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There’s the matter of numbers as well. In accounting, if you can’t prove that a specific price was paid, it doesn’t exist. The way economics is theorized and practiced, it requires numbers. Only recently have we put a number on carbon, such that corporations can trade carbon offsets, which sound good but leads to some dubious results. (Some owners of waste land in Australia are making a killing by not developing what they were never able to develop.) But if you do put a price on something that is visible and close to a decision, it can have an effect. Locally, we put a 5 cent price on disposable plastic bags at the grocery store. Maybe that doesn’t matter, but it puts a bump in the road that I’d rather not hit. There is an opportunity in the balance sheet non-numeric footnotes. In 2018, I believe, Shell’s accountants felt obligated to say in the footnotes that the divestment movement had a “material effect” on it’s stock price. Whether that actually slows down petroleum production is another matter. Perhaps what would be helpful is to put some teeth into triple bottom line, otherwise the enterprise is not offered the privileges of a corporate charter. (“Triple bottom line theory expands conventional business success metrics to include an organization’s contributions to social well-being, environmental health, and a just economy. These bottom line categories are often referred to as the three “P’s”: people, planet, and prosperity.”)

Not sure you grokked Rifkin’s point. I should have said “self-extingishing.” Capitalism will have done its work and had no more profit to wring from the system. There might be some other domination, but you wouldn’t be able to blame it on capitalism. Could just be violent gangs, kings, priests, or something more traditional.

I looked at the Parecon article, and it’s the same as the self-management and Mondragon examples I pointed to. Very good. Lots of people trying to agree on things to help themselves, without a big boss. It is very telling, however, that the only mention in the wiki article of anything resembling investment is the case of a peoples’ council grabbing a public property — a piece of empty land — to develop a playground. You said you have nothing against modern technology. OK, so let’s start a Parecon steel mill. Somebody has to accumulate capital prior to the council grabbing the cash for construction. After the steel mill is built, everybody can merrily argue over how much they want to produce (perhaps involving a discussion with a customer?) and who gets paid for which job. (By the way, the critique section in the article described pretty well the squabbling that I saw in a short-lived self-managed insurance company. Not pretty.) But my question is, who puts up the capital to build the steel plant? If it can’t be a stock company in your system, then I guess it has to be the state’s accumulation of tax revenue. (In the old days it was a king or a Medici who bankrolled the commercial ship. Another group of rich men, Lloyds, insured him. But even a Medici is not rich enough to build a fab without the benefit of a stock company.) So are you advocating state-owned enterprise for your factories? That works, in a way. We have the Soviet case. Are you recommending that we try that again? Mao tried to make steel, but all he accomplished was stealing everybody’s cooking pots! China gave up on that and has stock companies, albeit government supervised (and corrupted) “in the interest of the people.”

“If conceptual capitalism is capitalism done right, and beautifully free of wrongs, then on what basis are we to presuppose that bringing such a vision of capitalism down from the realm of airy theorizing to earth is doable? There’s certainly no historical support for such a claim.”
I would say that it is equally if no more airy to imagine organizing today’s society without some version of capitalism. If it’s so obvious what would be radically different and has been demonstrated to be radically better, I’m sorry to have missed it.
As for modifications of capitalist organization, thare are plenty cases that have that have demonstrably taken the edge off from time to time. One is employee ownership. I observed and worked at SAIC. The company kept distributing the stock to workers and kept that going for about 35 years. Many hundreds of people did extremely well when they cashed out. I suspect that it could have continued, but ‘leadership’ saw a big opportunity to grab a whole lot of cash by going public. While in many ways it was a typical Beltway bandit, there really was a different ethos. (I also worked at several of the worst!) You enjoyed your work and felt that it was your company. You also helped each other, though there were many amusing instances where multiple ‘entrepreneurial’ people wanted to bid on the same work, and we actually had to put in two competing proposals, because the rules said you couldn’t always hold back individual initiative. There’s many more flavors of employee ownership, and several good cases where groups made a decent living doing honest work without the need for a top-hatted exploiter.
Another strain is “self-management”. THis was hot in the 70s and had a nearly identical uprising in ‘Communist’ Yugoslavia. It was just teams and functions, and salaries were not vastly different and were based on longevity and skill.
And then there’s Mondragon in Basque territory. It’s really more of a community that happens to work togther, rather than companies that hire. THey support anybody who can figure out something productive to do that employs locals. They’ve kept the network going for decades, with big and small businesses, and participants are relatively pleased. They know that its their operation, supporting their people.
And recently there are B corporations that claim and have to prove they are going to either do good products or do good for workers, or both. Some succeed at achieving social ends, while also creating satisfactory income for participants.
None of this has overtaken the world, of course, but they are practical, sustainable demonstrations.

Many years ago a rich member of my PCUSA church offered to pay to “finish the bell tower.” We lacked that piece for a century and the Session decided we could continue without it. They declined the donation! Not sure what the lesson is, but giving and spending in the church is often different than buying and selling in the market. We enjoy giving, partly because we don’t have to. Sometimes, we actually enjoy getting along with less. I’m shocked, though, at how little many people in the church are paid. (Our outgoing pastor has been extremely well paid, however. The benefit of having some high rollers as members.) Anyway, I’m sure a lot of people are fighting over money, but there is also a lot of generosity, free flow, and lack of calculation, even among dour, penny-pinching Presbyterians. I wouldn’t know how to scale that up. Compare that to Mormons who give vastly more, but they are obligated. They also work hard to make money within their community. Many were revealed to be greedy, going all-in on a Ponzi scheme.

Regarding morality, didn’t Whitehead write, at the end of one of his books, that the should be on the beam of intense beauty (in the fuller sense), and not be fussy about morality (in the lesser sense). Good is somehow subsumed in beauty. So when living with love we won’t go around hurting people, yet we probably won’t appear to be strict moralists.
I’ll have to look up why Hartshorne associated with UUs. I suspect that Universalism was something he required but was not offered in a lot of Christian denominations of his day. In a Whitehead reading of the situation, all are “saved” by being gathered up in God’s memory. Maybe that’s not much of a consolation, but it applies to everybody.

Many years ago I attended the big anthropology conference where a close friend was delivering her first big paper about her multi-year fieldwork with an obscure group in Nepal. Everybody was delighted to hear about this group that nobody had cracked before. It was great stuff about what they had to do to survive, isolated in the mountains, and work togther with their distinct social patterns. Then she gradually explained the backbone of the whole operation, where one person would be given the great honor and great burden of taking everybody’s money and going on a long caravan to trade on behalf of the group. He was required to bring back a 10% profit. And she added that people would throw wood up on their roofs, to show that they had that wealth and could just store it, let it rot, and not use it except for display. All the people in the audience who started out with big smiles, excpecting to hear about the poor natives, were suddenly horrified to realize that these people were capitalists, albeit of a very elemental kind. It seems to me that a lot of people, indigenous or not, are going to want a cushion of wealth, are going to find ways to make a profit, and will want some social recognition for doing so. That much seems inevitable, and not terrible, but it gets quickly out of hand and appears to need a heavy dose of regulation and taxation, which then becomes another tempting target for corruption and exploitation. It’s hard to organize a society well without an ethic that helps people become willing to get along. The surveys say that people in Finland, Denmark, etc., are happier than other people. THey are capitalists and have wealth, but everybody is pretty even and highly taxed. Their population is in check as well (even with recent refugees). They are not the worst on the environment and can at least get organized to invest in such things as a proper electric grid and wind generation. It is interesting that these societies aren’t religious in a conventional sense. These are all matters to explore in the next class on economics!

I believe James and Whitehead speak of perception other than sensory, but I can’t put my finger on the terms and passages. Sheldrake is more explicit about it and points to evidence of ‘fields’ that operate other than through the familiar senses. So he will claim that there is memory in fields, and it does things such as shape the development of an animal, because there is no good basis for claiming that all instructions are in DNA, or that environmental shaping provides the rest. There are patterns that are drawn on and are needed to complete development. And of course he shows evidence for various kinds of mental communication (ESP). For my paper I recalled that Zubiri said a lot about other senses, and I found a couple of papers that draw similarities to Whitehead. Zubiri is also a radical empiricist, asserting that we have non-sensory ‘feel’ of reality, which he calls theologic. It is pure experience, pre-concept.
“The power of the real is referred to by Zubiri as the theologic dimension, not theological, because it refers to the facts and not to the theory….we have direct access to it and we can examine it. Because this dimension thrusts us towards the ultimateness of reality, we can say that through it we have indirect access to God and can ask about Him.” The hard part about all this, of course, is that we don’t have any instruments that will tell us how this operates in a material medium. If you don’t believe that there can be anything other than material, then you have to work very hard to deny the evidence of non-material reality. So the West has been materialist for a few centuries, but it wasn’t always so, and it wasn’t irrational to be non-materialist, but we’ve apparently successfully convinced ourself that it is irrational, despite the evidence of our experience.

During the pandemic I tried to get an extremely obscure Japanese novel from a small seminary in Philadelphia. They shut down and wouldn’t answer, and I couldn’t even raise them on the phone. I was on a board that had that seminary as a member, and even had the director asking on my behalf didn’t work. The publisher said they pulped the copies they had decades ago. Eventually I got it! And I could hardly make heads or tails of it. My old professor could have interpreted it, and the information is certainly in his papers that are at the University of Chicago, but I’m not flying to Chicago to go rifle through the papers. (My wife would kill me. Hey, let’s go out on the town!) So much for scholarship.

A proper scholar would take complete notes and not require a repeat reading of the text. Hah! I took copious notes, but now I want to let it sink in, and I’d enjoy re-reading some of the chapters. It was a dense book, plenty of details about Japanese concepts that I had missed because, over the years, I had inadvertently skipped over the good stuff. I had actually written to Odin a year or two ago and he didn’t answer. Sort of a quiet guy. Just as well, his scholarship is good. Whitehead said that he really didn’t want to hear all the questions about his book. He said as much as he had to say and well as he could, and any further conversation wasn’t going to make it better. He wanted to move on. And that’s where Odin observes that he did go on from Process and Reality, and nobody seemed to notice. Or rather, nobody was interested in digging below what looked like good physics to aesthetics. That was a big surprise to me, and I liked it. THe most prominent book on aesthetics was Santayana’s, and I read it a long time ago. But recently I read that Santayana actually hated it, and that he he wrote it just because he was being pressured to publish something. I guess that was in the day when it was optional. Nowadays, you get no credit for writing a book that would mean anything. All that counts is articles in particular journals that are read by absolutely nobody because the criteria for publishing are absurd. (I wrote an article about a very hot topic in intelligence, and the intelligence journal wouldn’t even consider it because nobody in the academy had been writing about it and I had few citations. They were trying very hard to detatch from the actual subject matter. THis is an arch version of the echo chamber. So it’s great that Odin is not in one of those pressure cookers and can write meaningful books and keep his job.

THe quotation emphasizes connection to the land, meaning a particular land, but why should that be so? Are there no indigenous practices understood by its practitioners to have universal, unbound validity, even if others in the next valley aren’t actually practicing it? It seems to me that Abraham qualifies as having had an inigenous practice. In his case, his God said that his practice was both portable and, in a sense, universal, in that there was one chosen people in the world. Or does Abraham’s faith not qualify as indigenous exactly becaue it was portable and that it made universal claims? Or is it not indigenous because it is too old, or because it morphed into something else, or because it became big? (What is the largest, and what is the oldest, indigenous ‘way’,after all, so that we may compare?) If “indigenous” just means “catch-all for everything that didn’t make the big time,” I’ll understand. But maybe there’s something more specific that distinguishes the category. (I really want to know because some Shinto leaders consider Shinto to be universal, even though it is resolutely tied to land. They probably thought it would be impolite to speak up about that.)

Marlon Brando (On the Waterfront, 1954): “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it.” I think there are differences in spiritual potential. Forty years ago I was in a small group of mostly grad students talking with Georg Gadamer after his astounding lecture. I got the distinct sense that he singled me out as having the potential that the others didn’t. He annoited me with his look. I can’t be certain how much potential I really had, but I’m certain that I have not realized the measure afforded me. To take just my case, I would say that I’m in the right diretion and have flourished, just not enough. I’ve examined why that’s the case and actually had some success in releasing constraints, but the constraints eventually returned and I’m working again on releasing them. A short version of it is that I’m lazy. I think there are plenty of people who are doing just fine with modest and quiet spiritual achievements. But they didn’t get that look from Gadamer. That’s been my meditation here.

It appears that the process people in each of the various spiritual traditions are tolerant and, in addition, accept that other ways of recognizing divinity (though perhaps not all) are legitimate. Process seems to strengthen that stance. Process people also seems to end up being more critical of their own tradition than that of others, which is actually odd.
I see that there are plenty of Hindu ‘nationalists’ that, while not proselytizing, are highly intolerant to the point of murderous. I just heard a lecture on the Doctrine of Discover, the Pope’s explicit invitation to genocide of indigenous peoples in whatever lands are ‘discovered’. I’m curious whether there are any similar Hindu texts that motivate the murder of Muslims or Christians.

I was an at theological event this morning and asked one of my favorite pastors about whether a FEW people who closely follow Ganesha are practicing idolatry. And, if a FEW Presbyterians found this to be true, were they being too squeamish about it? He reminded me that this was a cause of Reformation and why we still don’t have much in the way of objects of adoration in the chapel. But he added that we get criticized by the real purists for having a Trinity — by Muslims of course, but also by Unitarians and even Deists. Our Jewish lecturer observed that it seemed so much easier for him to incorporate process, compared to Christians, who have to contort themselves to reconcile a lot of doctrine that isn’t so easy to fit with process, including Trinity.

I’m referring to a widespread practice that was singled out in the reading. There are people who are visited by Ganesha. What is the status of Ganesha and why are SOME people who call themselves Christians upset by that, and do they have a point about idolatry?