The Dharma Manifesto
Page 11
The French Revolution, on the other hand, was the most bloody, chaotic, and destructive political upheaval of the entire Enlightenment era. Spurred on by the resentment, envy, jealousy and impiety of the have-nots against the dissolute nobility of France, and led by a sociopathic assortment of ideologically inconsistent leaders, the end result of the French Revolution was the summary execution of thousands of the new regime’s imaginary opponents (including many of the original leaders of the very revolution itself),[6] the wide-scale attack against anything that was even suspected of reflecting a religious or spiritual mindset, the destruction of traditional French culture, and the rapid ascendency of atheism, hedonism, and imperialism that eradicated all meaningful freedoms in the very name of an overly idealized liberté.
The French Revolution was the ultimate triumph of the — heretofore only a symptomatic phenomenon — successful ascendency of the perennial revolt against Natural Law all too often witnessed in the annals of the history of Kali Yuga. It represented the political instantiation of the idée fixe of Conflict Theory in the form of the first conspicuously secular state regime of our modernist era.
As Dharma Nationalists, we obviously reject the failed atheistic ideology of the French Revolution.[7] Moreover, for those of us who are both Dharma Nationalists and Americans specifically, we support the overall positive foundational ideals of the American Revolution. While the American Constitution is an imperfect document, it does represent the manifest will and spirit of the American people brought vividly to the fore at the time of the Revolution, as well as a stable and inspired source of higher authority through which American governing policies can be generally guided.
While The Dharma Manifesto was written with the specific idea of establishing a Dharma Nation in America, our goal is to ultimately establish such nations in many of the currently constituted nation-states. Needless to say, the specific foundational antecedents of the many Dharma Nations which will eventually be established in other countries will naturally conform to the historically and politically appropriate conditions that apply to those specific nations. Each Dharma Nation must faithfully reflect the historical, temperamental, and ethnic heritage of that particular nation.
Utilitarian Futility
The school of nineteenth-century British philosophy, Utilitarianism, represented an attempt to contrive a system of human-derived principles designed to serve as a guide to ethical decision-making — both personal and political. This approach was in stark contrast to both Natural Law theorists, as well as Moral Sense theorists, who held that principles of morality were inherently discernible as either rationally discovered laws of nature, or as the common sense of the ethically evolved, respectively. Much of Anglo-American jurisprudence and social policy is predicated upon the Utilitarian approach. It is for this reason that I will now provide a brief critique of this post-Enlightenment school of thought from a Dharma perspective.
Arguably, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) represented the intellectual apex of the Utilitarian school of thought up to his time. Having taken Jeremy Bentham’s (1748–1832) hedonistic criterion for what constitutes the good, Mill introduced the notion that qualitative pleasure is a superior indicator of the good than merely a quantitatively greater number of pleasures.
For Bentham and the early Utilitarians, identifying the nature of what is moral lies in determining what was the greater good for the greatest number of individuals. Thus, the goal of both ethics and politics, they felt, was to achieve the overall goodness of the sum of all individuals’ experience of goodness in any given society. But what precisely constitutes the “good”?
Both the Classical Utilitarians, as well as Mill, recognized the a posteriori fact that of all desires, it is only the desire for pleasure that people seem to pursue for its own intrinsic sake. To desire anything aside from pleasure, according to the Utilitarians, was not possible. Therefore, the conclusion of the Utilitarians was that the only real desire of all individuals was their own sense of pleasure.
This being the case, the Utilitarians insisted, it was the maximization of pleasure that constituted the highest value, the highest good, to be sought in any ethical system.[8] For Bentham, “pleasure” was taken in its most literal and basest sense. Pleasure is the result of hedonistically-sought sensations. Moreover, pleasure was understood in purely quantitative terms. If one had a quantitatively higher degree of pleasure from performing x activity in juxtaposition to y, then x was, de facto, a higher good. X being the highest good — regardless of what type of pleasure x represented — the moral logic of Classical Utilitarianism dictated that the acquisition of the highest degree of x for the greatest number of people must then be pursued. Thus, if the greater number of people derived more pleasure from bowling than from poetry, then, for Bentham, bowling had a higher hedonic value to it.
Like Bentham, Mill was a self-admitted hedonist. His perspective on what constitutes proper hedonism, however, differs slightly from Bentham’s. On Mill’s account, the desire for pleasure did, indeed, lie at the root of all human activity. Specifically, what is considered to be intrinsically desirable — and therefore of inherent good — is realizing one’s desires. What is actually desirable is not the immediate base pleasure in itself, but acquiring what we feel within ourselves to be pleasurable. Thus, a sense of satisfaction derived from knowing that our desires have been fulfilled was proffered as being superior to the mere immediate, pleasurable sensation attendant on the realization of desires. What humans seek, Mill insists, is the actual object of favorable regard, and not merely the sensation that is produced by the object. Pleasure was thus not reducible to a state of sensation, but must be derived from empirically real circumstances. For Mill, then, the very locus of pleasure is transferred from the sensory to the empirical realm.
In addition to the shift in locus, Mill makes another minor distinction between his version of hedonism and that of his predecessors.
Both Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Stuart Mill were in agreement that it is natural for individuals to be concerned exclusively for their own personal well-being, but not that this fact is necessarily unproblematic.
Hobbes held that society is composed of many atomistic individuals, each of whom is pursuing his own self-interested agenda. The individual inertial forces of these many monads of moving (“organic” in contemporary biological terminology) matter lead necessarily to a state of conflict. Each individual is naturally compelled by reason to seek his own self-interest. It is not in the interest of any one person to abide by contractual agreements with others in such a state of war between individual beings. Regardless, it is rational and in one’s self-interest, Hobbes felt, if every individual agrees to uphold the laws of a neutral sovereign. Thus, it is in an individual’s greater self-interest to uphold a moral order than it is to pursue his more brute self-interests in a state of war of all against all.
Like Hobbes before him, Mill also held that it was natural for individuals to promote their self-interest in the form of the maximalization of utility outcome. Both were individualistic, egalitarian and conflict-oriented theories. Value is utility, and individual rational agents are utility maximizers by design. While Hobbes held that it was the good of the individual that was primary, however, Mill sought to maximize the logical sum of all individual utilities, with each individual utility counting equally. From an individual level, one’s individual hedonic quotient was of primary interest, but moral content existed only on the level of the sum, not in individual utility. Thus, while both philosophers were agreed that self-interest is rational and natural, both also felt that it was in each rational individual’s interest to subsume that interest to the good of the greater whole.
John Stuart Mill’s teleologically-based ethical theory of Utilitarianism has had a far-reaching impact on the development of social and political philosophy, as well as policy, over the last century and a half. His notion that eth
ical law can and should be determined solely by the principle of utility, and that the final arbiters of morality should be the majority party within a group of competent judges, are familiar ideas to those of us who have been raised in modern liberal-democratic societies and duly inculcated in their ways. What follows is a brief assessment of Mill’s Utilitarianism and an objection to his pervasively famous theory from the Dharmic perspective.
Mill felt, first of all, that actions could never be judged as being inherently right or wrong, but were to be assessed only by the results they produce. Thus Mill’s criterion for whether or not an act is right was based upon a posteriori knowledge, or on sensory data based on observation that is empirically gathered and evaluated. This being the process, we will now focus on his philosophical principle for determining what is ethical.
As an Epicurean, Mill held that the ultimate end of every human endeavor (and by implication the endeavor of all living beings) is pleasure. However, he was also a universalist in outlook, and as such felt that the pleasure and benefit of the majority necessarily overrides the enjoyment of the individual. Thus, the ethical and political goal of Utilitarianism was to provide the greatest amount of pleasure, both quantitative and qualitative, to the greatest number of individuals.
But who is to determine which course of action will benefit the greater whole? And what if a situation arises in which there are two quantitatively equal, yet contradictory, pleasures from which to choose? Mill’s answer to both queries was that the final decision must be arrived at by a majority vote of those individuals who are most qualified to judge the answer. These judges must be thoroughly conversant with all of the alternatives, and they must possess dignified characters that do not easily succumb to baser pleasures. Thus, the process is essentially a democratic one, as Mill would have us derive our moral laws by determining what the majority of qualified people feel is in their best interest.
This, of course, begs the question of who, precisely, gets to determine the identity of this committee of “qualified” people? The proper derivation of authority is one of the most important questions in philosophical thought. From whence does the authority arise to determine who are the proper authorities to be bestowed with the judicial power to determine what is, and what is not, in the best interest of persons outside of themselves? For Mill, for the Utilitarians, and for the political suppositions that serve as the grounding of all modern liberal-democratic societies, such power is derived from the popular vote. For proponents of Dharma Nationalism, however, such power is derived from the eternal and transcendent guidance of Natural Law.
Of the many objections that can be raised against this bottom-up theory of ethics is that it tends to dehumanize and alienate the individual agent as a person. In a Utilitarian form of society the individual becomes merely a nameless, faceless and easily-replaced atomized component of a vast, impersonal ocean of humanity. One’s personal goals, beliefs and values would be subordinate to the capricious will of the majority. Our inherently unique and God-given characters, insights and talents would be overlooked and our potential contributions to society would be left untapped, and instead, society would seek to find those ideas which are most easily understandable and which have the greatest appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Thus, rather than having a society in which every person’s inherent human value is taken into consideration and cherished, we have a tyranny of the majority, wherein the perceived good of the many may be used as a means of denying justice and respect to the few. A telling aphorism often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but most likely first coined by James Bovard in 1994, states the democratic conundrum in this way: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.” Such is the current destabilizing impasse that every single liberal-democratic nation in the world finds itself situated in today.
Conflict Theory Instantiated
Conflict Theory (Virodha-Vardhana-Vada), in all its myriad sectarian forms, has increasingly become the prevailing guiding ideology over world affairs, beginning from the “Enlightenment” era and continuing up to the present day. The final triumph of Conflict Theory occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. Today most of the once-free nations of the world now exist firmly within its ever-tightening grip. Conflict Theory is no longer merely a theory. It has now become fully instantiated as the precise philosophical foundation of the New World Order, and as the social, political and cultural machinations that are secretly calculated to usher in a new and frightening era of global totalitarian government.
This calculated plan to create a global dictatorship is controlled by the autocratic whims of a tiny cabal of demonic psychopaths who have directly manipulated, and thus directed, many of the major course-changing events in recent world history.[9] The victory of this evil cabal of manipulative “insiders” would result in the end of freedom for all.
Despite this potential for the triumph of evil in our age, however, we must always remember that homo proponit, se Deus disponi: “Man proposes, but God disposes.” As the rest of The Dharma Manifesto will show, the ascendency of Conflict Theory has been short-lived. We are on the very threshold of experiencing the reinstantiation of Dharma in the immediate future.
The Post-Secular Age
“The facts of nature cannot in the long run be violated. Penetrating and seeping through everything like water, they will undermine any system that fails to take them into account.”
Carl Jung (1875–1961)[10]
The last two centuries have been a conspicuously unique era in the history of the human race. For, unlike any other epoch in our history, this period witnessed the purposeful, systematic and seemingly unstoppable deconstruction of spirituality as an important element of Western society and human culture. So seemingly successful has the exorcism of religion from public life been since the Enlightenment era that many twentieth-century scholars even went so far as to prematurely pronounce the imminent death of religion in our age. As events and trends in recent world history have shown us, however, this was an exceedingly mistaken pronouncement, to say the very least.
As is becoming increasingly apparent in the early years of the twenty-first century, religion’s obituary was prematurely written. Our current era is witnessing one of the greatest worldwide religious and spiritual resurgences ever recorded in the annals of human history. In America alone, for example, we have seen the importance of religiously-based human values ushered to center stage in the growing acceptance of Dharmic philosophy, principles, and practices in popular culture. The rest of the world, likewise, has not been immune to this unimpeded trend. The centrality of religion and spirituality in human life and culture has been aggressively reasserted in India, America, throughout the entire Islamic world, and throughout the Third World especially. Only the modern secular states of Western Europe had seemed, until recently, to have remained relatively untouched by the global revival of spirituality. But now even that is changing with the enormous growth of such “Asian” spiritual traditions as Buddhism and Sanatana Dharma all throughout Western and Eastern Europe. Rather than ushering in a new secular age, an age free from the influence of religion, spirituality and depthful contemplation, the evidence seems to indicate that we are actually entering a Post-Secular Age: an age wherein religion and spirituality will necessarily fill the vacuum created by the ruinous failure of twentieth-century secular materialism.
The notion that religion would meet its eventual demise (and, according to some of the more rabidly atheistic thinkers, that it should meet its demise) had been espoused by a large number of Western intellectuals in the last two centuries. Perhaps the most famous of these individuals were what Christian theologian Martin Marty termed “the bearded God-Killers.”[11] These primarily nineteenth-century figures included Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Erroneously equating all human religious expression with an enslaving opiate designed to
keep the proletariat bound to their grindstones with invisible psychic chains, Karl Marx predicted both the inevitable death of religion and the subsequent emergence of a new atheistic world order: the dictatorship of the proletariat, leading to the eventual eschatological state of Communism. Karl Marx was woefully wrong on every count.
Similarly, Freud saw in religion the greatest threat to humanity’s social and psychic development. Indeed, to Freud religion and philosophy represented no more than a “black tide of mud” designed solely to keep humanity enslaved by the chains of superstition.[12] Overt atheists, however, were not the only individuals to excitedly pronounce the supposed imminent end of religion.
Surrendering slavishly to the en vogue secularism of their day, quite a few notable liberal Judeo-Christian theologians also felt that secularism would ultimately triumph over the human religious impulse. Among these spiritually disheartened religious leaders were several who felt that the inevitable secularization of the world merely represented a coming of age for homo religiosus (religious man). Included among these dis-spirited Christian thinkers were theologian Harvey Cox (author of The Secular City)[13] of Harvard, and Anglican Bishop John Robinson (who wrote Honest to God).[14]