In article <741e6p$lhq@enews1.newsguy.com>,
amanda!nyts@uunet.uu.net (New York Theosophical Society) wrote:
> jthunderbird@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> : I specified modern racism, which is an institutional and organized affair. It
> : differs in scope and in intent from the feeling that my tribe is better than
> : your tribe because it's mine. That is not racism, even if the tribes differ
> : in their appearance or their language. Racism is a deliberate policy of
> : systematically denigrating and depersonalizing a particular people for
> : purposes of exploitation. It is found in the historical record only in
> : connection with monotheists, to my best recollection, so your accusation that
> : I'm a prejudiced revisionist is ill-founded. Find a fact and come back.
>
> There are many examples in Eastern Asia; the Japanese treatment of
> the Okinawans comes to mind, immediately. Unless you consider Shintoism to
> be a form of monotheism?
>
> Bart Lidofsky

Well taken! I recall sometime last year, having given the Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere of Japan as an example of modern polytheism in some
context, so it would be ungracious to waffle out now. I am not specifically
familiar with the prewar history of Okinawa, but the Japanese wartime
centrism on their own ethnicity is well known from its effects in Manchuria
and China. Internally, discrimination against the Hairy Ainu is recorded.

I can't dispute, you called me on this. (I can wonder to myself why my
memory becomes so selective during a rhetorical pass.) We can look at
the possible quibbles: could Nipponese racism have been acquired in its
form, from Western examples of intolerance, during the crash modernization
of Japan of the late the nineteenth century? Unprovable; it could not be
distinguished from an extension of native patriotic fervor.

I threw out the assertion equating racism with monotheism to stir the pot.
I felt that a counterexample would need a lot of digging, simply because
modern history has been monopolized by montheism so thoroughly, that
just finding a modern polytheist society which could show racism would be
tough. Evidently I was thinking in Western terms only. Now anyone can
put forth a proposition, like the Hindi exhibit racism against the Jain, or
any of a plethora of persecuted minority populations in Eastern polytheist
lands. Are the Tamil of Sri Lanka an example? Enough.

So there's no exclusive link of monotheism to racism. Nevertheless that
doesn't exclude causal connection; if it could be established that
monotheist societies do tend to be racist, some significance can still be
drawn, relevant to creating more livable social patterns for the next
millenium. What I need to check on, is whether Roman imperial society
was racist before Christian takeover. Racism (like sexism and agism) is a
pathology of power, the only way it can be distinguished from normal
ethnic pride.

Monotheism allows (or requires) the structural authority of heirarchy. It's
not a coincidence that all loner gods are male; our gods will be a lot like
mammals, so the males will be bigger and grumpier and like to be boss. But
genetics does not automatically determine culture. Our being mammals doesn't
mean we are destined to live in a world of bosses being bossed in a pyramidal
structure. The degree of freedom which culture has from genetics is
illustrated in our nearest animal relatives. A chimpanzee is hard to tell
from a bonabo in isolation. Chimpanzees spend most of their time cowering, or
intimidating, or fighting, or hiding, or running, or stealing. The pecking
order is everything that matters to chimpanzees, who live in a society i
should describe as legalistic, for all fear the ultimate punishment of death,
or exile its equivalent. Bonabos, in contrast, spend most of their time in
copulation with any and every other bonabo in reach. Their culture is
free-form and fluid, and they do not live in fear and fighting. So the fact
we are human does not compel us to resign ourselves to living in a world
which is a tyranny disguised with superficial liberties to make it palatable.

We can choose in detail how we wish to live with one another.

I'm unfamiliar with the Shinto belief, but evoking it calls forth a comparison
with several other societies with a deified emperor. Rome, Egypt, the Inca,
and old China all spring to mind. Mostly these come about in polytheist
backgrounds, and only the rare sicko god-emperor will try to make his
State religion exclusive in the realm, but control of secular resources like
education, the civil service and army can make it persuasively predominant.

These same factors operate in a monotheist culture as social enforcement
for exclusionism. The god is now invisible, and in a titular democracy the
emperor himself may be invisible, but nonetheless no other gods can be
allowed to establish a base of worship, for monotheism by definition is
exclusive. The heirarchy reacts to polytheist worship as subversive to
the structure of the State, though it may widely tolerate other monotheist
variants. Today's societies are tolerant of heresies, those people are just
mistaken about the nature of the One, but polytheists are evil and
deserve to be persecuted.

Modern polytheists therefore have a natural affinity for other persecuted
minorities (as feminists would insist, persecuted majorities also). So the
issues of racism, sexism and agism are of prime importance to today's
Pagans in that they threaten the very identity. The legal structure is not
the relief from fear because it is the threat itself. Adding new laws meant
to protect this and that only increases the mass of the monotheist bulwark,
which was inherently biased against Paganism, as it was biased against Black
and Red and female and young and poor people, from its first foundation.
Laws literally cannot help when too much law and power is the problem.

The solution to melt down laws is impossible, because our species is too
stupid to create any law that isn't forever. We can organize hierarchies,
but only in an irreversible manner. There is no technique known by which
our social structures can be simplified and reduced to essentials, just
enough to let us live happily. Once again I am forced to conclude that
revolution really is the only path by which humanity can continue the
journey of life, for society is gridlocked to strangulation by its own
complexity. It is not to support the interests of any group, or set of groups,
but for life itself we must clean the slate and start anew.

To expect that the system can tolerate Paganism as a real religious
option, simply by putting some patches on old laws, is probably beyond
the treshold of the ability of our social structure, to absorb changes to its
original function. We are talking about machinery first designed to keep
things like this from happening. We face the task of recognizing our
society isn't working right any more because it's obsolete, and of building
a new model to replace the old.

The Internet swarms with Pagans and other religious diversities, but no
people in secular power have given any acknowledgment of an intent
to accomodate Pagan religions with political privileges accorded to
other (monotheist) religions. I don't think they can, because it would
literally break the system, based as it is on the monotheist Western
tradition. To point up this failure, I have pressed the drug culture as a
latter-day incarnation of the substance-mediated diffuse religion, which
is indicated by archaeology to be the primal religion for everybody.

There is no possibility that society as presently constituted can ever
reverse its twentieth-century stance on self-administration of psychoactive
drugs. Legalizing pot would break too many important parts. So to present the
matter as a religious issue, is my way of pointing up that: no, society
cannot provide religious liberty for everybody, because it is a broken-down
machine which needs replacement. Like Mir, it has served far beyond its
original design specifications. Modern needs are for something more
maintainable, modular, and scalable, and a lot more user-friendly, with an
absolute requirement that the source code be public. What are we donig on the
Internet?

Musing,
Johnny Thunderbird
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