The Art & Philosophy of Bonsai

We all know what to think of when we hear the term bon­sai: dwarf trees. Or so Shi­nobu Noza­ki titled his book, the very first major pub­li­ca­tion on the sub­ject in Eng­lish. Dwarf Trees came out in the 1930s, not long after the Japan­ese art of bon­sai start­ed draw­ing seri­ous inter­na­tion­al atten­tion. But the art itself goes back as far as the sixth cen­tu­ry, when Japan­ese embassy employ­ees and stu­dents of Bud­dhism return­ing from sojourns in Chi­na brought back all the lat­est things Chi­nese, includ­ing plants grow­ing in con­tain­ers. By six or sev­en cen­turies lat­er, as scrolls show us today, Japan had tak­en that hor­ti­cul­tur­al tech­nique and refined it into a prac­tice based on not just minia­tur­iza­tion but pro­por­tion, asym­me­try, poignan­cy, and era­sure of the artist’s traces, one that pro­duces the kind of trees-in-minia­ture we rec­og­nize as art­works, and even mas­ter­works, today.

It hard­ly needs say­ing that bon­sai trees don’t take shape by them­selves. As the name, which means “tray plant­i­ng” (盆栽), sug­gests, a work of bon­sai must begin by plant­i­ng a spec­i­men in a small con­tain­er. From then on, it demands dai­ly atten­tion in not just the pro­vi­sion of the prop­er amounts of water and sun­light but also care­ful trim­ming and adjust­ment with trim­mers, hooks, wire, and every­thing else in the bon­sai cul­ti­va­tor’s sur­pris­ing­ly large suite of tools.

You can see a Japan­ese mas­ter of the art named Chi­ako Yamamo­to in action in “Bon­sai: The End­less Rit­u­al,” the BBC Earth Unplugged video at the top of the post. “Shap­ing nature in this way demands ever­last­ing devo­tion with­out the prospect of com­ple­tion,” says its nar­ra­tor, a point under­scored by one bon­sai under Yamamo­to’s care, orig­i­nal­ly plant­ed by her grand­fa­ther over a cen­tu­ry ago.

You’ll find even old­er bon­sai at the Nation­al Bon­sai Muse­um at the U.S. Nation­al Arbore­tum in Wash­ing­ton D.C. In the video “Bon­sai Will Make You a Bet­ter Per­son,” cura­tor Jack Sus­tic — an Amer­i­can first exposed to bon­sai in the mil­i­tary, while sta­tioned in Korea — shows off a Japan­ese white pine “in train­ing” since the year 1625. That unusu­al ter­mi­nol­o­gy reflects the fact that no work of bon­sai even attains a state of com­plete­ness. “They’re always grow­ing,” say Sus­tic. “They’re always chang­ing. It’s nev­er a fin­ished art­work.” In Nation­al Geo­graph­ic’s “Amer­i­can Shokunin” just above, the tit­u­lar bon­sai cul­ti­va­tor (shokunin has a mean­ing sim­i­lar to “crafts­man” or “arti­san”), Japan-trained, Ore­gon-based Ryan Neil, expands on what bon­sai teach­es: not just how to artis­ti­cal­ly grow small trees that resem­ble big ones, but what it takes to com­mune with nature and attain mas­tery.

“A mas­ter is some­body who, every sin­gle day, tries to pur­sue per­fec­tion at their cho­sen endeav­or,” says Neil. “A mas­ter does­n’t retire. A mas­ter does­n’t stop. They do it until they’re dead.” And as a work of bon­sai lit­er­al­ly out­lives its cre­ator, the pur­suit con­tin­ues long after they’re dead. The bon­sai mas­ter must be aware of the aes­thet­ic and philo­soph­i­cal val­ues held by the gen­er­a­tions who came before them as well as the gen­er­a­tions that will come after. Wabi sabi, as bon­sai prac­ti­tion­er Pam Woythal defines it, is “the Japan­ese art of find­ing beau­ty in imper­fec­tion and pro­fun­di­ty in nature, of accept­ing the nat­ur­al cycle of growth, decay, and death.” Shibu­mi (or in its adjec­ti­val form shibui) is, in the words of I Am Bon­sai’s Jonathan Rodriguez, “the sim­ple sub­tle details of the sub­ject,” man­i­fest for exam­ple in “the appar­ent sim­ple tex­ture that bal­ances sim­plic­i­ty and com­plex­i­ty.” Looked at cor­rect­ly, a bon­sai tree — leaves, branch­es, pot, and all — reminds us of the impor­tant ele­ments of life and the impor­tant ele­ments of art, and of the fact that those ele­ments aren’t as far apart as we assume.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

This 392-Year-Old Bon­sai Tree Sur­vived the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Blast & Still Flour­ish­es Today: The Pow­er of Resilience

Kintsu­gi: The Cen­turies-Old Japan­ese Craft of Repair­ing Pot­tery with Gold & Find­ing Beau­ty in Bro­ken Things

The Philo­soph­i­cal Appre­ci­a­tion of Rocks in Chi­na & Japan: A Short Intro­duc­tion to an Ancient Tra­di­tion

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

Dis­cov­er the Japan­ese Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed to Col­lect­ing Rocks That Look Like Human Faces

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save Available as a Free AudioBook and eBook: Features Narrations by Paul Simon, Kristen Bell & Stephen Fry

In 2009, Prince­ton philoso­pher Peter Singer pub­lished his prac­ti­cal handbook/manifesto The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Pover­ty. Bill and Melin­da Gates called it “a per­sua­sive and inspir­ing work that will change the way you think about philanthropy”–a book that “shows us we can make a pro­found dif­fer­ence in the lives of the world’s poor­est.”

Now, on its tenth anniver­sary, Singer has released an updat­ed ver­sion of The Life You Can Save. And he’s made it avail­able as a free ebook, and also as a free audio­book fea­tur­ing nar­ra­tions by Kris­ten Bell, Stephen Fry, Paul Simon and Natalia Vodi­ano­va, among oth­ers. You can get the down­loads here.

Singer’s web­site fea­tures a page where you can find the best char­i­ties that address glob­al pover­ty. Each char­i­ty has been “rig­or­ous­ly eval­u­at­ed to help you make the biggest impact per dol­lar.” If you are look­ing for an effi­cient approach, you can also make one sin­gle dona­tion to sup­port all of the char­i­ties vet­ted and rec­om­mend­ed by Singer’s orga­ni­za­tion.

The audio ver­sion of The Life You Can Save will be added to our meta col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Life You Can Save in 3 Min­utes, by Peter Singer

Peter Singer’s Course on Effec­tive Altru­ism Puts Phi­los­o­phy Into World­ly Action

The Jour­nal of Con­tro­ver­sial Ideas, Co-Found­ed by Philoso­pher Peter Singer, Will Pub­lish & Defend Pseu­do­ny­mous Arti­cles, Regard­less of the Back­lash

Richard Dawkins’ Uncut Inter­views with Peter Singer & Big Thinkers

 

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An Animated Introduction to Cynicism, the Anti Conformist Philosophy That Originated in Ancient Greece

The word “cyn­i­cal,” like “sto­ic,” has come to have a very spe­cif­ic mean­ing in Eng­lish, one that bears only a par­tial resem­blance to the ancient Greek phi­los­o­phy from which it came. “Cyn­ics,” writes psy­chi­a­trist Neel Bur­ton, “often come across as con­temp­tu­ous, irri­tat­ing, and dispir­it­ing.” They are bit­ter, unhap­py peo­ple, defined by thor­ough­go­ing pes­simism, summed up in the Oscar Wilde quote about those who “know the price of every­thing and the val­ue of noth­ing.” This char­ac­ter­i­za­tion is part­ly the result of ancient slan­der.

As with many move­ments of the past, the first Cyn­ics were named by their ene­mies. Dio­genes of Sinope, often cred­it­ed as the first Cyn­ic (though there were oth­ers before him), was “an indi­vid­ual well known for dog-like behav­ior,” notes Emory Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Julie Pier­ing at the Inter­net Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy. “As such, the term [Cyn­ic, from kunikos, or “dog-like”] may have begun as an insult refer­ring to Dio­genes’ style of life, espe­cial­ly his pro­cliv­i­ty to per­form all of his activ­i­ties in pub­lic.” His shame­less­ness and exile from Greek civ­il soci­ety for the crime of coun­ter­feit­ing made him unwel­come in polite com­pa­ny.

But Dio­genes turned his pub­lic humil­i­a­tion into exper­i­men­tal phi­los­o­phy. Like many who have insults hurled at them reg­u­lar­ly, the ear­ly Cyn­ics “embraced their title: they barked at those who dis­pleased them, spurned Athen­ian eti­quette, and lived from nature…. What may have orig­i­nat­ed as a dis­parag­ing label became the des­ig­na­tion of a philo­soph­i­cal voca­tion.” Of what did their phi­los­o­phy con­sist? In the TED-Ed video above, script­ed by Maynooth Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor of Ancient Clas­sics William Desmond, we learn the basics.

Like the Sto­ics who came after them, Cyn­ics val­ued sim­plic­i­ty and self-suf­fi­cien­cy. But unlike many a famed Sto­ic philosopher—such as Nero’s advi­sor Seneca or the Emper­or Mar­cus Aurelius—Diogenes and his dis­ci­ples cared noth­ing for mate­r­i­al com­forts or polit­i­cal pow­er. The Cyn­ics were vagrant exhi­bi­tion­ists by choice. Dio­genes “did not go about his new exis­tence qui­et­ly but is said to have teased passers­by and mocked the pow­er­ful, eat­ing, uri­nat­ing, and even mas­tur­bat­ing in pub­lic.”

If the philoso­pher lived like a dog, this does not mean that he had aban­doned all human val­ues, only rede­fined them. Dogs aren’t bit­ter, angry pes­simists. “They’re hap­py crea­tures,” Desmond’s les­son points out, “free from abstrac­tions like wealth and rep­u­ta­tion.” The “dog philoso­phers” were a seri­ous irri­ta­tion, liv­ing exam­ples of a social alter­na­tive in which mon­ey, fame, and pow­er meant noth­ing. Their con­tent­ment posed a chal­lenge to the estab­lished order of things.

Cyn­ics fol­lowed Dio­genes’ exam­ple for almost a thou­sand years after his death—and even far longer, we might argue, if we con­sid­er them fore­run­ners of hobos, hip­pies, and every inten­tion­al­ly home­less wan­der­er who decides to rid them­selves of prop­er­ty and soci­ety and live ful­ly on their own terms.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Sto­icism, the Ancient Greek Phi­los­o­phy That Lets You Lead a Hap­py, Ful­fill­ing Life

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 35 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

A Short Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Hypa­tia, Ancient Alexandria’s Great Female Philoso­pher

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Ram Dass (RIP) Offers Wisdom on Confronting Aging and Dying

After his dis­missal from Har­vard for research­ing LSD with Tim­o­thy Leary, Richard Alpert left the U.S. for India in 1967. He devot­ed him­self to the teach­ings of Hin­du teacher Neem Karoli Baba and returned to the States a per­ma­nent­ly changed man, with a new name and a mes­sage he first spread via the col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly-edit­ed and illus­trat­ed 1971 clas­sic Be Here Now.

In the “philo­soph­i­cal­ly misty, stub­born­ly res­o­nant Bud­dhist-Hin­du-Chris­t­ian mash-up,” writes David March­ese at The New York Times, Ram Dass “extolled the now-com­mon­place, then-nov­el (to West­ern hip­pies, at least) idea that pay­ing deep atten­tion to the present moment—that is, mindfulness—is the best path to a mean­ing­ful life.” We’ve grown so used to hear­ing this by now that we’ve like­ly become a lit­tle numb to it, even if we’ve bought into the premise and the prac­tice of med­i­ta­tion.

Ram Dass dis­cov­ered that mind­ful aware­ness was not part of any self-improve­ment project but a way of being ordi­nary and aban­don­ing excess self-con­cern. “The more your aware­ness is expand­ed, the more it becomes just a nat­ur­al part of your life, like eat­ing or sleep­ing or going to the toi­let” he says in the excerpt above from a talk he gave on “Con­scious Aging” in 1992. “If you’re full of ego, if you’re full of your­self, you’re doing it out of right­eous­ness to prove you’re a good per­son.”

To real­ly open our­selves up to real­i­ty, we must be will­ing to put desire aside and become “irrel­e­vant.” That’s a tough ask in a cul­ture that val­ues few things more high­ly than fame, youth, and beau­ty and fears noth­ing more than aging, loss, and death. Our cul­ture “den­i­grates non-youth,” Ram Dass wrote in 2017, and thus stig­ma­tizes and ignores a nat­ur­al process every­one must all endure if they live long enough.

[W]hat I real­ized many years ago was I went into train­ing to be a kind of elder, or social philoso­pher, or find a role that would be com­fort­able as I became irrel­e­vant in the youth mar­ket. Now I’ve seen in inter­view­ing old peo­ple that the minute you cling to some­thing that was a moment ago, you suf­fer. You suf­fer when you have your face lift­ed to be who you wish you were then, for a lit­tle longer, because you know it’s tem­po­rary.

The minute you pit your­self against nature, the minute you pit your­self with your mind against change, you are ask­ing for suf­fer­ing.

Old­er adults are pro­ject­ed to out­num­ber chil­dren in the next decade or so, with a health­care sys­tem designed to extract max­i­mum prof­it for the min­i­mal amount of care. The denial of aging and death cre­ates “a very cru­el cul­ture,” Ram Dass writes, “and the bizarre sit­u­a­tion is that as the demo­graph­ic changes, and the baby boomers come along and get old, what you have is an aging soci­ety and a youth mythology”—a recipe for mass suf­fer­ing if there ever was one.

We can and should, Ram Dass believed, advo­cate for bet­ter social pol­i­cy. But to change our col­lec­tive approach to aging and death, we must also, indi­vid­u­al­ly, con­front our own fears of mor­tal­i­ty, no mat­ter how old we are at the moment. The spir­i­tu­al teacher and writer, who passed away yes­ter­day at age 88, con­front­ed death for decades and helped stu­dents do the same with books like 2001’s Still Here: Embrac­ing Aging, Chang­ing, and Dying and his series of talks on “Con­scious Aging,” which you can hear in full fur­ther up.

“Record­ed at the Con­scious Aging con­fer­ence spon­sored by the Omega Insti­tute in 1992,” notes the Ram Dass Love Serve Remem­ber Foun­da­tion, the con­fer­ence “was the first of its kind on aging. Ram Dass had just turned six­ty.” He begins his first talk with a joke about pur­chas­ing his first senior cit­i­zen tick­et and says he felt like a teenag­er until he hit fifty. But jok­ing aside, he learned ear­ly that real­ly liv­ing in the present means fac­ing aging and death in all its forms.

Ram Dass met aging with wis­dom, humor, and com­pas­sion, as you can see in the recent video above. As we remem­ber his life, we can also turn to decades of his teach­ing to learn how to become kinder to our­selves and oth­ers (a dis­tinc­tion with­out a real dif­fer­ence, he argued), as we all face the inevitable togeth­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wis­dom of Ram Dass Is Now Online: Stream 150 of His Enlight­ened Spir­i­tu­al Talks as Free Pod­casts

You’re Only As Old As You Feel: Har­vard Psy­chol­o­gist Ellen Langer Shows How Men­tal Atti­tude Can Poten­tial­ly Reverse the Effects of Aging

Bertrand Russell’s Advice For How (Not) to Grow Old: “Make Your Inter­ests Grad­u­al­ly Wider and More Imper­son­al”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Zen of Bill Murray: I Want to Be “Really Here, Really in It, Really Alive in the Moment”

We all know, on the deep­est lev­el, what we have the poten­tial to achieve; once in a great while, we even catch glimpses of just what we could do if only we put our minds to it. But what, if any­thing, does it mean to “put our minds to it”? In break­ing down that cliché, we might look to the exam­ple of Bill Mur­ray, an actor for whom break­ing down clichés has become a method of not just work­ing but liv­ing. In the 2015 Char­lie Rose clip above, Mur­ray tells of receiv­ing a late-night phone call from a friend’s drunk­en sis­ter. “You have no idea how much you could do, Bill, if you could just — you can do so much,” the woman kept insist­ing. But to the still more or less asleep Mur­ray, her voice sound­ed like that of “a vision­ary speak­ing to you in the night and com­ing to you in your dream.”

Through her ine­bri­a­tion, this woman spoke direct­ly to a per­sis­tent desire of Mur­ray’s, one he describes when Rose asks him “what it is that you want that you don’t have.” Mur­ray replies that he’d “like to be more con­sis­tent­ly here,” that he’d like to “see how long I can last as being real­ly here — you know, real­ly in it, real­ly alive in the moment.” He’d like to see what he could do if he could stay off human auto-pilot, if he “were able to not get dis­tract­ed, to not change chan­nels in my mind and body, so I would just, you know, be my own chan­nel.” He grounds this poten­tial­ly spir­i­tu­al-sound­ing idea in phys­i­cal terms: “It is all con­tained in your body, every­thing you’ve got: your mind, your spir­it, your soul, your emo­tions, it is all con­tained in your body. All the prospects, all the chances you ever have.”

Mur­ray had spo­ken in even more detail of the body’s impor­tance at the pre­vi­ous year’s Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val. “How much do you weigh?” he asked his audi­ence there, lead­ing them into an impromp­tu guid­ed med­i­ta­tion. “Try to feel that weight in your seat right now, in your bot­tom right now.” If you can “feel that weight in your body, if you can come back into the most per­son­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, a very per­son­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, which is: I am. This is me now. Here I am, right now. This is me now.” The idea is to be here now, to bor­row the words with which coun­ter­cul­tur­al icon Ram Dass titled his most pop­u­lar book. But Mur­ray approached it by read­ing some­thing quite dif­fer­ent: the writ­ings of Gre­co-Armen­ian Sufi mys­tic George Ivanovich Gur­d­ji­eff, whose con­tri­bu­tion to Mur­ray’s comedic per­sona we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.

Gur­d­ji­eff believed that most of us live out our lives in a hyp­no­sis-like state of “wak­ing sleep,” nev­er touch­ing the state of high­er con­scious­ness that might allow us to more clear­ly per­ceive real­i­ty and more ful­ly real­ize our poten­tial. In recent years, Mur­ray has tak­en on some­thing like this role him­self, hav­ing “long bypassed mere celebri­ty sta­tus to become some­thing close to a spir­i­tu­al sym­bol, a guru of zen, and his fre­quent appear­ances among the mass­es (in a karaoke bar! In a couple’s engage­ment pho­to!) are report­ed on the inter­net with the excite­ment of sight­ings of the mes­si­ah.” So writes the Guardian’s Hadley Free­man in a Mur­ray pro­file from 2019, which quotes the actor-come­di­an-trick­ster-Ghost­buster-bod­hisatt­va return­ing to his wish to attain an ever-greater state of pres­ence. “If there’s life hap­pen­ing and you run from it, you’re not doing the world a favor,” he says. “You have to engage.” And if you do, you may dis­cov­er pos­si­bil­i­ties you’d nev­er even sus­pect­ed before.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Phi­los­o­phy of Bill Mur­ray: The Intel­lec­tu­al Foun­da­tions of His Comedic Per­sona

Lis­ten to Bill Mur­ray Lead a Guid­ed Medi­a­tion on How It Feels to Be Bill Mur­ray

An Ani­mat­ed Bill Mur­ray on the Advan­tages & Dis­ad­van­tages of Fame

Nine Tips from Bill Mur­ray & Cel­list Jan Vogler on How to Study Intense­ly and Opti­mize Your Learn­ing

What Is High­er Con­scious­ness?: How We Can Tran­scend Our Pet­ty, Day-to-Day Desires and Gain a Deep­er Wis­dom

97-Year-Old Philoso­pher Pon­ders the Mean­ing of Life: “What Is the Point of It All?”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“The Philosophy of “Flow”: A Brief Introduction to Taoism

“In the West,” the I Ching, or the Book of Changes, “is main­ly known as a div­ina­tion man­u­al,” writes philoso­pher and nov­el­ist Will Buck­ing­ham, “part of the wild car­ni­val of spu­ri­ous notions that is New Age spir­i­tu­al­i­ty.” But just as one can use the Tarot as a means of read­ing the present, rather than pre­dict­ing future events, so too can the I Ching serve to remind us, again and again, of a prin­ci­ple we are too apt to for­get: the crit­i­cal impor­tance of non-action, or what is called wu wei in Chi­nese phi­los­o­phy.

Non-action is not pas­siv­i­ty, though it has been mis­char­ac­ter­ized as such by cul­tures that over­val­ue aggres­sion and self-asser­tion. It is a way of exer­cis­ing pow­er by attun­ing to the rhythms of its mys­te­ri­ous source. In the reli­gious and philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion that became known as Tao­ism, non-action achieves its most canon­i­cal expres­sion in the Tao Te Ching, the clas­sic text attrib­uted to sixth cen­tu­ry B.C.E. thinker Laozi, who may or may not have been a real his­tor­i­cal fig­ure.

The Tao Te Ching describes non-action as a para­dox in which dual­is­tic ten­sions like pas­siv­i­ty and aggres­sion resolve.

That which offers no resis­tance,
Over­comes the hard­est sub­stances.
That which offers no resis­tance
Can enter where there is no space.
Few in the world can com­pre­hend
The teach­ing with­out words, or
Under­stand the val­ue of non-action.

Wu wei is some­times trans­lat­ed as “effort­less action” or the “action of non-action,” phras­es that high­light its dynam­ic qual­i­ty. Arthur Waley used the phrase “action­less activ­i­ty” in his Eng­lish ver­sion of the Tao Te Ching. In the short video intro­duc­tion above, “philo­soph­i­cal enter­tain­er” Einzel­gänger explains “the prac­ti­cal sense” of wu wei in terms of that which ath­letes call “the zone,” a state of “action with­out striv­ing” in which bod­ies “move through space effort­less­ly.” But non-action is also an inner qual­i­ty, char­ac­ter­ized by its depth and still­ness as much as its strength.

Among the many sym­bols of wu wei is the action of water against stone—a grace­ful organ­ic move­ment that “over­comes the hard­est sub­stances” and “can enter where there is no space.” The image illus­trates what Einzel­gänger explains in con­tem­po­rary terms as a “phi­los­o­phy of flow.” We can­not grasp the Tao—the hid­den cre­ative ener­gy that ani­mates the universe—with dis­cur­sive for­mu­las and def­i­n­i­tions. But we can meet it through “still­ness of mind, curb­ing the sens­es, being hum­ble, and the ces­sa­tion of striv­ing, in order to open our­selves up to the work­ings of the uni­verse.”

The state of “flow,” or total absorp­tion in the present, has been pop­u­lar­ized by psy­chol­o­gists in recent years, who describe it as the secret to achiev­ing cre­ative ful­fill­ment. Non-action has its ana­logues in Sto­icis­m’s amor fati, Zen’s “back­ward step,” and Hen­ri Bergson’s élan vital. In the Tao te Ching, the Way appears as both a meta­phys­i­cal, if enig­mat­ic, phi­los­o­phy and a prac­ti­cal approach to life that tran­scends our indi­vid­ual goals. It is an impro­visato­ry prac­tice which, like rivers carv­ing out their beds, requires time and per­sis­tence to mas­ter.

In a sto­ry told by Taoist philoso­pher Zhuangzi, a renowned butch­er is asked to explain his seem­ing­ly effort­less skill at carv­ing up an ox. He replies it is the prod­uct of years of train­ing, dur­ing which he renounced the strug­gle to achieve, and came to rely on intu­ition rather than per­cep­tion or brute force. Embrac­ing non-action reveals to us the paths down which our tal­ents nat­u­ral­ly take us when we stop fight­ing with life. And it can show us how to han­dle what seem like insol­u­ble prob­lems by mov­ing through, over, and around them rather than crash­ing into them head on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cre­ativ­i­ty, Not Mon­ey, is the Key to Hap­pi­ness: Dis­cov­er Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s The­o­ry of “Flow”

Albert Ein­stein Tells His Son The Key to Learn­ing & Hap­pi­ness is Los­ing Your­self in Cre­ativ­i­ty (or “Find­ing Flow”)

Slavoj Žižek: What Full­fils You Cre­ative­ly Isn’t What Makes You Hap­py

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Radical Tea Towels Offer a Graphic Crash Course in Progressive American History

Those of us who are deeply dis­ap­point­ed to learn we won’t be see­ing Har­ri­et Tubman’s face on a redesigned $20 bill any time soon can dry our eyes on a Tub­man tea tow­el… or could if the revered abo­li­tion­ist and activist wasn’t one of the fam­i­ly-owned Rad­i­cal Tea Towel’s hottest sell­ing items.

The pop­u­lar design, based on one of Charles Ross’ murals in Cam­bridge, Maryland’s Har­ri­et Tub­man Memo­r­i­al Gar­den is cur­rent­ly out of stock.

For­tu­nate­ly, the com­pa­ny has immor­tal­ized plen­ty of oth­er inspi­ra­tional fem­i­nists, activists, civ­il rights lead­ers, authors, and thinkers on cot­ton rec­tan­gles, suit­able for all your dish dry­ing and gift giv­ing needs.

Or wave them at a demon­stra­tion, on the cre­ators’ sug­ges­tion.

The need for rad­i­cal tea tow­els was hatched as one of the company’s Welsh co-founder’s was search­ing in vain for a prac­ti­cal birth­day present that would reflect her 92-year-old father’s pro­gres­sive val­ues.

Five years lat­er, bom­bard­ed with dis­tress­ing post-elec­tion mes­sages from the States, they decid­ed to expand across the pond, to high­light the achieve­ments of “amaz­ing Amer­i­cans who’ve fought the cause of free­dom and equal­i­ty over the years.”

The descrip­tion of each tow­el’s sub­ject speaks to the pas­sion for his­to­ry, edu­ca­tion  and jus­tice the founders—a moth­er, father, and adult son—bring to the project. Here, for exam­ple, is their write up on Muham­mad Ali, above:

He was born Cas­sius Clay and changed his name to Muham­mad Ali, but the name the world knew him by was sim­ply, ‘The Great­est.’ Through his remark­able box­ing career, Ali is wide­ly regard­ed as one of the most sig­nif­i­cant and cel­e­brat­ed sports fig­ures of the 20th cen­tu­ry and was an inspir­ing, con­tro­ver­sial and polar­is­ing fig­ure both inside and out­side the ring. 

Ali start­ed box­ing as a 12-year-old because he want­ed to take revenge on the boy who stole his bike, and at 25, he lost his box­ing licence for refus­ing to fight in Viet­nam. (‘Why should they ask me to put on a uni­form and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bul­lets on brown peo­ple in Viet­nam when so-called Negro peo­ple in Louisville are treat­ed like dogs and denied sim­ple human rights?’ He demand­ed.) It was per­haps the only time he sur­ren­dered: mil­lions of dol­lars, the love of his nation, his career… but it was for what he believed in. And although his views on race were often con­fused, this was just exam­ple of his Civ­il Rights activism.

Ali became a light­ning rod for dis­sent, set­ting an exam­ple of racial pride for African Amer­i­cans and resis­tance to white dom­i­na­tion dur­ing the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. And he took no punch lying down – nei­ther inside the box­ing ring nor in the fight for equal­i­ty: after being refused ser­vice in a whites-only restau­rant in his home­town of Louisville, Ken­tucky, he report­ed­ly threw the Olympic gold medal he had just won in Rome into the Ohio Riv­er. So, here’s an empow­er­ing gift cel­e­brat­ing the man who nev­er threw in the (tea) tow­el.

The Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el blog is such stuff as will bring a grate­ful tear to an AP US His­to­ry teacher’s eye. The Fore­bears We Share: Learn­ing from Rad­i­cal His­to­ry is a good place to start. Oth­er top­ics include Abi­gail Adam’s Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion advo­ca­cy, the bridge designs of rev­o­lu­tion­ary philoso­pher Thomas Paine, and Bruce Springsteen’s love of protest songs.

(The Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el design team has yet to pay trib­ute to The Boss, but until they do, we can rest easy know­ing author John Steinbeck’s tow­el embod­ies Springsteen’s sen­ti­ment. )

Lest our edu­ca­tion­al dish­cloths lull us into think­ing we know more about our coun­try than we actu­al­ly do, the company’s web­site has a rad­i­cal his­to­ry quiz, mod­eled on the US his­to­ry and gov­ern­ment nat­u­ral­iza­tion test which would-be Amer­i­cans must pass with a score of at least 60%. This one is, unsur­pris­ing­ly, geared toward pro­gres­sive his­to­ry. Test your knowl­edge to earn a tea tow­el dis­count code.

Begin your Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el explo­rations here, and don’t neglect to take in all the rad designs cel­e­brat­ing the upcom­ing cen­ten­ni­al of wom­en’s suf­frage.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

2,200 Rad­i­cal Polit­i­cal Posters Dig­i­tized: A New Archive

11 Essen­tial Fem­i­nist Books: A New Read­ing List by The New York Pub­lic Library

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Hannah Arendt Explains Why Democracies Need to Safeguard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Themselves Against Dictators and Their Lies

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Two of the most tren­chant and endur­ing crit­ics of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Han­nah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, were also both Ger­man Jews who emi­grat­ed to the U.S. to escape the Nazis. The Marx­ist Adorno saw fas­cist ten­den­cies every­where in his new coun­try. Decades before Noam Chom­sky coined the con­cept, he argued that all mass media under advanced cap­i­tal­ism served one par­tic­u­lar pur­pose: man­u­fac­tur­ing con­sent.

Arendt land­ed on a dif­fer­ent part of the polit­i­cal spec­trum, draw­ing her phi­los­o­phy from Aris­to­tle and St. Augus­tine. Clas­si­cal demo­c­ra­t­ic ideals and an ethics of moral respon­si­bil­i­ty informed her belief in the cen­tral impor­tance of shared real­i­ty in a func­tion­ing civ­il society—of a press that is free not only to pub­lish what it wish­es, but to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for telling the truth, with­out which democ­ra­cy becomes impos­si­ble.

A press that dis­sem­i­nates half-truths and pro­pa­gan­da, Arendt argued, is not a fea­ture of lib­er­al­ism but a sign of author­i­tar­i­an rule. “Total­i­tar­i­an rulers orga­nize… mass sen­ti­ment,” she told French writer Roger Errera in 1974, “and by orga­niz­ing it artic­u­late it, and by artic­u­lat­ing it make the peo­ple some­how love it. They were told before, thou should not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very dif­fi­cult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behav­ior.”

This break­down of moral norms, Arendt argued, can occur “the moment we no longer have a free press.” The prob­lem, how­ev­er, is more com­pli­cat­ed than mass media that spreads lies. Echo­ing ideas devel­oped in her 1951 study The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, Arendt explained that “lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying gov­ern­ment has con­stant­ly to rewrite its own his­to­ry. On the receiv­ing end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great num­ber of lies, depend­ing on how the polit­i­cal wind blows.”

Bom­bard­ed with con­tra­dic­to­ry and often incred­i­ble claims, peo­ple become cyn­i­cal and give up try­ing to under­stand any­thing. “And a peo­ple that no longer can believe any­thing can­not make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capac­i­ty to act but also of its capac­i­ty to think and to judge. And with such a peo­ple you can then do what you please.” The state­ment was any­thing but the­o­ret­i­cal. It’s an empir­i­cal obser­va­tion from much recent 20th cen­tu­ry his­to­ry.

Arendt’s thought devel­oped in rela­tion to total­i­tar­i­an regimes that active­ly cen­sored, con­trolled, and micro­man­aged the press to achieve spe­cif­ic ends. She does not address the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in which we find ourselves—though Adorno cer­tain­ly did: a press con­trolled not direct­ly by the gov­ern­ment but by an increas­ing­ly few, and increas­ing­ly mono­lith­ic and pow­er­ful, num­ber of cor­po­ra­tions, all with vest­ed inter­ests in pol­i­cy direc­tion that pre­serves and expands their influ­ence.

The exam­ples of undue influ­ence mul­ti­ply. One might con­sid­er the recent­ly approved Gan­nett-Gate­house merg­er, which brought togeth­er two of the biggest news pub­lish­ers in the coun­try and may “speed the demise of local news,” as Michael Pos­ner writes at Forbes, there­by fur­ther open­ing the doors for rumor, spec­u­la­tion, and tar­get­ed dis­in­for­ma­tion. But in such a con­di­tion, we are not pow­er­less as indi­vid­u­als, Arendt argued, even if the pre­con­di­tions for a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety are under­mined.

Though the facts may be con­fused or obscured, we retain the capac­i­ty for moral judg­ment, for assess­ing deep­er truths about the char­ac­ter of those in pow­er. “In act­ing and speak­ing,” she wrote in 1975’s The Human Con­di­tion, “men show who they are, reveal active­ly their unique per­son­al iden­ti­ties…. This dis­clo­sure of ‘who’ in con­tradis­tinc­tion to ‘what’ some­body is—his qual­i­ties, gifts, tal­ents, and short­com­ings, which he may dis­play or hide—is implic­it in every­thing some­body says and does.”

Even if demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions let the free press fail, Arendt argued, we each bear a per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty under author­i­tar­i­an rule to judge and to act—or to refuse—in an ethics pred­i­cat­ed on what she called, after Socrates, the “silent dia­logue between me and myself.”

Read Arendt’s full pas­sage on the free press and truth below:

The moment we no longer have a free press, any­thing can hap­pen. What makes it pos­si­ble for a total­i­tar­i­an or any oth­er dic­ta­tor­ship to rule is that peo­ple are not informed; how can you have an opin­ion if you are not informed? If every­body always lies to you, the con­se­quence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes any­thing any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying gov­ern­ment has con­stant­ly to rewrite its own his­to­ry. On the receiv­ing end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great num­ber of lies, depend­ing on how the polit­i­cal wind blows. And a peo­ple that no longer can believe any­thing can­not make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capac­i­ty to act but also of its capac­i­ty to think and to judge. And with such a peo­ple you can then do what you please.

via Michio Kaku­tani

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt on “Per­son­al Respon­si­bil­i­ty Under Dic­ta­tor­ship:” Bet­ter to Suf­fer Than Col­lab­o­rate

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Enter the Han­nah Arendt Archives & Dis­cov­er Rare Audio Lec­tures, Man­u­scripts, Mar­gin­a­lia, Let­ters, Post­cards & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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