The philosophy class compelled us to read a book that now I cannot even find, that's how great a book it was. By Martin Buber, if I recall it correctly, Build Bridges Not Walls. Now a ton of books have that same name but none by Martin Buber. As I read it, I kept thinking, Buber is different from the others. Not nearly so serious. He didn't spent the first two million pages defining his terms like all the other philosophers did. He could have written the book off the top of his head. I couldn't understand why it was required. It was like candy.
“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked...” Barrack Obama, 2005. I voted, when I was a Senator, to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in...” Hillary Clinton, 2015.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2019
....The only reason they do not want to build a Wall is that Walls Work! 99% of our illegal Border crossings will end, crime in our Country will go way down and we will save billions of dollars a year! A properly planned and constructed Wall will pay for itself many times a year!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2019
The Chinese wall seems incredibly isolationist viewed from the present.
I was in kindergarten when an iron curtain had descended from Stettin to Trieste. Now there's a visual image to arrest a 5-year-old mind. Those must be pretty strong curtain rods. I kept hearing the phrase and I kept wondering what that looked like. And then finally I saw it!
In the basement of my school.
It was the most clever thing ever. I marveled at the ingenuity. There were actually two of them that divided the entire area. They were dividing walls that folded and tucked inside their own closet built for them behind the regular walls. When the school needed to divide the basement area then they would drag out the folded walls to stretch them along their own tracks in the ceiling.
Closing them back into their storage space sounded like this:
flapflapflapflapflapflapflapflapflapflapflapflapflapflapflap.
Shut the door, boom, wall gone.
I was so excited to put that together. Finally I understood what everyone was talking about.
But why be so emotional about it?
I learned that wasn't quite right.
We viewed it as East Germans keeping their people in. After all, they shot people trying to escape. More largely, though, they were keeping our ideas out, so they could keep their precious little world free of our contaminating influences.
And now we're doing that.
I don't like the idea of a wall. It goes against my tender sweetheart nature that enjoys the idea of people going back and forth as they like. Free. Like angels.
But that's an absurd fancy notion that falls apart when confronted with socio-political-economic reality.
The Chinese knew what they were doing and why; a reasoned solution for their time and their situation. And the East Germans knew what they were doing too, for their time and their situation. And so on through history across the globe. Entire cites were circled by walls to give the place a chance from marauding armies.
And of course we build bridges. With gates. Bridges and walls are not mutually exclusive. While opening our minds to accepting others for enhanced communication doesn't preclude protecting ourselves from invasion.
Not all cultures are equal. That's apparent by such large numbers escaping their cultures. When you come not to assimilate but to change the host instead then you're bringing your ruin with you.
I don't like the idea of a wall. It goes against my tender sweetheart nature that enjoys the idea of people going back and forth as they like. Free. Like angels.
But that's an absurd fancy notion that falls apart when confronted with socio-political-economic reality.
The Chinese knew what they were doing and why; a reasoned solution for their time and their situation. And the East Germans knew what they were doing too, for their time and their situation. And so on through history across the globe. Entire cites were circled by walls to give the place a chance from marauding armies.
And of course we build bridges. With gates. Bridges and walls are not mutually exclusive. While opening our minds to accepting others for enhanced communication doesn't preclude protecting ourselves from invasion.
Not all cultures are equal. That's apparent by such large numbers escaping their cultures. When you come not to assimilate but to change the host instead then you're bringing your ruin with you.
Adam Ruins Everything on Netflix has an entire segment on why a wall would invite more immigration than it would prevent and I was in no mood to hear a Canadian explain his conceptualization of an American situation with no serious challenge. He doesn't think up all this by himself, his writers do his thinking for him, and I was no mood to listen to all of them. I would be having a private argument with his entire staff. I stopped listening. I've reached the mind-block stage of intense liberal indoctrination. That bridge is gone. Destroyed by overuse. Go ahead and run your little show, it cannot penetrate my psychic barrier. Nothing gets seen, nothing gets heard. Go yell at the sky.
I notice Steven Crowder has a longer video debunking this one.
But to debunk it, Crowder had to first watch it. And I'm not willing to do that.
3 comments:
The philosophy class compelled us to read a book that now I cannot even find...By Martin Buber, if I recall it correctly... As I read it, I kept thinking, Buber is different from the others...He could have written the book off the top of his head. I couldn't understand why it was required. It was like candy.
I found two copies of Buber's "Good and Evil" on the shelf while moving and believe I've kept one but did not go looking for it. I did look through the online list of Buber books and didn't see any mentioning bridges or walls in the title. There is, however, a biography of Buber entitled, "Encounter on the Narrow Ridge" which led me to this explanation of Buber's view of the narrow ridge, and another's view of him as a "pioneer bridge builder" from an article on him following his death in Jerusalem in 1965:
His philosophy of personalism was an amalgam of religious mysticism, Old Testament inspiration, modern psychology and earthy common sense.
It was his contention that man could achieve an intimate relationship with God through an intimate interrelationship with his fellow man and that each man's relationship with God and a fellow man was distinct.
He strove for a "a dialogue," between man and God with man as "I" and God as "Thou." This concept was developed in his major philosophical work, "I and Thou." Could that have been the book assigned for class?? It was his most popular work.
By his emphasis on dialogue, Professor Buber was regarded as a pioneer bridge builder between Judaism and Christianity. His views accented the non-formal aspects of religion as opposed to theological systems.
Religion for Professor Buber was experience, not dogma. He doubted that man was made to conform with canon law, or with elaborately worked out plans for existence. On the contrary, Professor Buber's credo stressed individual responsibility.
In fact, according to Professor Buber, man has an obligation to achieve an identity by refusing to abdicate his will before the monolithic power of party, corporation or state.
Professor Buber pointed to the duality of things--love and justice, freedom and order, good and evil: but he did not suggest a happy middle way between them.
"According to the logical conception of truth," he once explained, "only one of two contraries can be true, but in the reality of life as one lives it they are inseparable.
"I have occasionally described my standpoint to my friends as the 'narrow ridge.' I wanted by this to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow, rocky ridge between the gulfs, where there is only the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed."
The I-Thou of Professor Buber's thinking stands for the kind of dialogue--love or even hate--in which two persons face and accept each other as truly human. There is in such a dialogue, he argued, a fusion of choosing and being chosen, of action and reaction, that engages man's highest qualities.
With the note at the end of this statement of his sizeable contribution making me smile: Professor Buber was a prodigious writer. More than 700 books and papers by him are listed in one "selected" bibliography. Many of them deal with aspects of the I-Thou philosophy. He was also a translator of renown.
I found this fascinating and am very much appreciating ChipA's mention of the man and the unnamed book read years ago.
He was professor of comparative religion at the University of Frankfurt, from 1923 to 1933. When the Nazis excluded Jewish students from institutions of higher learning in 1933, Professor Buber helped to set up adult education classes for them.
Dr. Buber was dismissed from his professorship. He spoke out, however, once lecturing on "The Power of the Spirit" in Berlin, although he knew that 200 SS (elite guard) men were in the audience. Utterly silenced in 1938, he went to Palestine, where he was professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University until his retirement in 1951.
In Israel, Professor Buber was not a conformist. For example, he opposed the execution of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi put to death by Israel for crimes against the Jews.
"For such crimes," he said at the time, "there is no penalty." He took the position that where the imagination cannot envision a suitable penalty for such horrendous crimes as Eichmann's, a death penalty was meaningless.
One more piece which may be better as a post, but here it is:
Buber argues that good and evil are not two poles of the same continuum, but rather direction (Richtung) and absence of direction, or vortex (Wirbel). Evil is a formless, chaotic swirling of potentiality; in the life of man it is experienced as endless possibility pulling in all directions. Good is that which forms and determines this possibility, limiting it into a particular direction. We manifest the good to the extent we become a singular being with a singular direction.
Buber explains that imagination is the source of both good and evil. The “evil urge” in the imagination generates endless possibilities. This is fundamental and necessary, and only becomes “evil” when it is completely separated from direction. Man’s task is not to eradicate the evil urge, but to reunite it with the good, and become a whole being. The first stage of evil is “sin,” occasional directionlessness. Endless possibility can be overwhelming, leading man to grasp at anything, distracting and busying himself, in order to not have to make a real, committed choice. The second stage of evil is “wickedness,” when caprice is embraced as a deformed substitute for genuine will and becomes characteristic. If occasional caprice is sin, and embraced caprice is wickedness, creative power in conjunction with will is wholeness. The “good urge” in the imagination limits possibility by saying no to manifold possibility and directing passion in order to decisively realize potentiality. In so doing it redeems evil by transforming it from anxious possibility into creativity. Because of the temptation of possibility, one is not whole or good once and for all. Rather, this is an achievement that must be constantly accomplished.
Buber interprets the claim that in the end the good are rewarded and the bad punished as the experience the bad have of their own fragmentation, insubstantiality and “non-existence.” Arguing that evil can never be done with the whole being, but only out of inner contradiction, Buber states that the lie or divided spirit is the specific evil that man has introduced into nature. Here “lie” denotes a self that evades itself, as manifested not just in a gap between will and action, but more fundamentally, between will and will. Similarly, “truth” is not possessed but is rather lived in the person who affirms his or her particular self by choosing direction. This process, Buber argues, is guided by the presentiment implanted in each of us of who we are meant to become.
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