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

.

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".

............................................

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/

.........................................................

John Cleese on PR:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSUKMa1cYHk
.

Layer 293 . . . Maitreya, Messiah, World Teacher, Raj Patel, Benjamin Creme and Share International

.
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.

.........................................

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.

...................................................

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.

..................................................

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.

.