aristocracy and the Mandarins were already committed to the complex ethical system of Confucius, thanks to which the empire could be administered. What they wanted from these rather crude but mysterious mountain monks were light entertainment and amusement. Like a miraculous glove adjusting to the hand it needs to fit, the Tibetans complied by drawing upon their childhood memories of superstition and magic.
With the Chinese invasion of the 1950s most of the monks were either locked into the country or locked out. For those on the outside life continued as it always had, except that they travelled West instead of East. In the process they discovered that, as with the pre-revolutionary Chinese élites, our equivalent had a taste for mystical circus entertainment.
They also discovered that the rich Westerners, who were dissatisfied enough with their lives to approach a Buddhist teacher, were nevertheless attached to their money and belongings. They were often willing to finance the monks, but not to become devoutly poor themselves. Although Buddhism is primarily about giving up desires and attachments to the tangible world, these monks have diligently worked to demonstrate that Westerners are an exception to the rule. The monks have developed an anti-materialistic way of materialism to help us through our lives. Providing weâre willing to do a bit of chanting and fasting, we can have our cake and eat it. Reflecting on the glovelike approach of these holy men, it is difficult not to believe that our modern concept of the service industry was originally a Tibetan invention.
BURKE, EDMUND Â Â Â An unfortunate prisoner of the twentieth-century ideological prism, forcibly confined for the last sixty years to the Right, although for the preceding one hundred years he was considered one of the great voices of reform, which constantly sought justice and social balance.
Burke appears to be the victim of a peculiar long-standing cooperation between the intellectuals of Right and Left, in which all thinkers are reduced to a caricature in order to be fitted into a closed dialectic of extremes. For a long time the idealogues were unable to do this to him. His practical ideas of justice bore no relationship to the building-block abstractions of modern ideology.
Burke was not an isolated observer of real events, but an elected member of parliament, the leading strategist of the Whig opposition as well as its most eloquent spokesman. When he spoke, he didnât have the privilege that most modern philosophers take for grantedâthat they can constantly lay out ideal scenarios as if these are practical options. The complexity of Burkeâs message comes not from his philosophical line but from the effects of sitting on the parliamentary bench in a senior position dealing with reality on a daily basis. In that sense, Burkeâs trail resembles Thomas Jeffersonâs.
By picking out particular political events, almost any political group is able to deform the constant line of his career and claim him as their spiritual ancestor. As for Burkeâs enemies, they have concentrated on the practicalities of his daily political life in order to suggest that he was a hypocrite on the important philosophical questions.
By the early twentieth century, the reduction of Western political ideas to two reflecting opposites was almost complete. It suddenly seemed easy to ignore his long and passionate struggles for justice in America, India and Ireland so as to concentrate on what interested the ideologuesâhis âanti-revolutionaryâ stand during the French crisis that began in 1789.
The French Revolution was and remains the deflowering orgasmic event of the modern Left and Right. To have opposed it was to oppose the idea that a single overwhelming actârevolutionâcould solve the problems from which society suffered. From the 1790s on, the ideologues had found that Burkeâs opposition constantly
With the Chinese invasion of the 1950s most of the monks were either locked into the country or locked out. For those on the outside life continued as it always had, except that they travelled West instead of East. In the process they discovered that, as with the pre-revolutionary Chinese élites, our equivalent had a taste for mystical circus entertainment.
They also discovered that the rich Westerners, who were dissatisfied enough with their lives to approach a Buddhist teacher, were nevertheless attached to their money and belongings. They were often willing to finance the monks, but not to become devoutly poor themselves. Although Buddhism is primarily about giving up desires and attachments to the tangible world, these monks have diligently worked to demonstrate that Westerners are an exception to the rule. The monks have developed an anti-materialistic way of materialism to help us through our lives. Providing weâre willing to do a bit of chanting and fasting, we can have our cake and eat it. Reflecting on the glovelike approach of these holy men, it is difficult not to believe that our modern concept of the service industry was originally a Tibetan invention.
BURKE, EDMUND Â Â Â An unfortunate prisoner of the twentieth-century ideological prism, forcibly confined for the last sixty years to the Right, although for the preceding one hundred years he was considered one of the great voices of reform, which constantly sought justice and social balance.
Burke appears to be the victim of a peculiar long-standing cooperation between the intellectuals of Right and Left, in which all thinkers are reduced to a caricature in order to be fitted into a closed dialectic of extremes. For a long time the idealogues were unable to do this to him. His practical ideas of justice bore no relationship to the building-block abstractions of modern ideology.
Burke was not an isolated observer of real events, but an elected member of parliament, the leading strategist of the Whig opposition as well as its most eloquent spokesman. When he spoke, he didnât have the privilege that most modern philosophers take for grantedâthat they can constantly lay out ideal scenarios as if these are practical options. The complexity of Burkeâs message comes not from his philosophical line but from the effects of sitting on the parliamentary bench in a senior position dealing with reality on a daily basis. In that sense, Burkeâs trail resembles Thomas Jeffersonâs.
By picking out particular political events, almost any political group is able to deform the constant line of his career and claim him as their spiritual ancestor. As for Burkeâs enemies, they have concentrated on the practicalities of his daily political life in order to suggest that he was a hypocrite on the important philosophical questions.
By the early twentieth century, the reduction of Western political ideas to two reflecting opposites was almost complete. It suddenly seemed easy to ignore his long and passionate struggles for justice in America, India and Ireland so as to concentrate on what interested the ideologuesâhis âanti-revolutionaryâ stand during the French crisis that began in 1789.
The French Revolution was and remains the deflowering orgasmic event of the modern Left and Right. To have opposed it was to oppose the idea that a single overwhelming actârevolutionâcould solve the problems from which society suffered. From the 1790s on, the ideologues had found that Burkeâs opposition constantly
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