Eric Gans in Vancouver: Public Lectures Not to Miss

Eric Gans

Vancouver is this weekend host to a conference discussing the work (and its ongoing extension) of one of the most important intellectuals of our time - his importance for our increasingly decentralized age partly reflected in the fact that his non-charismatic work is not as well known as certain lesser intellectuals who cling to the public showmanship and sacrificial theatre of old. Eric Gans is a prophet for our age when each of us should aspire to be a little leader in our own little neck of the woods. Gans' work, Generative Anthropology, provides us a deeper understanding of what all humans minimally share, an understanding of how culture or language first emerged, in a memorable event, and is since re-presented or generated through history on scenes, or in events, of shared consciousness.

In a global village where cultural and cognitive differences among individuals and populations remain significant, a firmer grasp of those aspects of human nature or culture that we all share helps provide us intellectual and spiritual tools to meet all comers, face to face, and hopefully to engage them in useful exchange, or, if need be, better to confront our enemies, whatever our neck of the woods.

Now is not the time to try more seriously to summarize the work of Eric Gans (though following the links above will get you started). But if you're in Vancouver and you are interested in real thinking, you'd be a fool not to make time on Saturday to see Eric Gans himself present his discipline of Generative Anthropology to the public, in Room 527 of the Vancouver School of Theology, University of British Columbia, 1:30-3:30. (Directions and link to map here) The lecture is titled "Generative Anthropology: A New Way of Thinking". Another public lecture being given as part of the Generative Anthropology Thinking Event is by another great scholar, Eugene Webb of the University of Washington, on Friday afternoon, 1:30-2:45, also in Room 527 of the Vancouver School of Theology. Prof. Webb will speak on "Stepping Back: Religious Faith and the Differentiation of Consciousness".

Covenant Zone blog is also organizing a chat, Friday evening, with a great student of Generative Anthropology, Adam Katz, whom we have often linked at this blog; anyone interested in attending should send me an email by early Friday morning (truepeers@gmail.com) for details. Sorry for the late notice.

Come to the Covenant Zone and grow a little

On a day when we mourn more fallen Canadian soldiers, those brave souls struggling against great forces to make this a freer world, we need to rededicate ourselves to this shared cause.

Let us remind that the Covenant Zone bloggers and friends meet every Thursday, 7-9 pm, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library (in front of Blenz Coffee - look for the blue scarves). All those interested in renewing a national culture founded on citizen self-rule through a discipline conducive to freedom, and not through submission to any form of totalitarian political religion or phony expertise, are welcome and encouraged to join us. This week I will just give you a few links to help do that job of encouraging.

Concluding a speech to a European audience, Gil Bailie notes (as he might well if he were in Canada):

The history of this century and beyond will be very largely determined by whether the West finds a way to reclaim and reaffirm its spiritual inheritance and thereby reenergize a culture that fosters the genuine flourishing of its people and to which others – whatever their race, creed, ethnicity, or background – will want to transfer their national allegiance, culturally assimilate, and contribute their part.

On Canada Day, David Warren gave a useful update of the "two nations" interpretation of Canadian history:

Canada today is “deux nations.” There are the people who speak and think in French; and the people who speak and think in English. Together they make up one nation, with a continuous history, of more than five centuries. And then there are the people who speak, effectively, no language; who are deracinated, who have no history. That is the other nation. There is very little communication between these two nations -- the “old” Canada, and the “new” Canada -- because little communication is possible between two such groups. The one is aging and shrinking, the other expanding while growing ever younger. (Yet all trends are reversible.)

Demographically, but also spiritually. Those who have no language, no culture, no religion, no sense of past, and therefore of destiny, remain ever young. Outwardly they may become old and wrinkly, but inwardly they retain the mind of the pre-school child, unformed and cloudless. Yet they fulfil the requirements for citizenship set out in John Lennon’s famous hymn to emptiness, “Imagine”:

“Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there's no countries: it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for; and no religion, too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace.”

This is the postmodern dream, of perfect vacuity -- of the serenity we imagine will sweep over us like sleep. All we need do is abandon everything of value in our heritage, everything for which so many of our ancestors actually fought and died. In this great zero, everyone will be equal, and no person will be better than another. The heroine and the harlot will be one and the same, great saints and great monsters indistinguishable. “Judgementalism” -- the aversion that one individual has behaved better than another -- is, among the vacuous today, the only crime remaining to be punished. And likewise, under the doctrine of “multiculturalism,” there is nothing to choose between one culture and another. They are all just fine, and so far as any particularity can still be distinguished, “everything is beautiful in its own way.”

But if you can't judge and discriminate, e.g. identify how Islam is different from all other "religions", you can never hope to grow up and truly become humble in service to a decent human cause or nation. The contemporary left, in denying our need to validate meaningful differences, around which a free human exchange of differences may be organized, makes all important human differences either into a scandal for some abstract notion of "equality", or occasion for a phony celebration. In either case, it becomes the responsibility of some bureaucrat to smooth over the differences, with whatever force necessary. The left today intends to impose a cult of victims and "equality" that will require a managerial priesthood constantly to determine who is a victim of a lack of proper equality of outcome, to seek redress (since any freedom generally permitted people will not lead to equal outcomes, at any one point in time), and hence to restrict the freedom that inevitably leads people to create, affirm, and exchange, differences.

It is in the affirmation of what makes us a new race of free Canadians - entirely unlike, say, those who take advantage of a chance to come to the West to become well-paid doctors, only to then attempt to kill as many Westerners as they can - that we discover the need to renew and recreate the old and new covenants of the West that can make this nation a true unity in diversity. It is time to decide whether you are on the side of freedom or of the totalitarian management of "diversity".

Only people with constitutional or covenantal guarantees that they, as free persons, can take the lead in negotiating and trading their differences, and not have to rely on expert bureaucrats (or thugs with religious books) to do more than what is the expert's proper job - to help us recognize and institutionalize, not initiate or control, the fruits of a free national discourse - can be considered mature, fully-realized, human beings. Those who best understand our common human origin are today rightly arguing that we are meant by the original events of human creation (or by our Creator, if you prefer) to negotiate and perform our history in freedom, to continually seek for the truth.

And if we don't encourage each other to become fully human, each in our own way, by meeting and talking on a regular basis to this end, how are we going to be able to negotiate with the aliens if they return? Must we again behave like children who only know how to dominate or be dominated? Or can we show the aliens we are up to the possibilities of a truly free political and economic exchange? Or, as the liberal mainstream would today seemingly have it, must we convince the humanoid aliens that we are all just the same, or that our differences are all equal in importance, which is to say nothing that distinguishes us from them is really important, and certainly not to be discussed in public? Just a friendly thought -:)