The Breakdown of Nations

Leopold Kohr, friend of E.F. Schumacher, wrote an insightful book in the 1960's setting out a vision for the benefit of small, compact, homogeneous nations. His Chapter 11 (if I recall correctly) responded to the likelihood of his vision coming to pass with a singe word: No!

With the news that the Yes campaign in Scotland finds itself in the lead (though within the bounds of statistical error) and the natives of Catalonia restless, one wonders what Kohr would have made of this if he were still alive.

Reading a few excerpts of the relentless commentary, one thing is certain, not only does no one know the outcome, no one knows the outcome of the outcome. However, whatever the result on the 18th is, nothing ought to be the same again.

For it is clear that one of the attractions of independence is one (as Kohr rightly noted) of voice, of the felt opportunity it affords of participating again in a real conversation about one's future and the runaway world that we have created of globalisation, relentless economics and political nattering does not provide this (and Kohr would argue could not).

Real conversation requires a meaningful sense of experienced community within shared rules and freedom from alienation. It needs 'face time' - the opportunity to interact with one's representatives and create and witness to shared bonds. None of which is of course guaranteed by a small state but the prospect is moved nearer. It is this prospect that makes it so attractive.

So whatever the outcome only genuine subsidiarity will do. Decisions made as close as possible to those affected. A subsidiarity that is only made possible with a solidarity that seeks the common good. Otherwise the forces disrupting scale will only become more agitated not less with all the sad possibilities of real disintegration that entails.

Revolution is always a deceitful form of democratic renewal.

Comments

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev

Golgonooza

Search This Blog