Reviews for Mystical Theology : The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology

The average rating for Mystical Theology : The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-01 00:00:00 Elizabeth Schmidt 259 pages into this he says something that if he said it on page one might have been very helpful: “I stand by the classic norm of ‘no class without class consciousness’.” In this, volume two of this work, we have moved from the things you would have automatically associated with The Information Age: that is, the computers and networks and productive forces of volume one – to ‘the power of identity’. And this is anything but an obvious or expected shift in focus, well, for me at least. One of the things that you might expect in a network society, if you were thinking in an abstract sense, is that perhaps people would become increasingly ‘the same’ as we became increasingly ‘connected’. You know, why is it that every five miles you drive down a road in a country like England you get an absurdly different accent from the last one? And why is it that in Australia, even though each of the capital cities were built following significantly different migration patterns, for even someone with a degree in linguistics it seems a struggle to tell the difference in accent from someone from Perth or from Sydney (look them up on a map if you don’t know what I’m talking about). I guess the advent of national radio and television has done a lot to ensure that regional variations in accent in Australia have been kept to a minimum, even when, as with Perth, the people living there have often wanted to secede and to form their own nation apart from the rest of Australia. And yet, a huge desert, a bucket load of South African migrants, and an unfair distribution of the national goods and services tax later still isn’t enough to get them to speak with a different accent to the rest of us. Identity is a complicated thing and how it has been impacted by the development of the network society isn’t necessarily obvious. This book provides remarkably useful histories of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, Catalunya (particularly interesting as he says that it is a nation that doesn’t even want to be a state), Al-Qaeda, the Aum sect in Japan, the anti-globalisation movement, the Green movement, the Feminist movement, the Gay movement, and particularly the rise of national identities, despite the shrinking power of the nation state. Like I said in my review of the first volume, this guy could be the definition of ‘comprehensive’. So, class consciousness. Well, that’s the thing. In some ways you could see this book as a long justification for the ideas of Beck and Giddens – that is, those who are generally blamed for providing the intellectual justification of the UK Labour Party’s ‘third way’ – or of Bill Clinton’s betrayal of the Democratic Party’s ‘working class base’. Beck, Giddens and Castells all claim that there has been a fundamental shift in society brought about by the information revolution. In large part this can be measured by the decline in people identifying with their social class as defined by their industrial position within society – the decline in the power of the trade unions being a particularly clear manifestation of this – and instead towards issues often referred to using the cliché of today – identity politics. One of the things the sociologists like to consider, if a lot of very different things all seem to be occurring at more or less the same time, is to try to come up with a relatively simple mechanism that might provide a way to understand the ‘why now?’ question. The growth of the environmental movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, the black lives matter movement, Al-Qaeda seems likely to require a pretty wide brush if you are going to sweep all of them into the one dustpan. Although, he doesn’t quite give just one ‘explanation’ for all of these disparate social movements – that would smell a little too much like the ‘grand narratives’ that have gone out of fashion lately. All the same, many of these new movements have been enabled by the shift to the network society. So, when you look at Al-Qaeda, for example, it would be almost inconceivable for them to be as effective as they have been if the internet hadn’t existed. It provides a remarkable example of a networked organisation – where all members are assumed to be so committed to the cause that they can be relied upon to do whatever is necessary to further the organisation’s aims, so that the ‘nodes’ of the network can be assumed to work-on with limited communication between each other, and certainly continue without the requirement of a central node calling the shots. Green Peace is similar, if, however, the need for absolute secrecy is less an imperative in this case. Still, its ability to plan and act also works on an assumption of distributed leadership, given member commitment. The requirement that a central leadership must be blindly followed is mostly removed. These organisations are based on convictions that are not necessarily related to a person’s social class, but they do require people to identify with the issue involved – you need to be a ‘certain type of person’ to identify with these issues. As he says early on in this, many academics in the West have preferred to think that religious fundamentalism is an example of the sorts of child-like certainties that our more educated world will increasingly move away from – except, the opposite appears to be the case, as people seem to be becoming more religious with time, and with religion becoming an ever more central aspect of their identity. This is interesting, given his discussion in the first volume about the space of flows and how it dominates the space of place. That is, that the power in network capitalism is held by those least connected to places, those who turn all places into a kind of no-place, and whose lives are facilitated by the most modern aspects of the network society. Organisations, such as Al-Qaeda and Green Peace, make use of these same networks, and they could not be conceived outside of those networks, but they are opposed to what might be called the ‘disembodied’ version of globalism that those who occupy the space of flows support. The agnosticism of network societies, their abstract and other-worldliness, is something that unites the various manifestations of the ‘anti-global’ movement, from the extremes of Green Peace to Al-Qaeda. And nationalism has increased too – and this is particularly strange, since we are witnessing an age when the nation state could hardly be more impotent. This is true of almost all nation states, the US being virtually the only one he believes can sustain itself as a ‘sovereign nation’ – but at a significant cost. In fact, the actions of powerful nations to undermine the new world order – one that stresses all nations having some form of voice and rights – is presented here as ultimately undermining those nation states as well. Still, nationalism is on the rise, even while those who inhabit ‘the space of flows’ increasingly ignore the boundaries and borders associated with such a land based concept. Here, as in the next volume, he points to the power of nationality to rip the Soviet Union apart – and hints that this might also be a problem for Indonesia and China. However, he also points out the contrary force here too – the force that is (despite Brexit) unifying Europe and creating the ground for other trading blocks in Asia, North America and so on. The other end of this is the gay and feminist movements. In these cases, it is the fundamental change in the sexual power relations that has given these movements the ability to bring about change. The reason this is happening now is because those who previously were without any form of power are finding they are increasingly as powerful as those who once controlled their lives. One of the biggest changes facilitating this shift has been in the number of women entering the work force. While this may have led to an increasing precarity in work for everyone – particularly in the advanced nations in the west, since this has occurred on the basis of a sharp decline in industrial jobs, often well-paid and male, and led to a huge rise in service sector jobs, often part time, poorly paid and female. Still, this increasing precarity has moved slowly towards levelling male and female wages, if remarkably slowly, and thus in levelling power between males and females. It is inconceivable that an average household could exist on a single wage today and this economic shift has brought about a shift in the power relations in the family too. The patriarchy sustained itself on the basis of economic inequality – and as women have entered the labour force, that economic inequality (which clearly still exists) has narrowed to the extent where sustaining male domination has become increasingly difficult. There is a long discussion here about the psychology underlying all this – with women described as more likely to be willing to be lesbian than men are to be guy (something that even the figures quoted by him didn’t seem to support) but even if not, that they are more willing to pair with other women in even non-sexual relationships to bring up children away from the bloody racket that is men. Since this book isn’t seeking to make predictions, but rather to expose patterns, the point here is not that he sees a necessary end to patriarchy, but rather that if patriarch is going to continue to exist it will need to find other ways to express its power. And that essentially looks like it will have to mean either it disappearing or resorting to abject oppression. And since it seems women just don’t seem to be prepared to put up with that for too much longer, things will need to change… but time will tell. Similarly, this seems to be also true with the gay movement. He presents this as also another manifestation of the move away from an unquestioned acceptance of the right of the patriarchy to decide the limits of desire. These movements are providing fundamental shifts in how ‘families’ are shaping in society – or if what is occurring can even be called ‘families’ – given the rise in one-person households. I have to agree about the diminishing power of trade unions, but a few books I’ve read lately have stressed that the proportions of those considering themselves to be working class – in the UK, it seems to have been about the same proportion since the mid-sixties; and in the US I think the people who refer to themselves as working class has actually been increasing – might mean a shift back to class consciousness. Again, it is hard to tell such patterns, but people do certainly appear to be becoming aware that the field is tilted out of their favour and that social inequality is growing at perverse rates. This book left me feeling rather down, to be honest, particularly in relation to the growth of religious fundamentalist movements and identities and national identities. I was born in Northern Ireland – religion and nationalism stink of death to me. And calling nationalism patriotism doesn’t make the smell go away even a little bit. That these are presented as two of the major movements fighting against the excesses of the global network society doesn’t particularly fill me with hope or joy. The problem I had with this book was one of the silences here. He says at one point that identity is more than just the stuff you do – it is what provides our lives with meaning. So, being a Muslim, for instance, is probably going to mean more to you, and be more a defining aspect of your life, than being a plumber. Now, you might not get to ‘choose’ to be a Muslim – it being a function of where you were born and so on – but the commitment of your beliefs here are infinitely important. Just as being gay, for instance, is something ‘you are’ rather than something you might choose. But nothing in this book looks at the forms of identity I’m particularly interested in, and I’m not sure why not. For example, capitalism spends billions and billions of dollars every year seeking to influence you into believing that your ‘true’ identity is yet another purchase away. For instance, are you a Mac or a PC? A Holden or a Ford? A Marlboro man or will only the best do, with Benson and Hedges? Beer or wine? The identity products are endless, each carefully crafted, and each defines us both to those we meet and to ourselves at least as well as our nationality and our religions do. In fact, I would argue that because most of these choices are barely even conscious, they link us to tribes we are hardly even aware we belong to and so are even more insidious than those neatly labelled Catholic and Protestant. All the same – what a book.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-03-21 00:00:00 Dwight Moore I don’t know about you but I get insulted when an author explicitly uses psychoanalytical analysis approvingly to explain gay and lesbian behavior by stating babble along the lines that lesbians had a relationship of some kind with their dad and that made them lesbians and the feminist movement is made up of patriarchal hating lesbians who think San Francisco is special because after the war sailors came home from Asia. Granted some of the author’s nonsense is quoting others such as when he slams ‘feminist materialist’ but he does open his psycho-babble gay and lesbian section by telling the reader he agrees with those he quotes. I don’t need psycho-babble to explain why I am right handed nor do I need it in understanding why there are gays or lesbians (or trans, or bi). The single biggest sea change that happened after proposition hate (prop 8) in California was passed in 2008 is that people don’t see homosexuality as a behavior (choice) but they started seeing it as people were born that way and were made in God’s (or the universe's) image. This author explains homosexuals as if they are choosing their behavior not as if they are born that way. All of the author’s analysis of his subgroups and his framing seem quaint today. The author is writing in 1996 and 2004. There’s a tidal wave going on as he’s writing and he fails to put the pieces together. For example, he misfires on religion and what was really happening overall with how faith was being reassessed (or even how they are starting to no longer think that homosexuals are an abomination and are going to hell or are at least slowly start to reassess their judgments against them). He is fixated on global World Trade Organization protests and makes them vital to his narrative in his identity story telling. His feminist story telling bleeds oddly into lesbianism and into the psycho-babble I mentioned in the first paragraph. The author is describing the world within its own terms and doesn’t step out of the given paradigms of his time period. Psychoanalysis is a perfect example for why that is such a dangerous way of seeing the world. It took people to get out of that tautology in order to see its flaw and understand why it was circular, ‘everyone is repressed because they deny their own repression’ (Popper will say that in his excellent book ‘Open Society’). The author at times did get into clock time, cosmic time and secular verse sacred time and did remind me of the vastly superior book by Charles Taylor ‘Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity’. By all means, if you get the urge to read on this topic I would suggest Taylor’s book as superior in every way and that would save you from the disappointment of this book. Even if I had read this volume II when it first came out, I would have probably blasted it for its faults, but 15 years latter this book is an anachronism and is best left on the library bookshelf next to volume II of Oswald Spengler’s ‘Decline of the West’ both books best ignored today. Overall, this book is a somewhat awful way of getting at his overall theme that our identity is being reshaped by the internet and is weakening the nation and leading to globalism through our identity necessarily reevaluating our values outside of our traditional communal context. Read Charles Taylor’s book instead.