The School of Life We’ve grown good at making many things in the modern world – but strangely the art of making attractive cities has been lost. Here are some key principles for how to make attractive cities once again. If you like our films, take a look at our shop (we ship worldwide): https://goo.gl/fwFNPV FURTHER READING “Cities are a big deal. We pretty much all have to live in them. We should try hard to get them right. So few cities are nice, very few out of many thousands are really beautiful; embarrassingly the more appealing ones tend to be old, which is weird because we’re mostly much better at making things now…” You can read more on this and other topics on our blog TheBookofLife.org at this link: https://goo.gl/6wYBGc MORE SCHOOL OF LIFE Our website has classes, articles and products to help you think and grow: https://goo.gl/RWcyzt Watch more films on CAPITALISM in our playlist: http://bit.ly/TSOLcapitalism Do you speak a different language to English? Did you know you can submit Subtitles on all of our videos on YouTube? For instructions how to do this click here: https://goo.gl/O5WaZT SOCIAL MEDIA Feel free to follow us at the links below: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theschoolofl… Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheSchoolOfLife Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theschoolof… CREDITS Produced in collaboration with: Vale Productions http://www.valeproductions.co.uk#TheSchoolOfLife

Friday 9:04AM (theonion.com)

TUCSON, AZ—Moved by the emotion of the moment, the audience at the University of Arizona’s graduation ceremony reportedly teared up Friday after a skeleton showed up to receive his posthumous degree. “Wow, this is a truly beautiful sight to behold,” said spectator Catherine Talbot, who told reporters she was emotionally overwhelmed by the sight of the deceased student who had returned 70 years after dropping out of the institution and 15 years after dying. “You could tell it meant a lot to him, I mean, to crawl out his grave and travel all the way across the country. It’s so heartwarming to see that big smile on his skull.” At press time, onlookers confirmed the degree holder walked back to his seat, where he embraced his skeleton family.

Weirdly hard to define, much less to feel OK about it, pleasure is a tricky creature. Can philosophy help us lighten up?

by Sam Dresser Fun, fun, fun. Pacific Palisades, California, 1964. Photo by Elliot Erwitt/Magnum

Sam Dresser is an editor at Aeon. He lives in New York.

Edited by Brigid Hains

16 June 2021 (Psyche.co)

Need to know

Over breakfast one April day in 1778, James Boswell asked Samuel Johnson why he gave up booze. Dr Johnson replied that he didn’t like to lose power over himself, but assured his friend that he would one day drink again when he grew old (he was 68 at the time). Boswell replied: ‘I think, Sir, you once said to me, that not to drink wine was a great deduction from life.’ To which Dr Johnson answered: ‘It is a diminution of pleasure, to be sure; but I do not say a diminution of happiness. There is more happiness in being rational.’

It is a common notion, even in our own day, that pleasure is in some sense a distraction from happiness – or that it doesn’t lead to the kind of happiness that really matters. Pleasure, in and of itself, is ‘lower’ than the real heavy hitters, such as Truth and Virtue and Wisdom and God, those hallowed founts of authentic happiness. It is universal – indeed inherent – that we humans are drawn to pleasure. Yet pleasure-seeking itself is often seen as an indulgence, and therefore rings with a kind of selfishness, even a kind of confusion. Pleasure doesn’t last, the idea goes, but Truth does, or Rationality does, or Wisdom does, and so those are the things that we ought to seek.

Whenever and wherever they are found, moralists and their dreary ilk often describe their own times as characterised by debauched hedonism. But does it accurately describe our time? Are we in the thrall of a love affair with pleasure? I don’t think so. Even if more people are more comfortable than they used to be, it’s still hard to admit to doing something pleasurable just because it’s pleasurable. More often, pleasure is excused as a little reward, a diversion, a break from the demands of the ‘real world’. Pleasure is something that will allow you to work harder, to catch your breath before returning to the turmoils of life. Searching for pleasure for pleasure’s sake is an act tinged with shame and, when it’s admitted to, excuses ought be made.

Lord Byron gave our tense relationship with pleasure a memorable couplet: ‘O pleasure! you’re indeed a pleasant thing / Although one must be damn’d for you, no doubt.’ Those who give in to pleasure have often been compared, unkindly, to animals. The Greek Stoic Epictetus told those who identified pleasure with goodness to go ‘lead the life of a worm, of which you judged yourself worthy: eat and drink, and enjoy women, and ease yourself, and snore.’ Friedrich Nietzsche located a being that, for him, was perhaps even lower than the worm: ‘Man does not strive for pleasure,’ he wrote. ‘Only the Englishman does.’

This isn’t true of all pleasures, however. The trouble for Dr Johnson, as he was quick to explain, was ‘sensual pleasure. When a man says, he had pleasure with a woman, he does not mean conversation, but something of a very different nature.’ (You can almost see the wink on his vast face.) The pleasures he disdains are the bodily pleasures, the ones we get from aged whisky and taking off your boots after a long hike. The pleasures that count, for Dr Johnson and for many other thinkers, are the pleasures of the mind. These are the pleasures that are pure, unmarred by the Earth. They’re to be kept clean and separate from the pleasures of the body, which are for the lower sorts of people. Or, as Dr Johnson rather flatly put it: ‘[T]he greatest part of men are gross.’

The purpose of this Guide is simple: I want to talk about some of the ways that people have thought about pleasure over the years. Pleasure is a surprisingly slippery idea, surprising because it seems so obvious what it is. But trying to actually nail it down is like nailing down a cloud. Regardless, that makes it more important to reflect on pleasure – its value, its nature, and the places that people have found it. My hope is that, by thinking through what pleasure is, by analysing and probing and querying it, perhaps you’ll be more likely to find it in the places you least expect (but no promises, of course).

Think it through

It is hard to say exactly what pleasure is

The sheer variety of ways that people procure pleasure is unsettling, as well as a testament to the plasticity of our species. The differences can be small – I can’t understand why people like to watch golf – and the differences can be great, especially across cultural and temporal gulfs – the pleasure people once got in attending the afternoon execution seems, to me, a bit odd.

Think of pleasure in your own life. What is common to all of the things that give you pleasure? The throughline between warm scarves and charity work and calling your grandmother; between the cool side of the pillow, the sad-happiness of nostalgia, the pop of a champagne bottle opening – what could it be other than that these are all, in their way, pleasing? So, the question is: if pleasure can be found in all these sundry ways, then what is it? And the most common answer is a tad ho-hum: stuff that feels good. Stuff that you like. The experiences that make you say: ‘Yep! There it is.’

Many philosophers have accepted this, or a version of it, and have taken it to mean that there’s not a whole lot more to be said about the nature of pleasure (moralising about how others go about getting pleasure, of course, is a different story). Pleasure is what it is. Its very heterogeneity, its inconceivable variety, has led many to conclude that it’s an elementary component of our existence, or an absolutely simple experience. Edmund Burke said it was so simple it was ‘incapable of definition’. John Locke held that pleasure ‘cannot be described … the way of knowing [pleasure] is … only by experience.’

This view of pleasure as unanalysable, it seems to me, makes the nature of pleasure even stranger given its ubiquity in our lives. Can it really just be, as William James held, that ‘pleasures are generally associated with beneficial … experiences’? Does that definition truly exhaust pleasure? Maybe. When a significant number of philosophers, usually a loquacious bunch, throw up their hands and say that pleasure is too simple to describe, you know that the idea is an odd one. As Elizabeth Anscombe once wrote, the idea of pleasure even ‘reduced Aristotle to sheer babble’, and she was right, as far as I can tell.

Perhaps the problem, as so often, lies with language. Pleasure occupies a prime position in a very crowded constellation. Nearby, you’ll find joy, delight, happiness, satisfaction and, perhaps a bit further on, ecstasy, euphoria, exaltation, bliss. Pleasure might just be stretched too thin, operating as a kind of catch-all for all the fine gradations of positive experience. (Plato thought so.) But, if asked what it is that makes an experience positive, I would be hard pressed not to fall back and say, well, it’s the experiences that give me pleasure.

Philosophers have long been wary of the pleasures of the body

Nowadays, many philosophers enjoy delicate concept carving, in which definitions are given so precisely that no counterexamples could be found. Ideas are divided and subdivided, and isms blossom and war with one another. But, traditionally, pleasure was rather bluntly cleaved into the two kinds of pleasures that I mentioned earlier: bodily pleasures and the pleasures of the mind. The division of pleasure mirrored the division of a person: the body was separate from the mind or the intellect or the soul, or whatever you would like to call that thing that makes you you (but isn’t your body). Bodily pleasures include easing into a warm bath, Arizona Iced Tea, and vigorous masturbation; while among the pleasures of the mind are imagining retribution on your enemies (and maybe your friends), feeling at one with nature, contemplating the higher truths and, naturally for philosophers, philosophy – which has often been called the highest pleasure.

Why is it that the bodily pleasures have accrued such a poor reputation? Plato, as usual, had the first, very loud, say on the matter. His views shift over the course of the dialogues, but some general themes stand out. Bodily pleasure, he says, is often connected to pain and, because pain is a bad thing, so too is bodily pleasure.

The relationship between pleasure and pain is intimate and tempestuous indeed. Plato said that sometimes you feel pleasure precisely when you’re relieved of a pain. Before Socrates was executed, he noticed that the bonds that he was kept in hurt him, but once released ‘pleasure seem[ed] to be following’. Bodily pleasures can also straightforwardly lead to pain, in the case of repetition or overindulgence. If I have one brownie, I’m feeling pretty good about things, but if I have 50, I’m in a dark place, re-examining my life decisions. Finally, pleasure also usually comes from fulfilling some desire. But Plato considered desires themselves painful, because they identify what in our lives is lacking. As Emily Fletcher put it in her excellent analysis: ‘[W]e always experience pleasure against a backdrop of pain.’

Bodily pleasures also receive the brunt of the blame for leading people astray, and this is Plato’s other criticism (which would be taken up with gusto by later Christian moralists seeking to shape the actions of others). This is the idea that bodily pleasure, and the seeking of bodily pleasure, produces false beliefs because, through bodily pleasure, the body comes to seem more important than the soul (the false belief par excellence for Plato). In another foreshadowing of the Christian view, Plato wrote in the Phaedo that your body is the ‘prison’ of your soul. There’s a fast and essential distinction between the two, and a struggle between them as well. Whenever you indulge yourself in the pleasures of the flesh, you become ‘an accomplice in [your] own imprisonment’ because it gives you the misguided impression that this fleshy, soul-entombing jail is somehow a good thing. ‘[E]very pleasure and pain provides,’ Plato went on, ‘another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together. It makes the soul corporeal, so that it necessarily believes the truth is what the body says it is.’ The soul is the way to truth, and therefore the body and its pleasures are distractions leading to falsity and confusion.

The pleasures of the mind, however, are free of most, if not all, of the blemishes that make bodily pleasures unworthy of philosophers. The pleasures of the mind are ‘pure’. They’re usually unconnected in any intrinsic way to pain, and they have to do with the soul, which bears upon your inevitable journey into the afterlife. Plato thought that the greatest pleasure of the mind is the pleasure of learning – particularly of the virtues. By avoiding the pleasures of the flesh and instead learning of the virtue and wisdom, your soul will attain ‘its own ornaments, namely, moderation, righteousness, courage, freedom and truth, and in that state [await your] journey to the underworld.’

But what exactly is pleasurable about the pleasures of the mind? Thinkers have long made the connection between the pleasures of the mind and the great things unseen, usually God. More interesting, of course, is how they’re described in a secular context. William James called intellectual pleasures ‘the subtler emotions’: ‘Concords of sounds, of colours, of lines, logical consistencies, teleological fitnesses,’ he wrote, ‘affect us with a pleasure that seems ingrained in the very form of the representation itself.’ These are ‘cognitive acts’, but ultimately not so different from the bodily pleasures, and he notes that when we’re enthralled by a great pleasure of the mind, it tends to lead to pleasures of the body. We should be wary, as with most distinctions, of drawing the line too thick.

You can find pleasure where pain isn’t

Next to the Christians, the Stoics were – and perhaps are, given the recent resurgence of interest – the great denigrators of bodily pleasure. Not all of them, but it’s a suspicion that commonly invades their lofty view of the Universe. Virtue, for the Stoics, was all-important, the summum bonum of life – at least if you’re wise – and anything that got in the way of the pursuit of virtue was treated warily at best. Pathē (passions) were to be avoided, and pleasure was a significant contributor because it confuses clear thinking and creates untoward desires. The pleasures of the flesh were haughtily detested, a view that the Christians took up with verve.

Their rivals in the ancient world were the Epicureans. Pleasure was the centre of Epicurus’ thought. This wasn’t pleasure in a positive sense, not a seasoning on the meat of life itself. It’s pleasure as an absence.

Cicero, writing of Epicurus’ ideas, glossed the notion like this:

The pleasure that we pursue is not that kind alone which directly affects our being with delight and is perceived by the senses in an agreeable way. Rather we hold that the greatest pleasure is one that’s experienced as a result of the complete removal of pain.

Or, as Adam Smith later put it: ‘What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience?’

This view applies both to bodily pleasures and to pleasures of the mind. Epicurus thought that the pleasures of the flesh consisted, for instance, in not being thirsty. What is the analogue to pleasures of the mind? He determined that the primary weight on our souls was the fear of death, which he sought to disabuse us of with an elegant little formula: when you are alive, death is nothing, and when you are dead, life is nothing. Once this is truly understood, then the weighty, wearying fear of death will be alleviated – and its absence is a great pleasure.

Though it is a moderate and negative view of bodily pleasure, it amounts to a fairly robust defence. It is an approach to life that tends to cultivate the materiality of our lives, to allow us to take joy in the physical humanness of being human. A line can be drawn from Epicurus to Valla to Erasmus to Montaigne to Voltaire to Hume to Mill to Russell: a life-affirming, world-accepting tradition that urges us not to fear the pleasures of the flesh (in moderation, of course). As Montaigne wrote: ‘I, who operate only close to the ground, hate that inhuman wisdom that would make us disdainful enemies of the cultivation of the body.’

Nature provides pleasures: both high-minded ones and just getting away from it all

On another April day, this one in 1336, Petrarch decided to go for a hike up Mont Ventoux, in Provence. It’s not an easy task – an 18-hour round trip, more or less, up to a bald and very windy peak (hence the mountain’s name). This ascent has since taken on the aspect of myth, a moment that seemed to herald the arrival of humanism, because it was supposedly the first time that someone had climbed a mountain simply for the pleasure of doing so. ‘My only motive,’ Petrarch wrote, ‘was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer.’

His account is filled with allegory and heavy-handed allusions to St Augustine’s own conversion experience a millennium earlier. But it’s still the moving testament of a man on a mountain, taken in by the beauty of a singular landscape. He looks south towards Italy and is affected by memories of the ancient Romans. He looks west towards the Pyrenees and north towards Lyon and, even though he can’t actually see these places, he knows that they are there and that he’s standing tall above them, all of Europe at his feet. Naturally, he ‘stood like one dazed’.

The pleasure Petrarch found in nature was in its immensity. He was lost in its vastness, overwhelmed by nature and his little place in it, hardly more than a speck of pollen in the wind. But he was also towering above the continent: ‘I beheld the clouds under our feet,’ he said. He is, at once, insignificant and all-powerful: an unsettling tension where you can sometimes find the subtle pleasures of the sublime. William Wordsworth was one of the first to illuminate this peculiar sensation, which he did most famously in his poem ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798):

– And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

But you can also find in nature a very different kind of pleasure, almost entirely at variance with the sublime. That is the pleasures of isolation, of solitude, of being freed, for a spell, from the drudgeries of ‘society’ and its countless goddamned ‘people’. Alone in nature, you can play as a hermit for a bit, which I think can allow you to recover a sense of your own uniqueness. As Byron wrote: ‘There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, / There is a rapture on the lonely shore.’ Though he went on to acclaim his love of all nature, it is the pathlessness of the woods that caught his interest: the pleasurable fact that, out here, no one’s tread before. In that way, perhaps, nature can help remind you of the indelible pleasure of being yourself.

Taking pleasure in the pleasure of others

Schadenfreude is a bottomless reservoir, of course. Whether you drink from it with embarrassment or pride, it is still wonderfully pleasing to see your enemies fail – and most people have enough enemies, who do enough inexcusable stuff, that this particular spring of pleasure will never run dry. But what about its rather less provocative opposite: taking pleasure in the pleasure of others?

It’s been observed that when a child gives a gift to another kid, they themselves become happier. And the Buddhist idea of muditā captures the phenomenon: it is the joy we feel when others are well. We are an essentially social species, and many philosophers have held that human nature cannot be fully realised without other people: being with one another is an indispensable part of being a human in the first place. If that’s the case, it makes a lot of sense that we would ‘naturally’ find the happiness of others pleasing to us. Of course – of course – a huge amount rides on whom we’re talking about here. Yes, it’s obviously pleasurable to gift a friend a top-notch loofah. But if you’re genuinely pleased by, say, seeing Kim Jong-un’s boyish excitement at attending a basketball game, then we need to have a serious talk about the world.

Setting aside dictators and jerks, why is it pleasing to make others pleased? Philosophers, particularly in the 18th century, had a winningly simple answer: because it is good. Or, more precisely, because that is what goodness itself is – the increasing of pleasure in the world.

Moral exhortations the world over have often boiled down to something like a common denominator: be not a nuisance to those you happen to be passing this life with, and, if you can, be a positive force for letting people get on with it. For instance, take these lines from a 4,000-year-old Babylonian advice book, amusing in their familiarity:

Be pleasant to your enemy.
Do not utter slander; speak well of people;
Do not say nasty things; speak favourably.

The question is why people should act well. The answer has long been found in the divine and the otherworldly: because God’s judging you and he’s got a very sharp memory; because if you’re a wretch there are some hellish surprises in store for you; because my interpretation of the Bible says so. What is radical about the philosophers who identified pleasure with goodness, then, is that they brought morality into the real world, there for it to be seen and tested, even quantified.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, was among the first to link the idea of the goodness of pleasure with the essentially social nature of humans. In Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), he made ‘public good’ in and of itself a virtue, necessary for all those who would aspire to dignity and gentlemanliness. And while he argued that it was moral to try to increase the pleasure of others – primarily by means of material generosity – he also said that it felt good to give. Indeed, he held that the joy of increasing pleasure was itself the very highest pleasure. ‘The very outward features, the marks and signs which attend this sort of joy [of giving], are expressive of a more intense, clear, and undisturbed pleasure than those which attend the satisfaction of thirst, hunger, and other ardent appetites.’ This is, I think, a pleasure of the mind, but it is a pleasure of an unusually humane sort – the pleasure of seeing your own humanity in the humanity of others.

Key points – How to think about pleasure

1. It is hard to say exactly what pleasure is. Though it is a common enough feature of existence, trying to nail down an exact definition is an elusive goal. That makes reflecting upon the nature of pleasure all the more important.

2. Philosophers have long been wary of the pleasures of the body. Yet they’ve embraced the pleasures of the mind. Of course, that doesn’t mean they were right. But it’s an important history to keep in mind – even if the categories ‘body’ and ‘mind’ can’t be kept strictly apart.

3. Pleasure is where pain isn’t. That is, at least according to one popular definition that reaches back to Epicurus. It continues to be a useful way of defending the pursuit of pleasure, as well as examining pleasure’s relation to pain.

4. Nature provides pleasure. People have often sought pleasure in nature, whether it be to feel the sublime immensity of the world or to get away from all those dickheads back home.

5. Taking pleasure in the pleasure of others. This is the most subtle and human kind of pleasure, and a sure route to becoming a decent sort of person.

Why it matters

Pleasure and the value of this life

Pleasure is never settled. Indeed, pleasure itself suggests a process, a fluidity, a striving. Pleasure once attained, whether bodily or intellectual, tends not to last. It is pleasing to kick your opponent’s ass at chess; it is pleasing to have finished working out – but, like the great majority of pleasures, these quickly fade, then to be sought after again. It is the seeking – the pursuit – of pleasure that usually matters more than the nature of pleasure itself. Behaviour, always tinged with ethical value, is more shaped by the seeking and maintenance of pleasure than anything else.

Because the value and pursuit of pleasure are such ineluctable parts of how you go about being a human, it deserves serious reflection. Is bodily pleasure too much of a preoccupation? Are you getting enough pleasure overall? Where else can pleasure be sought? And so on. But more than these pragmatic queries, thinking about pleasure can often lead to some downright serious considerations, like this beef Wellington of a question: how much do you value your temporary life on Earth?

That might seem like a dramatic leap, but it’s actually a natural development. Historically, those who have most loudly denounced pleasure are those who claim to view their lives as a temporary stop along the road to eternity. Asceticism doesn’t require that you believe in another world or an afterlife, but it’s far easier to self-flagellate if you do. Ostentatious denunciation of pleasure – especially other people’s pleasure – is a reliable sign of someone who reproaches their own humanness and thinks that real value is to be found beyond the horizons of this Earthly plane. The denial of pleasure goes hand in hand with the denial of value in this life.

And those who enjoy pleasure, who search it out and cultivate it, are naturally more likely to appreciate and value the here-and-now material world. The freethinkers of France in the 17th century well attest to this. They were among the first to loudly value this world at the expense of the next. They set the grandeur and beauty of Earth against the wispy ineffabilities of heaven, and found that they very much preferred the former. Charles de Saint-Évremond embodied the tradition, living well and long, and when he died in 1703, his epitaph read: ‘He was passionately fond of life, knew little of God, and nothing of his soul.’ (It is no surprise to find him condemned by theologians such as Jean Le Clerc as a ‘shallow Epicurean’.)

More incisive than Saint-Évremond was his friend the courtesan and philosopher Ninon de Lenclos. She affirmed, more bravely and beautifully than any contemporary, the pleasures of the flesh and the joys of the material world. She outright hated asceticism, particularly its Christian variant, which she felt helped to deny women their rights, because it helped to deny women their pleasures.

Towards the end of her life, she received a letter from Saint-Évremond, which captured her view of the world: ‘Wealth, power, honour, and virtue contribute to our happiness, but the enjoyment of pleasure, let us call it voluptuousness, to sum up everything in a word, is the true aim and purpose to which all human acts are inclined.’ She loved and demanded the pleasures of the world – and made it better in return.

Links & books

The nature of pleasure, pain, and their endless rippling effects on philosophy, is a huge subject, and I can hope to have given only a small taste of it here. For more, I would suggest starting out with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entries on pleasure and hedonism – this site is a gold-standard in philosophy, and an excellent place to go for a host of other philosophical topics as well.

On hedonism, Michel Onfray is a very intriguing writer. He’s a Frenchman who’s written some 60 books, many of which have not been translated into English and, as I read only un peu de français, I can’t speak to most of his work. I can, however, recommend his short book A Hedonist Manifesto (2006), translated by Joseph McClellan – lively, polemical, extremely debatable. Onfray argues that hedonism, properly understood, is the best way to live if one really is a thoroughgoing materialist. (A more academic, modern-day defence of hedonism can be found in the work of Fred Feldman.) I have also tackled hedonism in my not-yet-award-winning web series ‘I Hope This Helps’, currently on hiatus.

Catherine Wilson’s book How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well (2019) is the most recent entry on this subject, which gives a comprehensive overview of Epicurus, his thought and its application to contemporary problems of life. She also wrote Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction (2015). Both are recommended.

For the history of the idea of pleasure and the many attempts by philosophers to grapple with it, try out Pleasure: A History (2018), edited by Lisa Shapiro. This is an entry in a wonderfully stimulating series called ‘Oxford Philosophical Concepts’ (the series is edited by Christia Mercer). Emily Fletcher’s essay on Plato, ‘Two Platonic Criticisms of Pleasure’, is especially good.

Plato discusses pleasure and its attendant idea of desire in several dialogues, but his most famous meditation is probably on Diotima’s ladder in the Symposium, which you can learn about through this short on Aeon Video.

Aeon magazine has naturally dealt with many of the ideas taken up in this Guide. Of particular note is Julian Baggini’s Idea on the high and low pleasures, and how the low pleasures, in fact, allow us to be ‘fully human’. Daniel Callcut’s Essay ‘Against Moral Sainthood’ dwells on the messiness of life compared with the ethereal perfections of moral categories, and Eric Schwitzgebel’s Essay ‘Cheeseburger Ethics’ calls attention to the fact that ethicists are no more ethical than the rest of us. Over on Aeon Video, check out our interview with Morten Kringelbach on pleasure and the good life.

A bit further afield, Theodore Zeldin’s book An Intimate History of Humanity (1994) deals indirectly with pleasure and pain, but is an absolute treasure trove of acute and surprising observations about the history of our emotional lives and the ways in which we relate to one another. A rare pleasure indeed.

Historians cheered globalism with work about cosmopolitans and border-crossing, but the power of place never went awayStorm clouds gather above ships waiting to dock in Singapore. Photo by Edgar Su/Reuters

Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea professor of history and director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University. His latest books are Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O Hirschman (2013) and the co-authored Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (4th ed, 2014). He lives in New Jersey.

Edited by Sam Hasel

2 March 2017 (aeon.co)

Love Aeon?

Support our work DONATE

Well, that was a short ride. Not long ago, one of the world’s leading historians, Lynn Hunt, stated with confidence in Writing History in the Global Era (2014) that a more global approach to the past would do for our age what national history did in the heyday of nation-building: it would, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau had said was necessary of the nation-builders, remake people from the inside out. Global history would produce tolerant and cosmopolitan global citizens. It rendered the past a mirror on our future border-crossing selves – not unlike Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and white American mother, raised in Indonesia and educated in the Ivy League, who became the passing figure of our fading dreams of meritocracy without walls.

The mild-mannered German historian Jürgen Osterhammel might serve as an example of that global turn. When his book The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the 19th Century (2014) came out in English, one reviewer baptised him the new Fernand Braudel. It was already a sensation in Germany. One day, Osterhammel’s office phone at the University of Konstanz rang. On the other end of the line was the country’s chancellor, Angela Merkel. ‘You don’t check your SMSs,’ she scolded lightly. At the time, Merkel was on the mend from a broken pelvis and the political fallout of the Eurocrisis. While recovering, she’d read Osterhammel’s 1,200-page book for therapy. She was calling to invite the author to her 60th-birthday party to lecture her guests about time and global perspectives. Obsessed with the rise of China and the consequences of digitalisation, she had turned to the sage of the moment: the global historian.

It’s hard to imagine Osterhammel getting invited to the party now. In our fevered present of Nation-X First, of resurgent ethno-nationalism, what’s the point of recovering global pasts? Merkel, daughter of the East, might be the improbable last voice of Atlantic Charter internationalism. Two years after her 60th birthday, the vision of an integrated future and spreading tolerance is beating a hasty retreat.

What is to become of this approach to the past, one that a short time ago promised to re-image a vintage discipline? What would global narratives look like in the age of an anti-global backlash? Does the rise of ‘America First’, ‘China First’, ‘India First’ and ‘Russia First’ mean that the dreams and work of globe-narrating historians were just a bender, a neo-liberal joyride?

Until very recently, the practice of modern history centred on, and was dominated by, the nation state. Most history was the history of the nation. If you wander through the history and biography aisles of either brick-and-mortar or virtual bookstores, the characters and heroes of patriotism dominate. In the United States, authors such as Walter Isaacson, David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin have helped to give millions of readers their understanding of the past and the present. Inevitably, they wrote page-turning profiles of heroic nation-builders. Every nation cherishes its national history, and every country has a cadre of flame-keepers.

Then, along came globalisation and the shake-up of old, bordered imaginations. Historians quickly responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crumbling protective ramparts of national capitalism, the boom in container shipping, and the rise of the cosmopolis. New scales and new concepts came to life. Europe’s Schengen Agreement, inked in 1985, the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, and the founding of the World Trade Organization in 1995, heralded new levels of international fusion. These now-imperilled treaties promised a borderless world. ‘The world is being flattened,’ Thomas Friedman’s popular manifesto of globalisation, The World Is Flat (2005), concluded. ‘I didn’t start it and you can’t stop it,’ Friedman wrote in an open letter to his daughter, ‘except at great cost to human development and your own future.’

As the only game in town, globalisation produced a new popular genre that might be called patriotic globalism. Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2002), Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (1998), and books by Adam Hochschild all gave us horrible crises with would-be heroes fashioned, not as nation-builders, but as humanitarian worldmakers. There was also a surge of stories about a shared, planetary future, with a common, carbon-addicted past. The Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992 turned sustainability into a border-busting buzzword and fuelled environmental history. Two decades earlier, Alfred Crosby could not find a publisher who wanted his book The Columbian Exchange (1972), which charted the ecological fallout of the integration of the New World biome into the Eurasian system. Now, his book is Biblical.

After years of falling enrolments, declining majors and a dispiriting job market, many saw ‘global history’ as an elixir

In 2006, the scholars jumped officially on board. A team founded the Journal of Global History. Patrick O’Brien at the London School of Economics kicked it off with a call for new cosmopolitan meta-narratives for ‘our globalising world’. It was dedicated to stories to transcend (quoting the 18th-century Tory philosopher Lord Bolingbroke) ‘national partialities and prejudices’. Behind the scenes, universities in Europe (which includes, for a few more months at least, the United Kingdom), pockets in Japan, China and Brazil, but most especially in the US, rolled out new courses, new research centres, and new PhD programmes.

After years of falling enrolments, declining majors and a dispiriting job market for history PhDs, many saw ‘global history’ as an elixir, a way to return to public relevance. Globalisation had become all the rage. Historians, Hunt wrote in 2014, were stepping up with narratives of interconnection and integration. Jared Diamond’s works, synthesising 13,000 years of global history, populated airport newsstands. To get middle- and high-school students jazzed up about history on a cosmological scale – ‘13.8 Billion Years of History. Free. Online. Awesome’ – Bill Gates unveiled his Big History Project. More recently, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014) swept prizes and hit No 1 on Amazon’s bestseller ranks under the ‘Fashion and Textile’ category.

To understand what global history was, it helps to understand what it was supposed to eclipse. It used to be that, in the US, history departments had their cores in American and/or European fields; in Canada, Australia and Britain, the nuclei were also national. History meant the history of the nation, its peoples and their origins. When social and cultural history came along, it changed the subject from presidents or prime ministers to Hollywood or garment workers. But the framework remained mostly national; historians still wrote books about the making of the English working class, or the conversion of peasants into French citizens. There might be a smattering of East Asian or Latin American historians in the mix. Often, they were cordoned into regional studies units, or lumped – as in my home department at Princeton – as ‘non-Western historians’, defined by their fundamental difference, there to embellish but not challenge the national canon. The major exception was the study of migrations and diasporas, coerced or free. But even those fields tended to sit alongside the national behemoths; there was the American history survey (or French, or British), and then the story of African-Americans.

True, there has long been something called ‘world history’. The standard world history course was a tour of the civilisations that preceded or abutted ‘Western Civilisation’. The Western Civ industry dated to the early years of the 20th century. Back then, faced with creeping specialisation, historians got summoned to offer a structured base for the national collegian-citizen. With household names such as Arnold Toynbee and Will and Ariel Durant it boomed, like the rest of American industry, in the golden age of NATO, Sputnik and federal spending. One of its greatest figures was the University of Chicago historian William H McNeill, author of the stand-by History of Western Civilisation: A Handbook (1949). As Western Civ became something of a relic in the 1960s, ‘world history’ or ‘world civilisations’ took its place to explain the Triumph of the West and, by extension, the Decline of the Rest. McNeill’s epic The Rise of the West (1963) was the high-standard bearer for this kind of encompassing view of the planetary past composed of civilisational blocs competing for global supremacy. This was not global history, though many subsequent global historians cut their teeth studying other civilisations. Rather, it was a story that brought in the Rest to help explain the West.

Connection was in; networks were hot: global history would show the latticework of exchanges and encounters

By the 1980s, it was no longer foregone that the Rest was synonymous with decline, or the West with rise. The Rest, to some, became the new threat to define the purpose of the West. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) offered a counterpoint to the emerging bravura of one-world heroism. In Huntington’s view, the essentially dark, antagonistic, competitive perspective of the world-civilisations approach remained the driving force of history. Don’t kid yourself, he argued: the fall of the Berlin Wall merely heralded the return of an older, deeper civilisational conflict. That message has new treads with the White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s prophecies about the inevitable collision of the ‘Judeo-Christian West’ with the Jihadist East. ‘There is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global,’ he told an audience in 2014. ‘Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act.’

The notion of intractable divides, however, seemed increasingly at odds with the high-def, global-fusing present; it mobilised a new generation of historians to go beyond stories of our walled-off, essential selves. Their global history project would reveal connections across societies instead of cohesions within them. The vintage comparative, civilisational framework gave way to contacts and linkages. Connection was in; networks were hot. Global history would show the latticework of exchanges and encounters – from the Silk Road of 1300 to turbo-charged supply chains of 2000.

More than anyone, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, now at the University of California, Los Angeles, made the coinage of ‘connected histories’ his own. As determined to dethrone the myth of Indian civilisation (whose Hindutva ideology is dear to the tribalism of India’s Right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party) as he is to dispel the idea of a Great European Trajectory (from Athens to the Enlightenment, a march dear to European tribalists), the son of urbane Delhi turned encounters and contacts with many origin points and as many meanings into a global bricolage that antedated our multicultural makeups. Through travel, discovery, translation and the flow of books, silver and opium – ‘histories that moved’ as Subrahmanyam called them in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 2013 – he evoked a world laced together long before the rise of the West.

Global history’s other signature was its emphasis on dependence between societies. If globalisation opened the borders between Westerners and Resterners, global historians were especially interested not just in the contacts, but in the ways in which countries and regions contoured each other. The rise of the West looked more and more not just like a response to the Rest, but dependent on it. Even the industrial revolution and Europe’s great leap forward in the 19th century, the one thing that seemed to separate Europe from others, came under the global historian’s macroscope. In The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000), Kenneth Pomeranz demolished the view of Europeans as the authors of their own miraculous rise. He revealed how much European enterprise and accumulation shared with China. How Europe’s break from the common, Eurasian-Malthusian straightjacket began not with the region’s internal uniqueness, but with access to and conquest of what Adam Smith called the wastelands of the Americas. In the same vein, global historians demonstrated how much insurance, banking and shipping startups owed to the African slave trade. The European miracle was, in short, a global harvest.

Global history did not mean telling the story of everything in the world. What was global was not the object of study, but the emphasis on connections, scale and, most of all, integration. Even the nations and civilisations were more the products and less the producers of global interactions. Some scholars went all-out. ‘If you are not doing an explicitly transnational, international or global project, you now have to explain why you are not,’ said the Harvard historian David Armitage in 2012. ‘The hegemony of national historiography,’ he pronounced, ‘is over.’

No sooner did historians catch the globalisation wave with fancy new courses, magazines, textbooks and attention, than the wave seemed to collapse. The story changed. A powerful political movement arose against ‘globalism’. White-supremacists and Vladimir Putin fans from the Traditionalist Worker Party in the US proclaim as their slogan that ‘Globalism is the poison, nationalism is the antidote.’ Donald Trump put it only a bit more mildly. ‘Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,’ he thundered to cheering Republicans in his convention speech in July 2016. On the day after the US inaugurated Trump, the French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen gave an incendiary speech at a summit in Germany, calling 2017 the year of the great awakening of the nationalist Right. ‘We are living through the end of one world,’ she proclaimed, ‘and the birth of another.’

Suddenly, global historians seemed out of step with their times. If the backlash was a wake-up call for the globalisers, it also revealed some problems for the global chroniclers.

All narratives are selective, shaped as much by what they exclude as what they include. Despite the mantras of integration and the inclusion on the planetary scale, global history came with its own segregation – starting with language. Historians working across borders merged their mode of communication in ways that created new walls; in the search for academic cohesion, English became Globish. Global history would not be possible without the globalisation of the English language. In a recent workshop in Tokyo, I marvelled as Italians, Chinese and Japanese historians swapped ideas and sake in a lingua franca. But this kind of flatness can mask a new linguistic hierarchy. It is one of the paradoxes of global history that the drive to overcome Eurocentrism contributed to the Anglicising of intellectual lives around the world. As English became Globish, there was less incentive to learn foreign languages – the indispensable key to bridging ourselves and others. According to a 2015 report by the Modern Languages Association, the US foreign-language head count at universities peaked in 2009, and has been declining ever since.

Global history is another Anglospheric invention to integrate the Other into a cosmopolitan narrative on our terms, in our tongues

The retreat from learning how to talk with others reflected a wider stall. Despite the embrace of global history, there is evidence that the global turn didn’t actually help to raise the profile of the Rest. In a 2013 survey of 57 history departments in the UK, the US and Canada, Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt show that historians remain pretty loyal to the West after all. In the UK, 13 per cent of historians study the non-Western world. The most wincing datum? East Asia commands only 1.9 per cent of all history faculty appointments in the UK. In the US, the figure is almost 9 per cent. Even in the US, less than one-third of historians are interested in the world beyond the West. If some critics were getting all worked up about the encroachment of Resterners on the Western Civ canon, they needn’t worry. ‘We’re overwhelmingly interested in ourselves,’ Clossey and Guyatt conclude. To justify Brexit, the UK’s prime minister Theresa May yearns for a ‘Global Britain’ (as if Europe were not part of the globe), but UK historians still look inwards; 41 per cent of historians in the UK study Britain and Ireland, homelands to 1 per cent of the world’s population. Oxford University, my alma mater, recently mothballed its professorship in Latin American history, the last of its kind in the UK. Outside the Anglosphere, things are mostly worse. In all the German-speaking universities, there are only five professors of African history. In Japan, to study non-Japanese and non-‘Oriental’ pasts means dispatch from history departments altogether, to teach about the Other in other units on the margins of the master-discipline.

What are we to make of all this? First, the high hopes for cosmopolitan narratives about ‘encounters’ between Westerners and Resterners led to some pretty one-way exchanges about the shape of the global. It is hard not to conclude that global history is another Anglospheric invention to integrate the Other into a cosmopolitan narrative on our terms, in our tongues. Sort of like the wider world economy.

Secondly, to some extent, global history sounds like history fit for the now-defunct Clinton Global Initiative, a shiny, high-profile endeavour emphasising borderless, do-good storytelling about our cosmopolitan commonness, global history to give globalisation a human face. It privileged motion over place, histoires qui bougent (stories that move) over tales of those who got left behind, narratives about others for the selves who felt some connection – of shared self-interest or empathy – between far-flung neighbours of the global cosmopolis.

Perhaps we should not be shocked at the backlash against post-national, cosmopolitan story-telling. During the French regional elections of 2015, one Front National poster featured two women’s faces, one painted with the French tricolour and the other wearing a burqa. The text proclaimed: ‘Choose your neighborhood: vote for the Front.’ The logic of global history tended to dwell on integration and concord, rather than disintegration and discord. Global historians favoured stories about curiosity towards distant neighbours. They – we – tended to overlook nearby neighbourhoods dissolved by transnational supply chains.

Global history preferred a scale that reflected its cosmopolitan self-yearnings. It also implicitly created what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) called ‘empathy walls’ between globe-trotting liberals and locally rooted provincials. Going global often meant losing contact with – to borrow another of her bons mots – ‘deep stories’ of resentment about loss of and threat to local attachments. The older patriotic narratives had tethered people to a sense of bounded unity. The new, cosmopolitan, global narratives crossed those boundaries. But they dissolved the heartlanders’ ties to a sense of place in the world. In a political climate dominated by railing against Leviathan government, big banks, mega-treaties with inscrutable acronyms such as TPP, and distant Eurocrats, the pretentious drive to replace deep stories of near-mourning with global stories of distant connection was bound to face its limits. In the scramble to make Others part of our stories, we inadvertently created a new swath of strangers at home.

Global history faces two seemingly opposite challenges for an inter-dependent, over-heating planet. If we are going to muster meaningful narratives about the togetherness of strangers near and far, we are going to have to be more global and get more serious about engaging other languages and other ways of telling history. Historians and their reader-citizens are also going to have to re-signify the place of local attachments and meanings. Going deeper into the stories of Others afar and Strangers at home means dispensing with the idea that global integration was like an electric circuit, bringing light to the connected. Becoming inter-dependent is not just messier than drawing a wiring diagram. It means reckoning with dimensions of networks and circuits that global historians – and possibly all narratives of cosmopolitan convergence – leave out of the story: lighting up corners of the earth leaves others in the dark. The story of the globalists illuminates some at the expense of others, the left behind, the ones who cannot move, and those who become immobilised because the light no longer shines on them.

To shift the imagery: understanding inter-dependence means seeing how it expands personal and social horizons for some, but also thins bonds with others. At least until those bonds become more meaningful than an Instagram list, there will be much more resistance to integration than we have admitted.

To gain better insights into the dynamics and resistances to integration, to give as much airtime to separation, disintegration and fragility as we do to connection, integration and convergence, we are going to have to get rid of flat-Earth narratives and ideas of global predestination once and for all. We are going to have to account for how more interdependence can yield more conflict, how for instance, despite growing trade and student exchanges between China and Japan, Beijing can announce (as it did in 2014) two new national holidays to commemorate the victims of Japanese aggression from 1937 to 1945.

Connection, mobility, fusion, oneness: we put our stock in the magnetism of the market and the empathetic power of a cosmopolitan spirit that appeared to take hold of the upper echelons of a higher education committed to an idyll of global citizenship.

I did my own part in the global pivot. For several years, I oversaw Princeton’s internationalisation drive, creating global knowledge supply chains. It never occurred to me, or to others, to ask: what would happen to those less sexy, diminutive, scales of civic engagement? We didn’t worry much. They were the remits of provincialism, quietly escorted from the stage upon which we were supposed to be educating the new homo globus.

During globalisation’s up-cycle, it was easier to overlook the divides. When economies slumped, and globalisation fatigue set in, the gauzy veil came off.

This does not make global history less pressing. On the contrary. One of the ironies is that the anti-globalism movement is immersed in transnational mutual adoration networks. The day after the Brexit plebiscite, Trump travelled to the UK to reopen his golf resort. The British had ‘taken back their country’, he told the bristle of microphones, then returned home to Make America Great Again. Le Pen’s excitement about Trump is well-known. Fyodor V Biryukov, head of Rodina, the Russian Motherland Party, calls this swarm ‘a new global revolution’. It was, we should recall, the global financial crisis of 2008-9 that did the most to ravage the hopes of one-world dreamers, emanating from the sector that had gone furthest to fuse Westerners and Resterners while creating deeper divides at home: banking.

In short, we need narratives of global life that reckon with disintegration as well as integration, the costs and not just the bounty of interdependence. They might not do well on the chirpy TED-talk circuit, compete with Friedman’s unbridled faith in borderless technocracy, or appeal much to Davos Man. But if we are going to come to terms with the deep histories of global transformations, we need to remind ourselves of one of the historian’s crafts, and listen to the other half of the globe, the tribalists out there and right here, talking back.

If you’re in London and would like to learn more about cosmopolitanism, join us for an evening of Live Philosophy on 17 May 2022 at the Sophia Club, a new events program of immersive ideas and artistic performance from the publishers of Aeon and Psyche.

Politics and government Cosmopolitanism Global history

 5 Mondays, 1 hour each day (June 6, 13, 20, 27 and July 11)

TIMES: 9:00 am Pacific, 10:00 am Mtn, 11:00 am Central, Noon Eastern

Teacher: Heather C. Williams, H.W.,M. Ontological Artist
Author of Drawing as a Sacred Activity:

Oil Painting  “Call to Wholeness”          
36” x 72” 1995 Heather C. Williams

“Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – as being able to remake ourselves.”
~  Mahatma Gandhi

We are human beings living our lives as best we can. Today, we must do more. We must pay attention to the big problems that we have unwisely created! We created the problem of plastic bits that are now found in human cells. We created the problem of climate change. We created nuclear energy and we still DON’T KNOW how to safely dispose of nuclear waste. The question is: what blocks us from solving these problems right now? I’ll get to that in a minute.

Each of us is born with a creative seed planted deep in our hearts. This little seed is an eternal, spiritual ability or gift – and is always present within us. Unfortunately most people know nothing about this and can often be heard saying, “Oh, I’m not creative!” The TRUTH is we all have a creative gift and our assignment is to express (draw out) our creative gift with practice and share it with the world. Also, we each live in a physical body and we pretty much identify ourselves as material beings in a material world filled with things that are separate from us. Everyone agrees that we also are born with a mind that thinks. Even though we know little about the mind or consciousness, we must admit that we each are creating our personal world through our thoughts, choices and decisions. It’s time we learn more about the mind.

To solve the big problems today we must learn how our thinking creates our world. To do this, let’s explore three very different kinds of thinking: 1) Mechanical Thinking 2) Critical Thinking and 3) Straight thinking in the Abstract. Hopefully, the image of a taxi can help us understand how these kinds of thinking actually construct our personal/cultural worlds. 

1. The taxi represents mechanical thinking: The taxi is a machine. Machines perform certain tasks. Machines do not question the task. Artificial Intelligence is a machine. We are machines when we habitually blame, deny, ignore, get angry or run away from our problems. Machines can’t feel. We humans FEEL love, joy, sadness and we feel the rightness or wrongness of something. This is conscience. We must wake up to our true identity as Consciousness and free ourselves from mechanical thinking. An ancient way to wake up is to practice self observation. A simple, easy-to-understand book is Self Observation by Red Hawk. My Ontology Book Club discusses this book every week. You are welcome to join. Check it out: https://www.drawingtogether.com/bookclub. 
2. The driver of the taxi represents critical thinking: The driver thinks, analyzes, evaluates the road ahead, makes informed decisions and exercises control over the machine. Critical thinking is at the heart of scientific inquiry. Science makes progress when we find data that contradicts our current scientific ideas. 2,500 years ago Socrates employed critical thinking as a way to question opinions and to search for the Truth. It’s a lot easier to follow a leader or a narrative that aligns with our beliefs. But to drive forward and solve problems today, we must know how to analyze social media websites, corporate advertisements and governmental policies. We must think for ourselves! Critical thinking is how we uncover the truth that lives beneath machine-like thinking. 
3. The passenger inside the taxi represents “straight thinking in the abstract”: The passenger pays a price to get into the taxi. The passenger determines where the taxi goes. We’re all passengers on spaceship earth. We’re all capable of awakening to our true identity as consciousness – of thinking for ourselves – and working together. Work takes practice! And practice is the price we pay to sit down, relax and employ a tool like “straight thinking in the abstract”. This tool can help us to think critically using axioms (self-evident truths) which connect us with the abstract, truthful, spiritual principles of life. It takes practice for us to face our current problems (plastic, climate change and nuclear energy) and to see them as opportunities to create a safer, kinder, more beautiful world. “Straight thinking in the abstract” is a tool I have practiced for over 50 years now. 

I created a class about these three kinds of thinking, titled: Thinking as a Sacred Activity. Class begins Monday, June 6. Learn more at my website: https://www.drawingtogether.com/the-prosperos

Community Update May 2022 HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING!

Classes Our Spring classes have been going well! We’ll be on hiatus for the month of May, but we’ll be back in June with one of our most important Foundation Classes. Join us then! RELEASING THE HIDDEN SPLENDOUR June 11-12, 2022 – HughJohn Malanaphy, H.W., M., instructor This essential technique gives you a safe and systematic method of re-perceiving the past, freeing yourself from negative emotions, conflicting memories, and self-defeating habit patterns. More information will be available soon on our website:  https://www.theprosperos.org/events  Find out about all our classes and events at https://www.theprosperos.org/events. We look forward to seeing you soon!  <◊◊◊>  Labor Day Weekend Event 2022  <◊◊◊> JOIN US FOR A SUPER CYBER GATHERING, SEPT. 3-4!! We’re working on something unique for this special event! We’ll be getting together online for two days of inspiring presentations and thought-provoking discussion groups, spiced with fun and entertainment. We invite you to join your friends and fellow students for this dynamic gathering! <◊◊◊>  MORE TO COME — WATCH THIS SPACE!  <◊◊◊>   Sunday Meetings  Presenting talks by Prosperos Mentors and inspiring guests, these online events are open to all who are interested. There is no charge, although we do encourage contributions. Join the meetings at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/332275676! Coming up this month: SUNDAY, MAY 8  (11:00 am PDT) “Revisiting Cosmic Intention Therapy”  Richard Hartnett, H.W., M. will offer a fresh look at the concepts covered in one of The Prosperos basic classes. SUNDAY, MAY 15  (11:00 am PDT) “Cultivating Your Intuition”  Join Anne Bollman, H.W.,M. for a discussion on accessing and unlocking the power of your intuition.  SUNDAY, MAY 29  (11:00 am PDT) “Conversations with Calvin”  Calvin Harris, H.W.,M. continues his series of discussions with fascinating people from all walks of life.  Have you missed a meeting? Recordings of selected Sunday Meetings are available online at https://www.theprosperos.com/podcast. Ongoing Work and Study Groups From time to time, interested students get together to work on special studies or projects. Here’s what’s happening now: A focus group has been meeting each week to apply Translation® to current events in Ukraine. Translators are invited to join this effort to reveal Truth in these difficult circumstances. The group meets every Friday at 11 a.m. Pacific time. Link is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84023755291. >> HAVE YOU CHECKED OUR BLOG LATELY? << Looking for some interesting reading? Prosperos students have been posting all kinds of interesting essays, reports, and musings to our Vesper Flights blog. We invite you to read these items, and share your comments, at https://www.theprosperos.org/vespers.  And if you would like to share an insight or experience, please send your thoughts to our coordinator, Pam Rodolph, H.W., M., at pam.rodolph@theprosperos.org.  We’re looking forward to hearing from you! **(**Learn About Lunar Cycles**)** Stargazers and skeptics; starseeds and earthlings, are you ready to live more intentionally? The lunar cycle can help you structure your time around themes, hobbies, and projects that matter to you, as well as to uncover hidden talents and dreams. This special series, which includes workbooks and conversations, is designed to help you balance active intention setting and openness to spontaneous good, based around the lunar cycle. Learn how to craft a monthly plan in harmony with the astrological weather. No previous astrological knowledge is required! You can sign up for one or more months. For more information — see this announcement! MAY WE HELP YOU? High Watch Translation Service Need help with a problem? You can request Translation® for any issue: illness, relationships, professional difficulties, etc. Members of The Prosperos High Watch—students who have shown their understanding of Translation®—will work to reveal the Truth behind the appearance. Contributions are welcome; all information is confidential. Please post your request at: http://TheProsperos.org/community/hwts. Personal Counseling Our Mentors (Teacher/Counselors) offer lay counseling based on the techniques of Translation® and Releasing the Hidden Splendour™ taught through The Prosperos. If you wish to arrange for personal counseling, or need questions answered about the techniques, or just want to talk, Prosperos Mentors are ready to help. For counselor names and contact information, please contact us at info@theprosperos.org. Volunteer Opportunities  WEBSITE ASSISTANCE: We are currently seeking volunteers to help with web design and social media. This is a great chance to learn about these essential communication tools! To offer your services, or to request more information on how you can help, please write to info@theprosperos.org. Thank you! FOR MORE INFORMATION… We invite you to visit our websites for information about the School, as well as for descriptions of our wide selection of printed, recorded, and online resources (many are free; others are available for purchase). General Information – For our calendar, class descriptions and blogs, as well as other articles and information, please visit https://TheProsperos.org.  Audio Center – This site offers free podcasts, talks and lectures, plus a wealth of other recorded material for our students and friends. To see what’s available, please visit https://TheProsperos.com.

Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is “Big History”: an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life, and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1988.  A Jungian psychotherapist, John Weir Perry, MD, is author of many books including The Heart of History and The Far Side of Madness.  He suggests that the psychiatric community errs in treating visionary experience as a form of mental illness.  Psychiatric labelling and the use of anti-psychotic drugs serve to stifle the valuable integration of life’s mythic dimensions.  Dr. Perry suggests that throughout history, visionary experience has led to important resolutions of social conflicts. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. New!! Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.

BOOK BITS, KOREAN TEXTS, THE MASTERS

June 17, 2019 Vanessa Able (thedewdrop.org)

Seung Sahn was the first Korean Zen master to come to live and teach in the West. His style borrowed from a number of different Buddhist traditions, particularly Rinzai. The book, ‘Dropping Ashes on the Buddha’ is a collection of his teachings that happened both in person as well as through correspondence – a way of transmission that he was well known for.  This excerpt from that book recounts a meeting between Seung Sahn and one of his students in which he is asked about death and responds by trying to break down the student’s fundamental construct of the concept itself.

One morning, during Yong Maeng Jong Jin at the Providence Zen Center, a student walked into the interview room and bowed to Seung Sahn Soen-sa.
Soen-sa said, “Do you have any questions?”
The student said, “Yes. What is death?”
Soen-sa said, “You are already dead.”
The student said, “I’m only dying. I haven’t really experienced death yet. I don’t even understand what that would mean.”
Soen-sa hit him.
The student became confused and couldn’t answer.
After a few moments, Soen-sa said, “When you think death, you make death. When you think life, you make life. When you are not thinking, there is no life and no death. In empty mind, is there a you? Is there an I?”
“No.”
”You say No. You must understand No. This No is no self, no other, no body, no mind, no world. So it is no life and no death. This is true emptiness. True emptiness is before thinking. Before thinking is just like this. So life is only life; death is only death. You must not be attached to names and forms. It is like a clear mirror. In a clear mirror, all is nothing; there is only the clear mirror. Red comes, the mirror is red. Yellow comes, there is yellow. A woman comes, there is a woman. A man comes, there is a man. Death comes, there is death. Life comes, there is life. But all of these do not exist. The mirror does not hold on to anything. There is only the coming and the going. This is before thinking: all things are just as they are. The name for this mind is original pure mind. You must find your original face. Then you will not make life or death.”
The student bowed, and the interview continued.

The next morning, the same student walked into the interview room and bowed.
Soen-sa said, ”Do you have any questions?”
“Yes. What is death?”
“You are already dead.”
“Thank you very much. Now I understand.’
Soen-sa said, “You understand? Then what is death?” The student said, “You are already dead.” Soen-sa smiled and bowed.

Seung Sahn (1927-2004)

From – Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn

Dr. Peterson recently traveled to the UK for a series of lectures at Oxford and Cambridge. This conversation was recorded during that period with Sir Roger Penrose, a British mathematical physicist who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for “discovering that black hole formation is a robust predictor of Einstein’s general relativity.”

Moderated by Dr. Stephen Blackwood.