File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0310, message 12


Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 08:49:29 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: The tall poppy syndrome within CR


Hi Radha,

I'm not surprised, but I must confess to a certain irritation and 
frustration. I spend a lot of time trying to encourage people to read 
DPF etc and don't find it helpful when people seem intent on doing the 
opposite.

For the rest, I absolutely agree. Thank you for taking the discussion to 
a deeper and more rewarding level.

Do tell us when you're ready what's in that crystal ball! I have one of 
my own, and I'm trying to exercise some influence over what's in it.

I wondered why you call the spiritual turn 'so called'. What is the 
problem with 'spiritual turn' (given that handy labels are more or less 
necessary)? I think there has been a definite turn in Bhaskar's thought, 
and that 'spiritual' is the best single-word label, but I might be 
missing something owing to my one-thirds perspective.

Mervyn


r.dsouza <r.dsouza-AT-waikato.ac.nz> writes
>Mervyn
>My spontaneous reaction to your mail was "why am I not surprised" followed
>by "but why is Mervyn (the writer of the new age, new left article)
>surprised?" and are you surprised Mervyn? I don't mean this as a rhetorical
>question in any sense. Surely, CR is not exempt from a sociology of its own
>and from its historical, cultural and political contexts that we talk about.
>As someone from the so called "Third World" (which in my view, is the
>two-thirds world) it interests me that with so many radical "schools of
>thought" in the so called "West", from scientific theories to Marxism,
>socialism et al, the problem for the two-thirds world is not so much with
>the philosophy or theory per se (the text) but with the sociological and
>cultural assumptions (the context) that makes the theory/philosophy
>problematic. There appears to be threshold beyond which the
>theory/philosophy is constrained by its own cultural and historical context.
>It certainly happened with Marxism in the "West" and the ramifications it
>had for the "Third World".
>Is it surprising at all that the so called "spiritual turn" should have
>invited the kind of response it did, or, for that matter the reactions on
>this list to the ad for a publicist recently (I don't recall how the
>position was described exactly now). And, do we not lapse quickly and
>comfortably into bourgeois norms of discourse or social practices for that
>matter, even when critiquing those norms in the issues we talk and write
>about?
>Calling it "tall poppy syndrome" is putting it too simplistically, it is
>much deeper than that. I am reminded of Rumi's famous story of the parrot
>and the merchant, (I don't know if you are familiar with it). Indeed, like
>the parrot in the story, one has to give up things (die) to be free and
>enlightened, and to "gain" new things. I am not sure the adversarial and
>individualistic intellectual traditions in Western academic institutions
>ably guided by the "invisible hand of the market" are the most conducive
>places for an introspective approach that helps to locates oneself  in the
>wider search for answers to the questions of our times.
>I am tempted to look into my crystal ball now to see what CR will look like
>25 years from now, but I think I will leave it for another time.
>
>Radha
>
>
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