs wrote:
I sometimes meet women whom I say are of the Whitman type — the kind of woman he invoked and predicted… They are cheerful, tolerant, friendly, think no evil, meet high and low on equal terms; they walk, row, climb mountains; they reach forth into the actual world of questions and events, open-minded, sympathetic, frank, natural, good-natured… in short, the large, fresh, wholesome open-air natures whose ideal so completely possessed Walt Whitman.
Burroughs placed the equality of men and women as the crowning achievement of a more Whitmanesque society — the more democratic society of the future:
The more democratic we become, the more we are prepared for Whitman; the more tolerant, fraternal, sympathetic we become, the more we are ready for Whitman; the more we inure ourselves to the open air and to real things, the more we value and understand our own bodies, the more the woman becomes the mate and equal of the man, the more social equality prevails, — the sooner will come to Whitman fullness and fruition.
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)
Whitman himself had written in Leaves of Grass:
The race is never separated — nor man nor woman
escapes;
All is inextricable — things, spirits, nature, nations,
you too — from precedents you come.
[…]
The creation is womanhood;
Have I not said that womanhood involves all?
Have I not told how the universe has nothing better
than the best womanhood?
Art by Lia Halloran for The Universe in Verse. Available as a print.
Complement with Nikola Tesla’s feminist vision for humanity, then revisit Whitman on optimism as a mighty force of resistance, what it takes to be an agent of change, how to keep criticism from sinking your soul, and what makes life worth living.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Great Awakening |
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| First (c. 1730–1755)Second (c. 1790–1840)Third (c. 1855–1930)Fourth (c. 1960–1980) |
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The Great Awakening refers to a number of periods of religious revival in American Christian history. Historians and theologians identify three or four waves of increased religious enthusiasm occurring between the early 18th century and the late 20th century. Each of these “Great Awakenings” was characterized by widespread revivals led by evangelical Protestant ministers, a sharp increase of interest in religion, a profound sense of conviction and redemption on the part of those affected, an increase in evangelical church membership, and the formation of new religious movements and denominations.
The Awakenings all resulted from powerful preaching that gave listeners a sense of personal guilt and of their need of salvation by Christ. Some of the influential people during the Great Awakening were George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, and Gilbert Tennent, and some of the influential groups during the Great Awakening were the New Lights and the Old Lights.[1][2][3] Pulling away from ritual and ceremony, the Great Awakening made religion intensely personal to the average person by fostering a deep sense of spiritual conviction of personal sin and need for redemption, and by encouraging introspection and a commitment to a new standard of personal morality. It brought Christianity to American-African slaves and was an apocalyptic event in New England that challenged established authority. It incited rancor and division between old traditionalists who insisted on the continuing importance of ritual and doctrine, and the new revivalists, who encouraged emotional involvement and personal commitment. It had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational church, the Presbyterian church, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the German Reformed denomination, and strengthened the small Baptist and Methodist denominations. It had little impact on Anglicans and Quakers. Unlike the Second Great Awakening, which began about 1800 and reached out to the unchurched, the First Great Awakening focused on people who were already church members. It changed their rituals, their piety, and their self-awareness.[4]
Main article: First Great Awakening
The First Great Awakening began in the 1730s and lasted to about 1740, though pockets of revivalism had occurred in years prior, especially amongst the ministry of Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards‘ grandfather.[5] Edwards’ congregation was involved in a revival later called the “Frontier Revivals” in the mid-1730s, though this was on the wane by 1737.[6] But as American religious historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom noted, the Great Awakening “was still to come, ushered in by the Grand Itinerant”,[6] the British evangelist George Whitefield. Whitefield arrived in Georgia in 1738, and returned in 1739 for a second visit of the Colonies, making a “triumphant campaign north from Philadelphia to New York, and back to the South”.[6] In 1740, he visited New England, and “at every place he visited, the consequences were large and tumultuous”. Ministers from various evangelical Protestant denominations supported the Great Awakening.[7] In the middle colonies, he influenced not only the British churches, but the Dutch and Germans.[8]
Additionally, pastoral styles began to change. In the late colonial period, most pastors read their sermons, which were theologically dense and advanced a particular theological argument or interpretation. Nathan O. Hatch argues that the evangelical movement of the 1740s played a key role in the development of democratic thought,[9][disputed – discuss] as well as the belief of the free press and the belief that information should be shared and completely unbiased and uncontrolled.[10] Michał Choiński argues that the First Great Awakening marks the birth of the American “rhetoric of the revival” understood as “a particular mode of preaching in which the speaker employs and it has a really wide array of patterns and communicative strategies to initiate religious conversions and spiritual regeneration among the hearers”.[11] All these theological, social, and rhetorical notions ushered in the period of the American Revolution. This contributed to create a demand for religious freedom.[12] The Great Awakening represented the first time African Americans embraced Christianity in large numbers.[13]
In the later part of the 1700s the Revival came to the English colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, primarily through the efforts of Henry Alline and his New Light movement.[14]
Main article: Second Great Awakening
The Second Great Awakening was a religious revival that occurred in the United States beginning in the late eighteenth century and lasting until the middle of the nineteenth century. While it occurred in all parts of the United States, it was especially strong in the Northeast and the Midwest.[15] This awakening was unique in that it moved beyond the educated elite of New England to those who were less wealthy and less educated. The center of revivalism was the so-called Burned-over district in western New York. Named for its overabundance of hellfire-and-damnation preaching, the region produced dozens of new denominations, communal societies, and reform.[16]
Among these dozens of new denominations were free black churches, ran independently of existing congregations that were predominately of white attendance. During the period between the American revolution and the 1850s, black involvement in largely white churches declined in great numbers, with participation becoming almost non-existent by the 1840s–1850s; some scholars argue that this was largely due to racial discrimination within the church.[17] This discrimination came in the form of segregated seating and the forbiddance of African Americans from voting in church matters or holding leadership positions in many white churches.[17] Reverend Richard Allen, a central founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was quoted describing one such incident of racial discrimination in a predominately white church in Philadelphia, in which fellow preacher and a former slave from Delaware Absalom Jones was forcefully told to leave and grabbed by a white church trustee in the midst of prayer.[18]
Closely related to the Second Great Awakening were other reform movements such as temperance, abolition, and women’s rights. The temperance movement encouraged people to abstain from consuming alcoholic drinks in order to preserve family order. The abolition movement fought to abolish slavery in the United States. The women’s rights movement grew from female abolitionists who realized that they too could fight for their own political rights. In addition to these causes, reforms touched nearly every aspect of daily life, such as restricting the use of tobacco and dietary and dress reforms. The abolition movement emerged in the North from the wider Second Great Awakening 1800–1840.[19]
Main article: Third Great Awakening
The Third Great Awakening in the 1850s–1900s was characterized by new denominations, active missionary work, Chautauquas, and the Social Gospel approach to social issues.[4] The YMCA (founded in 1844) played a major role in fostering revivals in the cities in the 1858 Awakening and after. The revival of 1858 produced the leadership, such as that of Dwight L. Moody, out of which came religious work carried on in the armies during the civil war. The Christian and Sanitary Commissions and numerous Freedmen’s Societies were also formed in the midst of the War.[20]
Main article: Fourth Great Awakening
The Fourth Great Awakening is a debated concept that has not received the acceptance of the first three. Advocates such as economist Robert Fogel say it happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[21] The Jesus Movement is one evidence of this awakening, and it created a shift in church music styles.
Mainline Protestant denominations weakened sharply in both membership and influence while the most conservative religious denominations (such as the Southern Baptists and Missouri Synod Lutherans) grew rapidly in numbers, spread across the United States, had grave internal theological battles and schisms, and became politically powerful.[22]
The idea of an “awakening” implies a slumber or passivity during secular or less religious times. Awakening is a term which originates from and is embraced often and primarily by evangelical Christians.[23] In recent times, the idea of “awakenings” in United States history has been put forth by conservative American evangelicals.[24]
Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is a double-edged sword: It helps us empathize with others and avoid common misunderstandings that result in hurt feelings, but in the wrong hands, it can become a tool of manipulation.
A brief overview of studies at The Atlantic cites evidence that developing emotional intelligence can result in more narcissistic behavior, and if one has the proclivity toward deceit, having emotional intelligence can make such subterfuge more insidious still:
“A 2010 journal article [published in Research in Organizational Behavior] reviewed ‘self-serving’ uses of EI in office settings, such as ‘focusing on strategically important targets’ (subordinates, rivals, supervisors) and working to ‘distort, block, or amplify rumors, gossip, and other types of emotion-laden information.'”
What’s perhaps worst of all is that individuals with strategically deceitful attitudes may be blissfully unaware of their own behavior. Neuroscientist James Fallon is famously one of those people. Blind to his own manipulative tendencies his whole life, it was only in his sixties that he realized he habitually badgered and manipulated people without concern for his own actions. His Big Think Edge interview is a fascinating look at what it’s like to discover one’s darker side and come out the other end.
Popularized by psychologist Daniel Goleman in his 1995 book Emotional Intelligence, EQ took popular psychology by storm. The concept of a non-quantifiable, emotionally intuitive intelligence retooled our vision of what it meant to be smart, helping to explain why some extremely bright people just can’t get along.
Emotional intelligence also signaled that people who understood uniquely human desires, such as the need to feel respected, listened to, and understood, could benefit organizations by harnessing social capital. But just as human resource departments cultivated emotional intelligence, narcissistic and Machiavellian coworkers did the same.
Have you ever wondered whether you have a psychopath in your life? Or what if the psychopath happens to be you? In this Deep Dive, we’ll explore some key behaviors and distinctive traits of psychopaths and offer strategies for dealing with their high-conflict behaviors.
The Virgo Full Moon brings into opposition the order and perfectionism of Virgo versus the chaos and cloudiness of Pisces. This positioning of opposites is even more underlined than is usually the case with a Full Moon, since the Sun is conjunct Neptune. Effectively, the Sun has a form of reinforcement, with the Pisces ruling planet as its ally, which could make it hard for the Virgo Moon to hold on to its wishes for order, neatness, and symmetry. We might experience this, in everyday life, as working hard to tidy up while inadvertently creating more mess or chaos. Despite great intentions, it is not necessarily easy to achieve the result desired!
This doesn’t mean that we should just abandon plans, however, fruitless though any first efforts may feel. After all, the Moon often represents a need rather than just a want or a preference. If we cannot get a need met, we may feel it in a very deep way, and this could upset our sense that things are all right in our world. Luckily, a possible solution exists within the opposition itself, in terms of remembering that we can find ways to close the gap. In other words, planets in opposition are as far away as they can get from one another, in the major aspect setup. If we were to imagine trying to bridge that gap somehow, we could look at the sign characteristics and ask ourselves: How do I take one step towards being a little more like the other sign so that both sides can get their needs met? This might be especially relevant in a relationship context, where insisting on having everything in its place in the home is making someone else feel monitored and restricted — or, conversely, where someone’s personal chaos or lack of boundaries represents a physical danger or makes the other party feel under threat. Maybe we can find a solution that moves both people a little more the other way so that there’s more of a win–win scenario, instead of the pulling-apart tension of completely opposed sides.
We may also find potential solutions to tension and difficulties in the trine aspects the Virgo Moon makes to Mars, Jupiter, and Pluto, which are grouped together in Capricorn. When forces are opposed, it can be easy to just dig our heels in harder, trying to win the fight. But the mutable nature of the Virgo–Pisces opposition is not in agreement with this. In addition, the cardinal quality of the Capricorn planets favors leadership by good example, drawing on a greater wisdom. This is particularly amplified by the presence of Jupiter — although this freedom-loving, expansive planet might seem a little restricted in the confines of a Capricornian environment. Even so, Jupiter can help to highlight options that emphasize flexibility and the bigger picture. The idea is to be open to inspirations that breathe new life into proceedings, rather than just following protocol because it is automatic to do so.
The particular strength of the Mars and Pluto trines to the Moon may be to help cut through any of the fogginess or vagueness that could arise from the role the Sun–Neptune conjunction in Pisces plays at this Full Moon. Mars tends to do this in an overt and direct way, while Pluto tends to detect the state of play underneath the surface. It seems that we cannot really lose, either way, as there will be a clear route towards getting closer to the truth of a situation and pinning others down to specifics. This might relate to discovering some facts that explain why a situation is stuck, and perhaps add a clue as to how to solve the problem. It could equally relate to moving forward on a goal that has promise but hasn’t yet manifested in physical form.
This article is from the Mountain Astrologer, written by Diana Collis.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Epigenetic mechanisms
In biology, epigenetics is the study of heritable phenotype changes that do not involve alterations in the DNA sequence.[1] The Greek prefix epi- (ἐπι- “over, outside of, around”) in epigenetics implies features that are “on top of” or “in addition to” the traditional genetic basis for inheritance.[2] Epigenetics most often involves changes that affect gene activity and expression, but the term can also be used to describe any heritable phenotypic change. Such effects on cellular and physiological phenotypic traits may result from external or environmental factors, or be part of normal development. The standard definition of epigenetics requires these alterations to be heritable[3][4] in the progeny of either cells or organisms.
The term also refers to the changes themselves: functionally relevant changes to the genome that do not involve a change in the nucleotide sequence. Examples of mechanisms that produce such changes are DNA methylation and histone modification, each of which alters how genes are expressed without altering the underlying DNA sequence. Gene expression can be controlled through the action of repressor proteins that attach to silencer regions of the DNA. These epigenetic changes may last through cell divisions for the duration of the cell’s life, and may also last for multiple generations, even though they do not involve changes in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism;[5] instead, non-genetic factors cause the organism’s genes to behave (or “express themselves”) differently.[6]
One example of an epigenetic change in eukaryotic biology is the process of cellular differentiation. During morphogenesis, totipotent stem cells become the various pluripotent cell lines of the embryo, which in turn become fully differentiated cells. In other words, as a single fertilized egg cell – the zygote – continues to divide, the resulting daughter cells change into all the different cell types in an organism, including neurons, muscle cells, epithelium, endothelium of blood vessels, etc., by activating some genes while inhibiting the expression of others.[7]
Historically, some phenomena not necessarily heritable have also been described as epigenetic. For example, the term “epigenetic” has been used to describe any modification of chromosomal regions, especially histone modifications, whether or not these changes are heritable or associated with a phenotype. The consensus definition now requires a trait to be heritable for it to be considered epigenetic.[4]
The term epigenetics in its contemporary usage emerged in the 1990s, but for some years has been used with somewhat variable meanings.[8] A consensus definition of the concept of epigenetic trait as a “stably heritable phenotype resulting from changes in a chromosome without alterations in the DNA sequence” was formulated at a Cold Spring Harbor meeting in 2008,[4] although alternate definitions that include non-heritable traits are still being used.[9]
The term epigenesis has a generic meaning of “extra growth”, and has been used in English since the 17th century.[10]
