Finding One’s Own Past Blameworthy

There are times when life is busy, lived forwards with a view to the future that drives out any consciousness of the past. Sometimes it is just the opposite and things slow down and we live in quiet days that give us space to reflect. In such moments, if there is no imagined, sought-after future ready to fascinate our attention, then the mind is free to cast backwards through our personal histories and we can relive the past. This is often thought a bad thing, perhaps unconsciously regarded as suitable only for the elderly and the severely ill – that is, for those who haven’t any future to look forward to. That way lies only nostalgia, that unseemly retreat into what may never have been and which, in any case, certainly never may be again. Why, after all, would someone with more road left ahead than behind concern herself with what has been left behind?

It is an inevitability, of course, that thoughts of the past will arise in the present. We should try our best not to torture ourselves with them, but they come naturally and, just as naturally, they go. And while it is true the retreat to nostalgia can drain life of something in the present, it can also provide much comfort if the present moment is one of misfortune. Really, this is not better or worse than living with one’s mind fixed to the future, it is only cultural biases that make it seem so. After all, both hope and despair are future-oriented emotions, reactions to merely imagined circumstances – the least that may be said of rumination upon the past is that it is, ostensibly, about what has actually happened.

This is to understate the value of contemplating our own journeys, however. For when we imagine the future we always do so on our terms: “I will be as I am, but better, richer, stronger, wittier, more beautiful, charming, and intelligent, of more subtle and refined tastes, my every project will come to fruition…” Or, alternatively, “every possible misfortune will be visited upon me: I shall lose my youthful beauty, my mind will decline, my body will go to fat, I will lose my home, business, and family…” Both versions project our assessments of ourselves and our lives as we find them into an imaginal realm that reality does not and cannot push back against. But when we look back upon the past, we also do so on our terms – and sometimes what we can see is ugly.

(I am, of course, thinking about myself here.)

We should be glad if we look back and see misbehaviour – e.g. that our dissembling was transparent, our sense of entitlement delusional, our manipulations odious. It’s not that we are or ought to be glad that we behaved poorly or that we hurt people and lost friends, rather, we are glad because we now know that such behaviour is bad and that we should not act in such a way. We should be glad because we see that, although we didn’t meet our current standards for behaviour, those standards are there now and better than they were.

Despite My Previous Anti-Christian Assertions…

A Google search on christian buddhism brought me to this and this and this.  There’s both a lot of relief and negativity in evidence in the comments to these articles.  Personally, I understand both sides of the equation.

I don’t think it’s possible actually to be a 50/50 Christian-Buddhist or Buddhist-Christian, even if you are one of the mystical sorts of Christians.  Fundamentally, Buddhists and Christians differ pretty strongly in respect to that which is of transcendental concern and the differences between the two families of views cannot really be papered over.  Buddhism generally denies a metaphysical ground or source, which denial marks a huge non-starter for anything that reasonably could be categorized as ‘Christian’.  Having said that, however, there are some Buddhist sects that view the ultimate reality as being Mind (huge contentious discussion, I know, but let’s not get into it now) and so actually approximate something like the theism that they are doctrinally required to reject – even so, their ultimate reality of Mind is worlds apart from the God of Christianity, even in His more mystical articulations.  For instance, the Buddhists’ ubiquitous Mind/Awareness/etc. remains decidedly impersonal, while even the mystical Christians’ God has elements of volition, personality, etc. (granted, of distinctly different kind than those of humans).  These are particularly sticky problems and cannot simply be brushed under the rug.

Stained glass Padmasambhava (click to embiggen).
Source: http://www.yulokod.ca/limited_edition-2.htm

Moreover, there is obviously a lot of hurt that motivates the negative comments on these posts.  People who perhaps had bad experiences with Christianity or its representatives but who retained their spiritual hunger (which is being fed by Buddhism) would, quite naturally, view the entire religion with a jaundiced eye (indeed, most atheists are of this sort too).  Then there are those who simply have great distaste for what is familiar or a mild-to-extreme valuing of what is foreign, whatever the genesis of these feelings (see la wik: cultural cringe, oikophobia, xenophily, xenocentrism).  To such people, any attempt to forge a synthesis or bring Jesus into Buddhism pushes all the wrong buttons – Buddhism was supposed to be their escape from all that.

And then, of course, there are fervent, fundamentalist convert Buddhists as well (Namdrol of E-Sangha comes to mind).

Tibetan-ish Jesus in Gethsemane (click to embiggen).
Source: http://indigenousjesus.blogspot.ca/2012/04/gethsemane.html

But the negative comments seemed also to be missing the point of what the author was getting at, which really wasn’t that Christianity and Buddhism ought to merge into some perfect synthesis of the two.  Rather, his point (which I thought was fairly obvious) is that as Westerners we will have some degree of resonance with the morals, myths, and cultural containers (e.g. art, architecture, music) of our heritage and that this is something that Buddhism will have to accommodate itself to if it is truly to become rooted in Western soil.  I fully agree with that thesis even though I, raised in an atheist household, do not and never did believe Jesus to be God or any of the other stuff that goes with Christian belief.  Still, as an archetype of forgiveness and compassion, Jesus speaks far more powerfully to me than Tara and John the Baptist may speak to some Westerners as a more appropriate meditational figure for purification than Vajrasattva.  Nor does the process necessarily need be entirely about Christianity, either.  I have elsewhere expressed some interest in buddhizing Halloween (which I have been meaning to do a follow-up on).  And the Grim Reaper surely must be capable of being put to meditational use?

I love this so much, my print looks awesome on the wall (click to embiggen).
Source: http://www.etsy.com/listing/66376822/gothic-macabre-art-print-the-grim-reaper

The ironic thing about this is that both certain Western xenophiles and Asian cultural conservatives will fight tooth and nail against such a process taking place, even though it is exactly the same process (insofar as history does not repeat, it rhymes) as the synthesis of pre-Buddhist Tibetan folk-religion with Buddhism or of Kwan-Yin’s transformation from goddess to Bodhisattva.

My Conversation With Kenneth Folk

Today I had the good fortune of spending several hours shooting the breeze with Kenneth Folk. He just happened to be in town and was game to have lunch with me and a fellow dharma geek (though lunch got long). If I had had the presence of mind to think ahead, I probably would’ve made a point of taking mental notes, but (alas and alack) I did not!  But it was a most fascinating and enlightening (ha!) conversation, ranging from fMRI studies of meditators’ brains, to meta-models of enlightenment, to our individual practices (thanks for the advice, Kenneth!) and much else besides.  It’s not every day that an opportunity like that crops up.  I haven’t much to say about it right now – I need to give time to my subconscious to grind away until something good comes out of it – but I think this will provide fodder for this space, in any case.

 

EDIT: I posted this before I was finished, so I added a little more.

Anatta and Sunyata: Substantially Different Concepts?

(Did you get the joke?)

Perhaps someone out there with deeper knowledge of the doctrinal subtleties of this can help clear this up for me, but I have to admit that I’m hard pressed to find a big, hairy difference between the two.

Anatta can be interpreted strictly to mean that there is nothing whatsoever that arises in perception that is or is a property of a self, soul, me, etc.  This would be a completely accurate interpretation.  This is also exactly identical to the emptiness of ‘the self’.  So far, so good.  But if we allow a somewhat greater degree of freedom in interpretation, we could say that anatta also applies to all phenomena, not simply the putative self – all things are without their own self-nature (that is, there is nothing that is or is a property of a self of those objects).  How do we know this?  Anicca: if things had their own self-nature, they would not change, now would they?  Which is precisely the evidence brought out to support the supposedly different (and putatively superior) Mahayana doctrine of emptiness.

Now, of course, anatta is (almost?) always used in Theravada parlance to refer to one’s own self, soul, me, ‘I’ (etc.) as a matter of training.  Theravada theory and practice aims to  produce arahants through the clear perception of the emptiness of their own selves – it is not entirely clear whether it follows from this that arahants must therefore have overcome the misperception of inherent existence (or self) in external objects as well.  Regardless, this seems much less different than the sectarian cheerleaders for ‘higher’ yanas seem to suggest – it seems as though Theravadins do not talk about emptiness much because it’s not really relevant to their aims.  Does it boil down to this, or is there a real distinction that I’m missing here?

Was David Hume Enlightened?!

Hume needed all that fat to fuel his ginormous brain.

So, I’ve been sitting meditation for a long while.  It’s an interesting pursuit – the more one tries to just stay with whatever is here now, the more strange things seem to pop up.  Anyway, I was thinking about Hume today because of something that made itself so blindingly obvious during my meditation practice that I couldn’t help but make the connection.  Basically, whenever you have a sensory input (say, a fly passes through your field of vision), that input will be followed extremely shortly thereafter by an involuntary mental reproduction of that sight-event.  This comes almost immediately after the original sensory input and is noticeably different in ‘feel’ than a memory of the same event after the fact.

Now, you can’t force yourself to notice this – indeed, trying to force it will either entirely prevent it from occurring or will cause too much mental noise to allow you to notice it (I’m not sure which it is) – but it definitely happens.  And now I think I understand where Hume got his notion about ideas.  Or at least I think I do – my suspicion is that he was up to some sort of what today would be recognized to be meditation (granted, he probably didn’t sit full-lotus).  Which makes me wonder – where in God’s name did he get the idea to do that from?  For goodness sake, he even appears to have figured out anatta!

And so I’m seriously freaked – was David Hume… enlightened?

Buddhizing Halloween

As Buddhism left India it came into contact with other, sometimes remarkably different cultures.  The result is that there is a religion that incorporates and expresses itself through images (and the concepts they represent) as colourful, complicated, and symbolically laden as this:

Now that’s busy! (Click to embiggen some)

… but also as simple as this:

Enso. (Go ahead and embiggen if you want to, but I’m not sure what the point would be)

The point here being, of course, that as Buddhism has moved into new cultural spaces it has adopted the forms of those cultures, using them to express peculiarly Buddhist themes and sometimes supplanting their original meanings entirely [1].  Naturally, as Buddhism becomes rooted in the West we should expect the same treatment to be applied to Western cultural forms, even though by all accounts it appears to be appalling to many culturally conservative Buddhists that Westerners should want to practice and celebrate Buddhadharma in ways that resonate for their own cultures.  But, speaking for myself, I see this as a good thing – I am not Tibetan/Japanese/Chinese/Thai/etc. and I do not wish to be [2].

Which brings me to an upcoming and super-fun holiday: Halloween [3]!  If there is any holiday that I want/is a good candidate for being Buddhized, this is it.  There are several reasons why this is so:

• Although the broad outlines of the origins and meaning of Halloween are known, they are not believed in.  The holiday is widely celebrated by Western (at least, North American) society, but is largely devoid of meaning.  Indeed, the actual meaning of “trick or treat” never occurred to me until I was an adult – it had always just been a phrase that got you candy (which was good enough).
• More specifically, Halloween has no Christian content, which makes Buddhization much easier for two reasons.  First and most importantly, to Buddhize Halloween will not cause outrage among/backlash from the Christian community.  Secondly, there’s no metaphysics that will need abandonment or difficult reworking in order to fit with Buddhist thought.
• The West needs to take the dark side of life more seriously.
• There are tantalizing hints of existing traditions that could, by mere suggestion, be transformed from simple fun into meaningful ritual.
• It’s so so so fun.

I can think of a few obvious ways this could be done:

• Teachings about hungry ghosts/hell realms.
• Pointing out the emptiness of ‘external’ perceptions (what’s behind the mask?).
• Transforming emotional reactions, demonstrating purity of the world (the old peeled grapes as eyeballs, spaghetti as brains, etc.).
• Chod practice!
• Death and rebirth teachings/meditations.

I know that I’m not the only Buddhist to be thinking about this holiday specifically or about similar themes, so what does everyone think?  Western Buddhists, what are your ideas and suggestions?!

Getting in the *spirit* of things (har)!

Update:  The pic of the grim reaper on the lotus comes from here.  I wanted to give the artist any traffic that might flow through, ’cause I think that’s a pretty awesome pic (but sorry everyone, I bought the last print!).

Endnotes:

[1] Buddhism is not the only religion to have done so – Christianity has done so for Christmas and many of its saints.

[2] Which has just now inspired a thought vis-a-vis the Christianizing of old Pagan traditions throughout Europe.  Modern historians generally talk about this in negative terms (since there is a palpable anti-Christian bias in academia) but I wonder how much of this really was imposed by the Church.  If I as a Westerner want Halloween Buddhized, couldn’t former Pagans have wanted their festivals Christianized?  Food for thought.

[3] I know it’s a little early yet, but I’m thinking about it because I’m thinking about costumes!

Blog Direction Question & BDSM and Politics

First, I have to apologize for having gone AWOL for the past while.  I was both busy with work and tied up in the evenings such that writing slipped down the list of priorities.  Also, my mind has mostly been a vacant expanse of uninterestingness and unoriginality.  I only post thoughts that, while not necessarily being the first instance of their having-been-thought in the history of the whole universe, nevertheless are made chez moi.  I haven’t had (m)any of those lately and those I have I can’t decide whether to post or not – they are mostly of a political nature and I more-or-less want to avoid politics on this blog.  Should I set up a different site for those, expand this blog’s mandate, or just let them be?

But here’s a cute one that occurred to me the other day.  I was thinking about the nature of sexual fetishes and BDSM came up (natch).  Anyway, it occurred to me that there are people in this world who actually prefer to be subordinate to others.  Similarly, there are those that prefer to be dominant.  We have all met people of both types.  So the question is: where does this leave egalitarianism?  Presumably, those who would like to follow want to be led (and so shall be led) but egalitarianism requires that people become self-led.  Isn’t this sort of harmful to would-be sheep (also, would-be shepherds)?  Doesn’t taking their interests into account sort of necessitate creating structures of dominance?

Just Because It Sounds Science-y Doesn’t Mean It’s Not Faith-Based*

Beyond the limits of reasonable expectation.

There is a perception out there that whatever issues from the mouth or pen of one who wears a white coat is completely rational, reliable, evidence-based and trustworthy.  While this is more probably true when the white-coat is discussing some matter of little social or political import – electron spin, say, and not neuro-physiological differences between the sexes, etc. – we shouldn’t be too certain that this is always the case.  Scientists are, after all, only human and are subject to all the failings of reason and intelligence that goes along with being a member of our species.

This all comes to mind as I was flipping through the latest edition of Scientific American (cover pictured to the left).  This ‘special issue’ includes a number of essays by some far-out looking people about the future of ‘Science’ and where it’s going to take us.  Of course, the contents of these essays are interesting (entertaining, to be more exact) but fundamentally have no real basis for some of the claims they make – rather they are expressions of faith that Science will continue to uplift, enlighten, and transform the human race into whatever the authors of these pieces would like for humans to be.

Here’s a guy who looks like he has predictions you can trust. Just look in his eyes.

Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong about that per se – we all have to have faith in something, after all – but we should recognize religious-style beliefs for what they are, even if they come with the trappings of Science, because Science/science has a place of privilege among powerful decision-makers [1].  And when powerful people can be convinced that something is a good idea on the basis of Science, a lot of money, effort, and time can be wasted on pointless endeavours.

SETI is a paradigm example of this dynamic in action.  A number of scientists got together and convinced important people in the US government that there is a high enough probability that alien life is somewhere out there that it would be worthwhile to set up (at grand cost to the taxpayer) a series of listening-stations to see if we couldn’t pick up ancient signals travelling across the void.  Presumably they used math to help bamboozle the decision-makers in question. Now, there are a number of practical problems with the program [2] but there are even nastier issues on the purely conceptual side of things.

Specifically, the program only makes sense if one has a reasonably high estimation of the probability of there being other intelligent beings out there, but at the time that the program was being set up there was really no (good) reason to think that such is the case.  Sure, there were inferences and assumptions drawn from what we knew/know about how the world actually is – paraphrase: “it is simply inconceivably improbable that in a universe this vast in which intelligent life has arisen once, intelligent life should not have arisen multiple times” – but none of this constitutes any reason to think that it is so.  Perhaps it is improbable that a universe with laws and a history such as our own should only have intelligent life emerge once.  OK, so perhaps we happen to live in a really improbable sort of universe?

“But we can’t know if we don’t check!”  Ah, yes, true, but here’s the difference between SETI-fans and myself: I don’t expect (or hope) to discover anything and, moreover, I don’t think that a failure to find evidence would demonstrate anything about the universe we inhabit (remember those practical difficulties I mentioned?).  But if one believes without evidence that there must be life out there – or that it’s inconceivably improbable that there isn’t – it does raise the question of why this is believed.  Perhaps, like me, they find the grandeur of a well-populated universe appealing or, also like me, they find the prospect of human solitude infinitely depressing.  But those are not scientific reasons, to be sure, and today, after the program has been running for several decades without any positive results, it seems ever more probable that we are alone.  “But we can’t give up!  What if we do and we miss our chance to know?  It would be horrible!”

No, it wouldn’t.

USA! USA! (They’d’ve actually mooned Russia too, if it weren’t for decompression-related issues. This seemed the next best thing.)

Granted, this does not comprise reason not to engage in the program.  For all the bluster about the advancement of science that has flowed from NASA, the real point of the thing was never really about ‘Science’, was it?  It was more about having the best vantage point in the universe from which to flip Russia the bird (also, something about weaponizing space).  The science stuff has been a nice bonus but I sincerely doubt that it was what was foremost on JFK’s mind when he decided that humans would set foot up there.  And this is fine because we don’t need to have Science decide what our every act, individual and collective, should be – what more reason do we need for landing on the moon than “because it’s awesome” (awesomeness, I note, is not a property of objects/events measurable by ordinary scientific methods).  But pretending that because SETI might have some scientifically valuable side-effects means that it is principally a scientifically driven enterprise is simply misleading – it’s a(n ugly) Hail Mary for those who wish that ST:TNG was a documentary film.

An ugly cathedral of sorts. Did I mention ugly?

Endnotes:

* Not the catchiest title ever, so perhaps I ought to have gone with the alternate title for this entry: “SETI Is a Waste of Time, Effort and Money and Should Be Shut Down.”  That one is a bit on the blunt side, though.  Oh well.

[1] Despite much upset about the “War On Science” being perpetrated solely by those nasty Republicans (after all, who else could possibly have any non-scientific reasons for rejecting scientific findings) there really isn’t anyone (important) who is actually against science as an endeavour, just findings that are inimical to his or her particular agenda(s).  Whenever I hear the phrase “War On Science” trotted out I immediately start wondering whose research agenda is being impeded or whose political agenda stands to gain by painting the other guys as low-brow, fundamentalist rubes.

[2] I can think of a few off the top of my head.  First and most simply, there is no guarantee that any radio signals that an alien civilization might have sent into space would reach Earth without having degraded in pure noise.  Second, there is the matter of timing.  Could such signals even have had the time to reach us if they did exist and if so, how do we know they haven’t already gone by and we’ve missed our chance?  Heck, maybe we are the first intelligent lifeform to develop technologies that would send signals out into space (in which case, listening stations: no dice).  Third, why should we assume that any alien civilization will be using media enough like our own that we could even recognize their communications for what they are – alien tv broadcasts may just look like noise to us (and vice versa).

MetalliCharnel

A Charnel Ground Mandala?

So I went to see Metallica play last night in Vancouver, which was super fun (re-living my adolesence a bit) and the stage show was quite spectacular (I’m not going to recount the entire thing here though, go google it if you’re interested).  But the show actually got me to thinking – which is not generally the sort of thing that one should be doing at a rock concert.

There were these prop coffins that lowered from the ceiling which had video screens on their ‘lids’ that showed ‘inside’ the coffins.  There were people who appeared to be RIP-ing but who woke up and appeared confused about where they were.  Naturally, when they discoovered that they were trapped, they started panicking (as one would upon waking up in a dark, confined space, not knowing how one got there).  Meanwhile, the stage beneath all this – which itself was a giant walk-on video screen – show images of maggots writhing.

Now, of course I may not be interpreting these images quite as the band intends them to be interpreted (although I don’t imagine that I’m wrong), but it struck me that the point was the horror at the inescapability of death – that it is we who are trapped in the coffins and that all of our struggles are just as panicked and fearful as those of the actors on the screens.  (The feeling of powerlessness and being trapped or cornered by death is a theme running through their entire oeuvre.)  And all this made me think of Buddhist charnel ground practices like Chod.  Perhaps Metallica’s stage show is a large-scale charnel ground mandala/practice of sorts, looking at death in the eye and not flinching – which would mean that there already is something like Tantric practices at work in the West.

It’s not too insane an idea – when the lights go down the whole world shrinks to the size of the room, all centred on the stage, which is itself a visual representation of meditation on death, as seen above.  And it’s certainly in the realm of possibility – Kirk Hammett is apparently some variety of Buddhist.  But that is enough for now, just a quick thought I had.  I now have to go help tidy the kitchen and deal with this weird neck pain that showed up this morning (can’t imagine how that might have happened).  But check it out, the stage is even shaped (sort of) like a vajra:

A vajra?!

Implications, As Promised

In my post from last week I suggested that there would be some implications that flow from the unethical foundations of all ethics.  So, even though they are not completely thought-through, here are the ones which strike me as fairly obvious:

• All reasoning about ethics/morality is wrong – though not, I should say, in the sense in which orderlies stealing from old ladies in nursing homes is wrong, but in the sense of factual error.  At best, one could say that all ethical reasoning is partial.  This is, of course, because any conception of the Good will necessarily have one or more holes or blind-spots in its analysis which it cannot acknowledge since to do so would be to undermine itself.  As I pointed out before, any conception of the Good requires the suppression of certain beliefs, behaviours, or desires that are inimical to its successful realization.  However, if these beliefs (etc.) are not ‘bad’ apart from their utility/disutility to one or another conception of the Good and, more importantly, comprise the conception of and striving after the Good of the one who has them, then the suppression of same by some other ‘Good’ and its agents constitutes a harm for that person.  The suppressing ‘Good’, however, cannot acknowledge that it is doing actual harm, else it wouldn’t be Good (or even good) – and thus we arrive at notions of ‘restorative punishments’ and ‘merely perceived harms’ which, to my mind, are pretty obvious attempts at bootstrapping coherency and universality. [1]

• Another consequence is that to a significant degree, might makes right.  For society to be possible among numerous individuals it is necessary that there be some commonality of expectations, understandings, etc.  In order to achieve this, some conception of the Good – it will probably be easiest with one already broadly agreed to, but that is a matter of practicality – will need to be privileged over all others, even if this means doing harm to those who may not share in this conception.  Once a conception of the Good is being enforced, however, it becomes extremely difficult to resist seeing as ‘Good’ for many reasons: practicality, it grounds one’s way of life, simple lack of imagination, fear of social disapproval, etc.  By way of illustration, consider the case of hereditary monarchies.  It is difficult to imagine how any large number of people (thousands, millions) would have originally assented to absolute power being wielded over their lives by a single person and all his descendants thereafter except through coercion, but we do know that it was eventually taken for granted by most that this was simply the natural state-of-affairs and was a Good thing.  Moreover, it isn’t clear that this should strike us as overly troubling either.  Beijing is trying to enforce the use of a single language and a dominant culture throughout China, which is no doubt harmful to cultural and linguistic conservatives throughout that country [2], but which is no different in kind from any number of similar programs enacted throughout Europe which gave us all those countries we know today. [3]  Of course, this is meant to deny neither the reality of moral disagreement nor that the exercise of might (whether social or physical) can and often does do harm [4], but is rather to say that we should acknowledge that enforcement and the regularity it provides does, over time, tend towards legitimacy.

• We should probably drop any worries about ‘doing the right thing’ or ‘being in the right’ because these are only possible from within the framework of some conception of the Good.  There are several problems with this.  First, as mentioned above (1), it will actually make us blind to certain situations that require moral consideration but which our favoured idea of the Good won’t admit of.  Second, since any conception of the Good necessarily and categorically does harm to some number of people based on the ‘appropriateness’ of their beliefs, behaviours, desires, etc., then actions flowing from any such conception will be prone to causing harm in the ways characteristic to that idea, making it entirely likely that if we do harm when acting on our idea of the Good we shall ignore or rationalize away said harm.  Third, even if we can acknowledge an area of ethical concern, trying to stay too closely within the boundaries delineated by our theory will constrain our scope of action in ways that may not be useful and may even prevent us from ever getting around to being useful because we cannot make our ethical algorithm compute.

Endnotes:

[1] I am assuming here that we are considering universalist-type conceptions of the Good (e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, Socialism/Marxism).  An obvious objection is that such criticism wouldn’t apply to conceptions of the Good that are more local in scope like, for example, Jewish rules regarding diet or ethnic-chauvinist moralities.  It is an interesting question but one which I must set aside for now although, as a pre-reflective sort of comment, I will note that most ‘local’ conceptions of the Good tend to be those held by less-powerful groups.

[2] Who, in an attempt to find allies to apply external political pressure against such policies, have formed a partnership of convenience with Western Progressives who have little patience for such linguistic and cultural conservatives within their own countries.  The irony is both palpable and delicious.

[3] Similar programs were successfully undertaken in places such as France, Germany, Italy, and Great Britain (among others) and unsuccessfully in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia,  greater Spain (Spain, Portugal, the Basques), and the Soviet Union (among others).  Presently, the European project is attempting to forge a supra-nationality among the European nations – time will tell whether that will take (and perhaps, looking at the current European situation, not much time at that).

[4] Nor is it meant to imply that I am untroubled by the implementation of such policies in the Chinese case (or generally, for that matter).