Layer 339 . . . Laurie Anderson, Inheritance Tracks, Strange Fruit, Spirituals, The Spirit Level, Spiritual Intelligence, Big Questions and Calls to Action

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Thought for Today

I'd meant to say yesterday that Tom Jones and his new album were even mentioned on Radio 4's Thought for Today last week, as was the track 'What Good Am I?' Zeitgeisty indeed.

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Also on Radio 4 last week was the wonderful Laurie Anderson. She's been around for 30 years now, but is still relatively unknown. So it was good to find her popping up on Saturday Live to talk about her 'inheritance tracks'.

She spoke about listening, as a young person, to the minimalist music of Phillip Glass, especially 'Music in Twelve Parts', and how the act of listening to the music gave her the mental space to ask questions like, what do I want? and what am I doing here?

In fact she used to go to live rehearsals of the music in New York, together with friends who were sculptors, musicians, dancers and actors, and she says 'This was when we learnt to be artists ourselves'. The rehearsals lasted around 10 hours. One of her friends said, "That's when I do my best work - at Phil's rehearsals".

The piece of music she chose to 'pass on' was Billie Holiday singing 'Strange Fruit'. She referred to it as a kind of haiku - simple images of racist hangings.

Can art or music influence behaviour or politics?, she asked. That song certainly did. "Southern trees / Bear a strange fruit . . . "

She said, "It's the story of fascism. How's that made possible? Songs like that motivated people to change the world, to march for civil rights. That song was key. People heard that song, confronted that chilling image, and said, 'Wait a second!' The song is a spiritual, really, and spirituals are often calls to action."

"Cruelty, tenderness, hopefulness and beauty - this song has all these things."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00t5vkr

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00t5vkr/Saturday_Live_31_07_2010/

I notice on Spotify that Tom Waits also chose this song for his 'Jukebox' album.

Other versions worth listening to on Spotify include those by UB40, Jeff Buckley, Nina Simone and Wynton Marsalis.


http://www.legacy.com/ns/fullstory.aspx?storytype=1&storyid=38

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Calls To Action

I often forget to read it myself, so I need to remind myself as much as anyone else to go to Raj Patel's website regularly  - http://rajpatel.org/

There's currently plenty of good stuff on such subjects as G20, South Africa, McDonald's and 'Cheaponomics'.

Also a reminder to buy his book 'The Value of Nothing'.

It's also worth clicking on his RSS feed.

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Patel constantly brings up inconvenient truths, and on good days so does the Guardian:

The Spirit Level: Spooking the right

Even though its great sweep invites all manner of sceptical questions, this book's inconvenient truths must be faced

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/26/the-spirit-level-society-criticism

I reckon the dividing line between left and right in politics is whether or not you want to see greater equality, even if it's for purely utilitarian and pragmatic reasons. For the left, the Spirit Level was a seminal book. A recent Guardian editorial said:

It was briefly fashionable for modernising Conservatives, up to and including David Cameron, to demonstrate their progressive credentials by giving a nod to The Spirit Level, a book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett which traced a range of social sicknesses back to economic inequality. Suddenly, however, the rightwing thinktanks are circling. Both the Taxpayers' Alliance and Policy Exchange have attempted detailed demolition jobs, egged on from across the Atlantic by the Wall Street Journal and by another attack published under the auspices of the Washington-based Democracy Institute.

To recap: The Spirit Level charted a connection between the income gap and everything from crime to illness and under-education. Its great sweep quite properly invited all manner of sceptical questions. There were, as always in social science, disputes about whether causation and correlation were being confused . . . Thoughtful sceptics like David Runciman accepted the evidence marshalled about the damage done further down the heap as "overwhelming".

The combined forces suddenly being ranged against the book are now, however, of a very different nature. The titles of the anti-egalitarian studies – which refer variously to The Spirit Level's "delusion", "illusion" and its "false prophesy" – reveal the polemical intent, a telling contrast with the meticulous subtitle of the original book: "Why more equal societies almost always do better."

The Spirit Level did not claim to explain every social problem. Rather, it explicitly restricted itself to those societal ills which blight the lives of the lower classes more than they do the rest.

After a budget that made the poor poorer, it should be no surprise that some want to see that insight buried. Yet to emerge from stricken times without breaking Britain, The Spirit Level's inconvenient truths must be faced.

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Also in the paper recently:

Right to Work: In search of a new slogan

In the face of cuts, trade unions are demanding the 'right to work'. Better to rethink work altogether

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/29/right-to-work-recession-women-at-work

by Nina Power

In 1972 Selma James, founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign  and, more recently, Global Women's Strike, wrote the following: "We demand the right to work less." Her reasoning was clear – when women work for a wage for 40 hours a week and still carry the weight of childcare and housework, what is the moral value in expecting them to toil away at the cost of their health and happiness? Why should anyone, male or female, work more than 20 hours a week?

Should we be clinging on to employment at any cost, or should we instead be reconsidering what it means to work at all?

When James demanded that everyone "work less", it was part of a set of proposals that included a guaranteed income for everyone, equal pay and free, community-run nurseries and childcare.

Making clear the link between housework and paid work, such that unwaged labour must be counted as work and rewarded as such, James's vision is an integrated picture of the relation between (human) reproduction and (industrial) production.

The mass entry of women into the workforce has corresponded with an overall stagnation or diminution of wages. It is as if employers have taken the very worst aspects of women's work in the past – poorly paid, precarious, without benefits – and applied it to almost everyone, except those at the very top, who remain overwhelmingly male and incomprehensibly rich.

This is equality as a race to the bottom. Feminism is not wrong to see the economic autonomy of women as central to their political and social freedom, but we do a disservice to its aims if we believe that it is enough to have a job, regardless of what it is.

The Right to Work campaign, although vital, plays into this attitude that work is the ultimate mark of a man or, in more recent decades, a woman too.

Thinking of a world with less but better work, or even no work at all (as we currently understand it), particularly in the midst of an economic crisis, is impractical, of course. Yet thinking about alternatives to the current system, however unfathomable, may help us to break with much that is wrong about our everyday existence. In Italy in the 1970s, workers under the banner of a "refusal of work" shut down noxious chemical plants and paid only what they felt was appropriate for their utilities bills. This perhaps seems quite mad today, but it is a lot more fulfilling than working even harder for less so that those at the top can keep more.

Nina Power is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University and the author of One-Dimensional Woman.

See also an excellent piece she wrote on the study of philosophy:

A blow to philosophy, and minorities

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/29/philosophy-minorities-middleqsex-university-logic

Under the banner of the financial crisis, recent months have seen management threaten departments and jobs  in post-92 and Russell group universities alike. Although no clear national pattern of cuts has emerged, philosophy has been singled out by several institutions. Threats to philosophy at Liverpool and King's College London  were greeted with international outcry and management retreat. Recent news that philosophy recruitment at both undergraduate and postgraduate level at Middlesex University  will be terminated is a particularly terrible blow, both to the standing of philosophy in the UK and to the future of critical thought in our universities as a whole.

Interest in philosophy has in fact grown massively in recent years. This is, in part, due to the increased numbers of students taking A-level philosophy, but is also the result of the widespread desire for critical thought and analysis in the face of an increasingly disorienting world.

Closure at Middlesex would be a step back to the bad old days when philosophy meant a few young, white and almost entirely male students at privileged institutions discussing the finer points of formal logic over sherry. Middlesex University must be prevented from dismantling one of the finest philosophy departments in the country: fight to keep philosophy alive.

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Schumacher Sorry . . .

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/8878400.stm

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TV Highlights and Lowlife: "Human Life Has No Meaning Here"

Channel 4 ran two major hour long documentaries last night back to back - one on Britain's drugs culture and our hopeless attempts to ban drugs, and the other on the London Hospital's A & E department in Whitechapel and how it deals with the victims of knife crime.

On one level you can say the common denominator in these programmes was drugs, since most knife crime is committed by kids who are pissed or otherwise drugged up, or taking care of their drug businesses.

The excessive use of drugs, and addiction to drugs, however, is clearly just a symptom of people who are spiritually and emotionally sick and incapable of living life in any enlightened way. This type of sickness stems from a failure to develop positive spiritual and emotional intelligence, and what we can call human 'values'. People who are high in spiritual and emotional intelligence are incapable of committing knife crime, and by definition are not habitual users of debilitating drugs. Neither are they capable of inducing others to use drugs, including in some cases their own children.

So the only proper way to rid society of drug addiction and knife crime is to, on the one hand, eliminate poverty and hopelessness, and alongside of that to enable children of all ages to develop high levels of emotional, social and spiritual intelligence.

The problem, however, is that our society is light years away from doing either of these things, especially as virtually no-one understands how to work with children either from regular homes or from at-risk families living in drug-ridden communities in order to ensure they develop these key intelligences.

Virtually no-one understands how those intelligences operate, and hardly anyone has any experience of working in schools in ways that develop those intelligences to high levels, by focusing on them day in and day out. It's doable, but hardly anyone sees the need to do it, and there are far too few teachers who are equipped and trained to do it, or operate to policies in schools that prioritise it. Virtually no schools prioritise the development of emotional, social and spiritual intelligences, since they're too busy 'driving up' academic 'standards' and pass rates.
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And Finally . . .

Rev 'rather good' says Archbishop of Canterbury

Senior church figures flock to praise BBC2 comedy series, which finishes its six-week run tomorrow night

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/aug/01/senior-church-figures-rev-bbc

In the beginning was the script. And it was good. So good that it attracted an audience of two million every week to become the highest rating new comedy on BBC2.

A spokesman for the Church of England said it was great to see a church drama on television that did not resort to tired old stereotypes" and instead gave "an edgy insight" into the work of its clergy today.

"Clergy are incredibly gossipy; people don't realise that. It's a radical act to show vicars as human, people expect them to be paragons of patience and virtue. Just like all of us, they are vain, weak and ambitious."

The show, which has attracted more viewers than Big Brother in some weeks, reveals the jealousy, bitterness and rivalry that can exist in clerical circles. One episode is devoted to a "media vicar" who appears on quiz shows, newspaper columns and Thought for the Day.

Last Saturday's Mail magazine even featured the programme on its front page.

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Layer 302 . . . Tales of Two Cities, Enchantment, Politics, Peace Camps, Demos, PR, and a Progressive Alliance

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Paddy Ashdown, now pushing 70, showed this morning how to wear an open-necked shirt and still look funky. These younger politicians who wear their normal suit shirts without a tie just look - stupid.

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Here's my recommended viewing for today:

Crisis Capitalism - Naomi Klein and Raj Patel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ji_8tI0sbY

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There was a very funny moment on TV this morning when Dame Anne Leslie, the notorious right-wing hag, argued against PR electoral systems on the basis that they let into parliament undesirable parties such as Austria's neo-nazi Freedom Party and BZO. A fellow panellist then pointed out that these are exactly the kind of parties that Cameron and co have joined up with in the European parliament. Brilliant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_Freedom_Party
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Haider

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Tales of Two Cities

1. Venice - by Francesco da Mosto; BBC4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0078ssj

"Not just beautiful. Enchanting."

So said a guy who's been sweeping St Mark's Square at dawn every day for 22 years. Venice is enchanting.

So here we have it: there's something beyond beautiful. There's something more than aesthetically pleasing and visually stunning. There's another dimension where aesthetics trigger . . . the divine. The transcendental. The spiritual. The realm of satori that lies beyond the merely physical. The connection with the metaphysical; the one-and-all; the source of all meaning and ultimate joy and delight. The source of our higher being. This is what the street sweeper connects with, every morning in Venice, as he watches the sun rise.

This programme is a visually stunning, brilliantly conceived, wonderfully edited, superbly written and beautifully narrated essay on an amazing city.

Now available on DVD.

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2. London

Is London enchanting? Er . . . no. On the whole. London is something else. An amazing place in its own right, but not a place which of itself produces transcendental enchantment; though parts of it can, on certain days.

Arriving in Trafalgar Square yesterday I found it full of Morris dancers and their entourages, plus passing tourists, and this was only an hour after there was supposed to have been a massive demonstration in favour of PR and electoral reform. Hardly an Athens-like scenario.

Walking down Whitehall it was clear that the majority of people were tourists, speaking a variety of languages. This is a weird and not very wonderful street - though it's very impressive. All the financial and political pomp and power of the State is on architectural display. I'd really love to see there, every weekend, parties of visitors consisting of neighbourhood groups giving their young people an educational tour. Children and young people from all over the country should have a right to a guided tour of the throbbing heart of government, in order to stimulate their interest in politics, government and citizenship. How many schools, especially London schools, even bother to do this? You have to experience it, to begin to understand it.

Parliament Square yesterday was full of tents belonging to a peace camp set up as a 'democracy village' by activists who want to see our troops pulled out of Afghanistan, amongst other things

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/05/450803.html

 (c) Oxzen Pics

I noticed Sally Bercow had said she'd go to live in a tent in the Square when she was told to move out of the Speaker's flat for the duration of the election. An interesting character.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233127/Sally-Bercow-I-binge-drinking-ladette-downed-bottles-wine-day-night-stands.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7353788/Sally-Bercow-I-will-sleep-in-tent-in-Parliament-Square.html

(c) Oxzen Pics

There's now an amazing media village on the green opposite parliament, which is dominated by a two-story black-glass prefab belonging to the BBC. This is the studio that was used for the BBC's political broadcasts this morning.

I finally came across the "Demo for Democracy" in Smith Square - which had been organised by POWER2010 and its Take Back Parliament campaign. They gave a huge cheer when Vince Cable emerged from Transport House, which was fronted by a row of police officers, and made his way on foot back to the Lib Dems HQ a couple of streets away, accompanied by chants of "No sell out!"

(c) Oxzen Pics

Walking back past Millbank Tower and Parliament an hour later, after a visit to the Tate - the Westminster village's very own art gallery - I came across Chris Huhne and David Laws on their way to LibDem HQ, deep in conversation. These guys, in terms of influence, appear to be in the top six of the Lib Dem hierarchy. In our current circumstances they are therefore in the top six power brokers in the entire country. Their backgrounds are very interesting - both of them public school and Oxbridge educated politicians who were originally investment bankers, operating deep in the throbbing heart of the City.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Laws
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Huhne

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Helena Kennedy said on TV this morning that political tribalism is in decline, and her own record in the Lords shows she's always focused on issues and principles, not Party bickering and manoevering. PR allows us to have a more mature and intelligent democracy.

Which is pretty much what Oxzen wrote in response to Henry Porter's article on PR today.

Is this really the end of Punch and Judy politics?

The adversarial system we have lived with for so long is outdated and a bar to true progress

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/08/henry-porter-proportional-representation?showallcomments=true#end-of-comments

During the election, I took part in a dozen or so public meetings. I was struck by the incredible focus of the audiences. People were paying attention in a way that was quite new to me and was also rather moving. They wanted to believe; they wanted the best for those around them, particularly the new generation of voters, which is what makes the failure in all those polling stations such a scandal. The idea that people in those audiences were divided into first- and second-class voters because of their political allegiance was appalling.

We rediscovered the wonder of free elections last week and saw its potency and that is where we should start on the issue of PR. Two hundred-odd years ago, you might have met a stout man of affairs, probably a Tory, who would have deplored the idea of extending voting rights and abolishing rotten boroughs: he was swiftly consigned to history by the Whigs and their Great Reform Act of 1832. A hundred years ago, you would have met the same type spluttering at the mention of votes for women; he was swept aside by the suffragettes.

Today, that very same conservative voice will tell you that first past the post is the only system that can produce stable, decisive governments. But the view that says we have to tolerate an unfair voting system will go the way of all that self-serving opinion of the past.

The election seems to be telling us to settle on PR as a principle and then find a system that suits our politics. Neither of the main parties properly concedes this need, because it threatens their power, but a hung parliament is the clearest possible hint to them that we demand changes in the political culture that are more than spin.

Part of the British genius for progressive reform is that we used to understand that with each advance in people's rights and enfranchisement, government improved. PR is not a threat to government, but the only way to renew its legitimacy and improve its performance. PR means progress as well as equality at the ballot box.

Oxzen commented:

Good article, but

    . . . with each advance in people's rights and enfranchisement, government improved.

There have been important advances, but it's not clear that government has always improved. Would you say that the Blair/Brown government was an improvement on the Attlee government, which was arguably our one and only socialist government? Would Attlee have left it to the markets to dismantle, asset-strip, sell off, and cease to invest in British industry, and inflate property bubbles?

The reason that PR is essential, and has been adopted by more enlightened countries, is that it encourages and enables government on the basis of coalitions around ideology, and not just personalities and parties. The age of 'broad church' parties such as Labour and the Conservatives, which mainly provide career paths for professional politicians, has to come to an end. People need to know what and who they're really voting for when they take the trouble to vote. The New Labour brand fooled far too many people for far too long. A trade descriptions act is needed for politics as well as retailing.

Government on the basis of which party has the biggest share of seats and/or votes, even though their share of the vote is way below 50%, is almost as childish as government on the basis of personal popularity contests between individual politicians. This is what now enables the Tories to claim they have a right to govern when they know very well that the majority of voters are against them ideologically, and probably always will be.

The nonsensical neoliberal theories of market efficiency have been tested to destruction, trickle down economics have been shown to be a deception, and only government by coalitions of social democrats and others on the left is going build a better Britain based on social justice and sound economics. It's time for our politics to grow up and for politicians to persuade people to vote for them on the basis of where they really stand and who they'll work with in a balanced parliament. This is what happens in mature democracies.

The Tories have nothing to offer this country - certainly not PR - but New Labour are little better, unless they now admit they've been seriously going down the wrong road for the past 13 years.

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Alex Salmond has said that the country now needs a "progressive alliance" consisting of all the anti-Tory parties coming together. Can't argue with that.

(c) Oxzen Pics

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Layer 296 . . . John Gray, A False Dawn, Raj Patel and the Value of Nothing

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John Gray's book, "False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism", first published in 1998, has been reissued with a new introduction by Granta Books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Gray

Below is Gray's critique of Raj Patel's latest book. It's interesting that in it he refers to 'ancient European Stoic and Epicurean philosophies' and Buddhism. It's highly likely, it seems to me, that these philosophies will have an important role to play in bringing about a more enlightened age in which people finally understand that wellbeing and happiness do not stem from materialism and the satisfaction of cravings for status, luxury, excitement, novelty and stimulation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/dec/13/value-nothing-raj-patel

The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel

Raj Patel is right that we need to rethink our notions of value, but his solutions for a better world do not convince John Gray

Economists are taken seriously by governments because they claim to be practising a type of science that can predict the future and help manage our lives. Yet very few economists forecast the current crisis and it is hard to think of any economist who has come up with compelling ideas about how to deal with it. Underpinning all the stimulus programmes is the faith that if only we can restart growth of the sort that was suddenly curtailed two years ago, all will be well. But growth of that kind – debt-fuelled expansion that inflates the value of financial assets while depleting the material environment – is what got us into the present mess. If this is the best economists can do, it is hard to avoid concluding that there is something basically wrong with their discipline.

Much of what passes as economics is ideology and ideology only works if those who produce it also believe in it. The difficulty of the present situation comes from the fact that while few any longer believe in the free market, no one has an alternative to it that is able to command widespread support. Predictably, the financial storm has jolted moribund Marxist theories back into a semblance of life, but there is no popular interest in overthrowing capitalism. The idea of a post-market economy is today what it has been for decades: an intellectual toy rather than a serious political project.

For all his forensic dissection of free market thinking, this is a predicament that Patel cannot escape. The first half of The Value of Nothing, showing the unreality of efficient markets and Homo economicus, continues the demolition of market fundamentalism that events have set in train. The second section, where Patel discusses options to the hegemony of the market, is markedly less convincing. He gives examples of local resistance – shack-dwellers in Durban demanding the right legally to settle on public land, participatory budgeting by popular assemblies in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and numerous other cases where he believes new forms of common life are emerging. But when oppressed minorities have improved their lot, will they not want to live as most people in affluent societies do?

Patel fails to confront the most fundamental contemporary fact, which is that the majority of people in every country clearly want a type of economy – the sort that rich countries have enjoyed in the recent past – that the planet cannot sustain. A passionate activist, he believes problems of resource scarcity are man-made and can always be solved by fairer distribution. However, the growth-oriented lifestyle of rich countries is not unsustainable because it is unjust; it is unsustainable because the Earth's resources are unalterably finite. It may be true that the imbalance between human demands and the environment could be diminished if enough people rejected material affluence as their main goal in life. But this is an extremely nebulous possibility and one that highlights the deepest difficulty for Patel's analysis.

Oscar Wilde may have been right that people know the price of everything and the value of nothing, a remark Patel cites at the start of his book, and which gives him its title. But what is value if it is not price? It is telling that when trying to flesh out a non-market account, Patel turns to religion, in this case Buddhism. The Buddhist tradition gives him what he needs – an understanding of human wellbeing that does not centre round the satisfaction of wants. Like the ancient European Stoic and Epicurean philosophies, Buddhism proposes that happiness lies in shrinking the self – in giving up our wants, rather than forever chasing after them. It is a thought that occurs to many well-off people from time to time, but it is hard to imagine large numbers of people ever acting on it.

Theories of value that focus on curbing desire run up against the demand for self-realisation, which is one of the strongest impulses in modern life. To be sure, the pursuit of self-realisation does not often result in happiness. But is it happiness that most people are pursuing? Or is it stimulus and excitement? In the Himalayan Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, Patel informs the reader, the introduction of satellite television has been followed by a crime wave. He seems to think this fact somehow strengthens his argument. But what it tells us is that no culture can now resist the dangerous charms of a life spent in insatiable desire.

This is an incredibly negative outlook about the prospects for changes in the ways that people think and behave. If we can see something needs to happen, and then just say, "Oh, that'll never happen - people are far too selfish", then this is just cynicism, and there really is no hope for the world.

As for his closing sentence - let's consider that Cuba has at least attempted to resist capitalist consumerism and exploitation. And if it hadn't been for the American blockade of Cuba then who knows what the country might have been able to achieve in terms of both prosperity and healthy lifestyles. As things stand, Cuba has done far more per capita than any other country in terms of literacy, and in sending doctors to work for free in third world countries.

We then need to consider the role of education, which currently does little or nothing to help children grow up with a thorough understanding of philosophy and ethics, let alone train them in unselfish lovingkindness. John Gray ought to at least consider that we could establish an education system that enables young people to see through the lies and deceptions of our society, and equips them properly for living a productive and creative life, with all their intelligences fully functioning - intellectual, social, emotional, instinctive, spiritual and physical.

"It may be true that the imbalance between human demands and the environment could be diminished if enough people rejected material affluence as their main goal in life."

Of course it's true. What we need is a critical mass of people who actually care about the planet, with enough effort to create a proper system of education and a better understanding of what's needed for a good life. We also need governments that have a clear vision of the tasks that must be tackled, beginning with "How to reshape market society and redefine democracy".

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The Value of Nothing

How to reshape market society and redefine democracy

http://rajpatel.org/2009/10/27/the-value-of-nothing/

“This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness” — Naomi Klein.

Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system.

If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world’s worth. If we don’t want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common.

This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn’t often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society.

Read Chapter One here:

http://us.macmillan.com/CMS400/uploadedFiles/Picador/Raj%20-%20first%20chap.pdf


http://rajpatel.org/

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John Cleese on PR:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSUKMa1cYHk
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Layer 293 . . . Maitreya, Messiah, World Teacher, Raj Patel, Benjamin Creme and Share International

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This is a weird story I've been meaning to blog about for a couple of weeks, but the bloody election keeps getting in the way.

Here's what Maev Kennedy wrote about it:

Raj Patel, the reluctant messiah, set for Hollywood treatment

Economist named as messiah by spiritual group and ensuing internet mayhem declares he's just 'a very naughty boy'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/apr/09/patel-not-messiah-naughty-boy

The life of the London-born economist and author Raj Patel, who was hailed on the internet as saviour of the world for his indictment of capitalism, may become a Hollywood film.

Patel has become the subject of a blog and YouTube frenzy over his book on the "abject failure of western capitalism".

Supporters said his television promotion of the book was the "most important day in history" and called him the "master of masters".

Patel responded by using a clip from the Life of Brian in his blog and wrote: "Sadly, I'm not the Messiah. I'm just a very naughty boy."

The eulogising of Patel began with an announcement by Benjamin Creme, 87-year-old mystic and founder of Share International, a spiritual group. For decades he has forecast the imminent "most important day", the day of global recognition of the "Maitreya" who was already living quietly in our midst.

In January he announced that the Maitreya had just made his first appearance on American TV without revealing his true identity. Creme did not reveal which programme or channel and the internet began to hum with speculation. It zeroed in on two interviews by Patel, plugging his book The Value of Nothing, a scathing analysis of western capitalism and the global financial crisis.

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Here's what Bobbie Johnson had to say:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/19/raj-patel-colbert-report-benjamin-creme

I'm not the messiah, says food activist – but his many worshippers do not believe him

Members of religious group believe London-born author has come to save the world

The trouble started when Raj Patel appeared on American TV to plug his latest book, an analysis of the financial crisis called The Value of Nothing.

The London-born author, 37, thought his slot on comedy talkshow The Colbert Report went well enough: the host made a few jokes, Patel talked a little about his work and then, job done, he went back to his home in San Francisco.

Shortly afterwards, however, things took a strange turn. Over the course of a couple of days, cryptic messages started filling his inbox.

What he had written off as gobbledygook suddenly turned into something altogether more bizarre: he was being lauded by members of an obscure religious group who had decided that Patel – a food activist who grew up in a corner shop in Golders Green in north-west London – was, in fact, the messiah.

Their reasoning? Patel's background and work coincidentally matched a series of prophecies made by an 87-year-old Scottish mystic called Benjamin Creme, the leader of a little-known religious group known as Share International. Because he matched the profile, hundreds of people around the world believed that Patel was the living embodiment of a figure they called Maitreya, the Christ or "the world teacher".

His job? To save the world, and everyone on it.

Patel's career – spent at Oxford, LSE, the World Bank and with thinktank Food First – has been spent trying to understand the inequalities and problems caused by free market economics, particularly as it relates to the developing world.

His first book, Stuffed and Starved, rips through the problems in global food production and examines how the free market has worked to keep millions hungry (Naomi Klein called it dazzling, while the Guardian's Felicity Lawrence said it was "an impassioned call to action"). The Value of Nothing, meanwhile, draws on the economic collapse to look at how we might fix the system and improve life for billions of people around the globe.

While his goal appears to match Share's vision of worldwide harmony, he says the underlying assumptions it makes are wrong – and possibly even dangerous.

"What I'm arguing in the book is precisely the opposite of the Maitreya: what we need is various kinds of rebellion and transformations about how private property works," he said.

"I don't think a messiah figure is going to be a terribly good launching point for the kinds of politics I'm talking about – for someone who has very strong anarchist sympathies, this has some fairly deep contradictions in it."

To say Patel – with his academic air, stammer and grey-flecked hair – is a reluctant saviour is an understatement. In fact, he rejects the entire notion of saviours. If there is one thing he has learned from his work as an activist in countries such as Zimbabwe and South Africa, it is that there are no easy answers.

"People are very ready to abdicate responsibility and have it shovelled on to someone else's shoulders," he said. "You saw that with Obama most spectacularly, but whenever there's going to be someone who's just going to fix it for you, it's a very attractive story. It's in every mythological structure."

Unravelling exactly what it is that Share International's followers believe, however, is tricky.

The group is an offshoot of the Victorian Theosophy movement founded by Madame Blavatsky that developed a belief system out of an amalgam of various religions, spiritualism and metaphysics.

Creme – who joined a UFO cult in the 1950s before starting Share – has added a cosmic take to the whole concept: he says that Maitreya represents a group of beings from Venus called the Space Brothers.

This 18m-year-old saviour, he says, has been resting somewhere in the Himalayas for 2,000 years and – as a figure who combines messianism for Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and Muslims alike – is due to return any time now, uniting humanity and making life better for everybody on earth.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that Creme refuses to categorically state whether or not he believes that Patel and Maitreya are one and the same. He suggests that it is not up to him to rule either way, instead blaming media coverage, rather than his own mystical predictions, for making people "hysterical".

"It is not my place," Creme told the writer Scott James, a friend of Patel, recently. "People are looking to Mr Patel because they are looking for the fulfilment of a story which I've been making around the world for the last 35 years."

It is not the first time that Creme, an inscrutable guru with a mop of curly white hair, has courted publicity with his wild pronouncements of a messiah. In 1985 he made another prophecy: that Maitreya would reveal himself to the press in London.

A gaggle of journalists gathered in a Brick Lane curry house for the main event. In the end, the promised saviour failed to materialise. (One candidate, "a man in old robes and a faraway look in his eye", turned out to be a tramp begging for cigarettes, our correspondent wrote at the time).

Unlike some who have the greatness thrust upon them, though, Patel's greatest hope is that Share will leave him alone so that he can get back to normal life.

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Raj Patel himself has written this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/apr/11/religion-peace-social-justice-messiah

We don't need a messiah (and anyway, it isn't me)

Coincidence led to my being hailed as a prince of peace. But change will come from our own hard work, not a deity

As the Guardian reported, the deluge began after a number of coincidences seemed to match me up with the man foretold by followers of a group called Share International, founded by Scottish mystic Benjamin Crème. I'd done little to earn the title of Maitreya, though I admit some parallels between my life and that described in the prophecy.

Have I lived in London? Yes. Am I interested in social justice and sharing the world's resources? Indeed I am. Do I care about feeding the world? Certainly. Was I on American television soon before Crème announced the arrival of Maitreya? Sort of. On 12 January, I appeared on a spoof rightwing talk show called the Colbert Report. I'd also been on BBC World, CNN, Democracy Now and al-Jazeera before then, but it seems you can't be a deity unless you do Comedy Central.

So what, according to Share International, does Maitreya do? Through a doctrine of sharing, fraternity, social justice and co-operation, he (and it does seem to be a he, not a she) brings humanity back from economic and ecological collapse through new forms of spiritual community. As it happens, I do think that sharing, fraternity, justice and co-operation are terrific things. I also think that prioritising the needs of the poor, hungry and oppressed is a non-negotiable part of a sustainable future.

Unfortunately, I think that's where the resemblances end. It frustrates me only a little less than it might disappoint those looking for Maitreya that, in fact, I'm just an ordinary bloke.

In part, I suspect the reason the story isn't going away – the New York Times just ran a followup – is because it fits a narrative in which we're steeped from birth. From the Bible to Knight Rider to The Matrix, the story's the same: in crappy times, a single person will emerge to make all the difference and turn everything around. Although it makes for great viewing, it makes for a bad society. Ultimately, tales about messiahs are bedtime stories steeped in power. They're debilitating soporifics, inducements to be passive as we wait for social change because, some day, our prince will come.

Why wait, though? If the world is to transform, faith in politicians offering hope and change is a recipe for disappointment. Ask almost anyone who voted for Obama. Change happens through millions of acts of rebellion and mutual aid, not through faith in one great leader. What's depressing about this whole Maitreya thing is that it is a sign that we've given up on ourselves, that we need to depend on The One rather than finding the means to fix our own problems directly.

The thing is that there are millions of world teachers already. I've been lucky enough to report what they're teaching: from former petrol-pump attendants in South Africa to masked women in Mexico, leaders are subjecting themselves to democratic control, and messing with the boundaries of private property so that everyone gets to share the world's resources.

This, at least, is the world I'm keen to live in: one without princes but with billions of world teachers, in which we live under neither God nor Master. It's a recipe for change that makes for poor storytelling but great politics.

The only problem is how to condense it so that someone can chisel it in stone.

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Benjamin Creme has written this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/20/raj-patel-maitreya-world-teacher

Raj Patel is not Maitreya, but the World Teacher is here – and needed

This is no mystical bedtime story but a profound part of the history of the world

Raj Patel writes about how a series of coincidences led to his receiving "a trickle, then a flood, of email" asking whether he was Maitreya, the World Teacher, whose coming I have been predicting for 35 years [We don't need a messiah (and anyway, it isn't me), 12 April].

I would like to make clear that we at Share International have absolutely nothing to do with this mistaken identity and that we regret the inconvenience caused. Patel accepts that he does have much in common with Maitreya: "As it happens, I do think that sharing, fraternity, justice and co-operation are terrific things. I also think that prioritising the needs of the poor, hungry and oppressed is a non-negotiable part of a sustainable future." This is part of the reason for this silly misidentification.

Patel writes: "In part, I suspect the reason the story isn't going away … is because it fits a narrative in which we're steeped from birth … in crappy times, a single person will emerge to make all the difference and turn everything around … Ultimately, tales about messiahs are bedtime stories steeped in power … inducements to be passive as we wait for social change because, some day, our prince will come."

However, I have never presented Maitreya as a messiah figure who comes to make all things bright and beautiful for a supine humanity. Maitreya himself is at pains to clarify his position that every stone and brick of the new civilisation must be put in place by humanity itself; humanity's free will is sacrosanct.

To my mind Patel leaves out a huge and irreplaceable dimension. Why do we think that over the centuries, people like Confucius, Krishna, the Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad have come into humanity's midst? Over and over, the doctrine of a World Teacher has manifested to aid humanity in times of crisis.

I am not a "mystic" as Patel suggests, and this is not a mystical "bedtime story" but a profound part of the history of the world. The role of World Teacher is now held by Maitreya; the previous holder of the office was the Buddha. This is an office in our Spiritual Hierarchy of Masters, who are gradually returning to the everyday world where once they lived as men.

Maitreya is not a religious teacher but a spiritual teacher in the broadest sense. He is really speaking about freedom: freedom for each of us to be ourself, and he has come to show humanity how to attain this freedom from indoctrination, conditioning, poverty and want.

The world is already awakening and growing in understanding through the energies and ideas released by the man who Patel thinks is irrelevant to our needs. Incognito, Maitreya is already speaking to millions on US television, and his ideas and energies are inspiring many with new hope, and the resolve to change their lives for the better.

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