On the weekend of 19-21 June 2009 the University of Ottawa hosted the Third Annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference. In 1990s I attended scores of academic conferences, for reasons that now strike me as poor, if not deluded. I confess that, in the last ten years, I have been allergic to these usually dreary affairs, during which the tweedy set scurries beetle-like from one set of unintelligible papers to another. Or rather, the papers are all too intelligible, affirming the narrow set of Leftwing clichés about group-identity and oppression. I knew, however, that the Ottawa affair would be quite different – small, focused, and refreshingly un-postmodern. It was quite likely that the postures and vanities of postmodernism would come under objective analysis. (They did.) But what is “Generative Anthropology” (abbreviated as “GA”) and why should people of a conservative temperament take an interest in it? I will begin with a brief genealogy of “GA.”

George Handlery about the week that was. Without a people, special “Democracy” can work undisturbed. The EU: trying to create a nation. To hungry fools free lunches look attractive. We can choose our capitalist. When crime is normal and resistance to it is criminal. To resist them, you need the approval of the Islamists. The moral right of the intolerant to demand tolerance. Burkas for men?
 
1. It is not necessarily what it is: it is what you make out of it. Calculate this. In country X, the ruling Socialists, regardless of their 60+% majority from 3 years ago, get four seats. The right-of-center opposition (in PC terminology everything is right wing “extremist” that is not left of Stalin) has 15 mandates. A new formation, which is (too-far-to-the-right for the writer), grabs three seats. The author is uncertain, therefore, a question for you to answer privately arises. Who won?

The earliest evidence we have of musical instruments dates back to the Old Stone Age. We know that there were rich musical traditions in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China and elsewhere. Indirectly, it is possible that some aspects of Babylonian musical theory and practice influenced the Greek, and by extension European, musical tradition. The ancient Greeks used various musical instruments such as harps, horns, lyres, drums and cymbals. Greek music theory evolved continually from Pythagoras before 500 BC to Aristides Quintilianus in the late third century AD, whose treatise De musica (On Music) is an important source of knowledge of the Greek musical tradition. Music was closely connected to astronomy in Pythagorean thought, as mathematical laws and proportions were considered to be the underpinnings of both musical intervals and the heavenly bodies.

Spaniards are currently debating a controversial plan by Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to liberalize the country’s abortion law. The new measure would obligate the public healthcare system to provide free abortions without any restrictions for women 16 years and over up to the 14th week of pregnancy, and up to 22 weeks if there is a risk to the mother’s health or if the foetus is deformed. Women can also undergo the procedure after 22 weeks if doctors certify that the foetus has a serious deformity or incurable illness.

George Handlery about the week that was. The Islamic Republic of Iran is openly transmuting into a theocratic dictatorshi. The virtues of applied Socialism. How about a charter to protect the endangered majority? Again they are fighting Coca-Cola. Property is theft, expropriation via taxes is what?
 
1. Any reaction to the days past must include Iran. The need is clear. Having witnessed the collapse of several systems, an attraction to follow comparable events develops. Admittedly, in some of its details, the wobbling of Iran’s theocratic dictatorship differs from the writer’s experience. Iran’s system is not supported by the probable intervention of a great power. The security organs of the régime are still obeying orders. Furthermore, a significant segment of the public not only tolerates, but also supports the system. Regardless of the caveats, one can foretell much about the years to come.

Americans are proud, and rightly so, of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which, among other things, protects speech from government control. The Amendment says in part: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

Increasingly, however, Americans seem content to regard the First Amendment not as the fundamental working tool of democracy, but as a national heirloom, a kind of antique to admire rather than put to use. I don’t think many of my countrymen perceive how profoundly their attitude toward free speech has changed. But there is a difference between having freedom of speech and exercising freedom of speech, one that has become glaringly and distressingly obvious to me since September 11, 2001. So, while it is true that the US government is not Constitutionally empowered to make laws that censor Americans, it is also true, I believe, that Americans have come to censor themselves. But why?

Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), has already made four trips to the United States this year. He has also been to Italy and Denmark and is planning a couple of new trips to the US later this year, plus trips to Canada and Australia.

Why does the politician from the Netherlands travel so much? This is a question the Dutch media have been asking themselves. Last week, both the weekly magazine Vrij Nederland and the newspaper De Volkskrant wrote long articles about Wilders’ travels, written by journalists who followed him on a couple of his trips. The only reason why a man would so eagerly travel the world, is obvious, they say: He does it for the money. Wilders is said to be on fundraising tours, especially among the “American far-right.”

In my previous Brussels Journal essay on Jorge Luis Borges and Karen Blixen, I used the analysis of modernity undertaken by Eric Voegelin (1901-1986) as my critical framework. These current remarks constitute an extended footnote to the Borges-Blixen essay, in which I want to return to the text of Voegelin’s New Science of Politics (1952), particularly to its analysis of the Gnostic mentality, as that makes itself manifest on the contemporary political scene, and even more particularly to the book’s treatment of the Gnostic “second reality” or “dream world” in its remarkable Chapter 6, entitled “The End of Modernity.” I believe Voegelin to be central to any understanding of our condition.

Eric Voegelin

It pleases me a good deal that the citations from the work of Eric Voegelin – particularly from his New Science of Politics – in my recent Brussels Journal essay on Jorge Luis Borges and Karen Blixen appealed to the acuity of two Journal readers, the parties who identify themselves as “Wynne” and “Ribera.”
 
I first read Voegelin nearly thirty years ago at the moment when I began graduate studies at UCLA in Comparative Literature. The time was the mid-1980s, the watershed moment for postmodern thinking in North America due to the publication in English of books by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and a host of lesser Parisian radicals. In the proverbial blink of eye, the literature faculties and the cohorts of graduate students fixated on the weird syntax and abstract, rather threatening vocabulary of De la gammatologie and Les mots et les choses, which constituted, from that epoch, almost the sole object of interest in the reading-courses and seminars. Together, Voegelin and René Girard gave me the intellectual tools for understanding what I was seeing. Girard, a Frenchman but not a Parisian, would have called it a mimetic crisis, with literature and all normative views as the sacrificial victim under the pejorative of “Logocentrism.” Voegelin, who was more central to my understanding at the time than Girard, would have seen it as another manifestation of metastatic faith, or rather of a metastatic – or contagious – pseudo-faith pitting itself in contest with received tradition.

Victoria Station. Picture by René Slaats

Victoria Station, London. Look around this 150-year-old rail station and you can see the rise and fall, and rise and now again decline of the British nation.

Victoria Station is just a few blocks from Buckingham Palace and was for many decades the connecting station with the "Continent" (Europe) and the greater world, much like the large international airports of the present day.

The kings and queens of England would greet the various European royals and other heads of state at Victoria Station.

Most of the parts of the station that were built in the late 19th century are still there - the great steel trusses and the Victorian brickwork. In its time, it was state-of-the-art, befitting what was the superpower of its day. After World War I, the station slowly was allowed to decay, as was the British economy.

Beginning with the Thatcher reforms, England had a quarter-century run as the fastest-growing major economy in Europe, but still slower than that of the United States. Yet the basic structure of Victoria Station was only partially renovated during the good years, even though rail privatization and sleek new trains began to reinvigorate rail travel.