April 26, 2006

• Obliquely Tangential

  When I went to sleep last night it was raining.  It turned to snow overnight.

  
  I don’t know how to nudge you.
  What’s a nudge?
  How to do it?

  Am I just paranoid, or could someone in Xanga admin have concocted the
  flag program for systematic snitching as not only a way to get the Blog
  Patrol off their backs, but a way to get more people registered here,
  perhaps to make up the numbers inevitably lost when they boot out the
  flag-ragged miscreants?

  Think about it like I’ve been thinking ever since I decided to take my
  objectionable or questionable entries into protected status because
  John suggested that this was a way to protect them from censorship and
  me from banishment.  When my posts are protected, they’re not just
  invisible to every logged-in Xangan not on my list, but to every listed
  Xangan who isn’t logged and every non-Xangan in cyberspace.  That
  last category is a big one, lots bigger than my anemic little list of
  tolerant adults.

  The level of
  Driveway Lake is lower than it was a few days ago when the warm
  sunshine was hastening snowmelt.  This shot shows the firewood
  “steppingstones” that enable me to get into the car without getting my
  feet wet.
  
  I know that some Xangans don’t want to be read by non-Xangans or by
  Xangans who are anonymous through not having logged on.  I know
  this because I have encountered a few sites where that fact is stated
  explicitly.  I cannot pretend to understand the reasoning and I
  don’t think I really want to know.  I suspect that somewhere back
  in the deep recesses of the motivation there is some fear underneath it
  all.

  I know that I have more non-Xangan readers than Xangan readers. 
  FingerprintX told me so.  Some of those readers have let me know they’re there,
  either by using the email link to communicate, or by registering with
  Xanga so they can comment and tell me about finding me with a Google
  search for Hells Angels or orthomolecular therapy, ME/CFIDS, Kodiak
  Island, or the dualistic fallacy, among other things.  I don’t
  want to shut them out.  I have a partially-baked plan, involving a
  prominently placed message, maybe in the header, providing an alternate
  route.

  Granny
  Mousebreath doesn’t trust me to go walking around the neighborhood
  alone.  She’s always on the alert for any sudden attack upon my
  ankles by small rodents.

  
  How did I get off on that tangent?  That’s not what I wanted to
  blog about today.  I intended to get on here and talk about the
  connection between Malthus and the New Age.  I was mildly blown
  away to find it as I was on Google a few days ago, searching for images
  and details about T. Robert Malthus the misbegotten father of Victorian
  sexual repression.

  I suspect that Malthus himself would have been appalled and scandalized
  if he had been alive in 1877 when Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant
  went on trial for publishing an obscene book.  Besant and
  Bradlaugh had been influenced by Malthus’s frightening predictions of
  overpopulation, famine and poverty if the birth rate weren’t
  checked.  Known as neo-Malthusians, they republished in England an
  anonymously written American booklet,  Charles Knowlton’s The Fruits of Philosophy or the Private Companion of Young Married People.  It was a birth control guide, and did not rely on the “moral restraint” preached by Malthus the clergyman.

  There’s a crane out there somewhere.  I heard it calling.
  
  The neo-Malthusians fought the accusations and won.  The trial
  brought a lot of attention to them and to the cause of birth control,
  leading Annie Besant to write and publish her own book on birth
  control,  The Laws of Population.  The Times of London called
  it, “indecent, lewd, filthy, bawdy and obscene.”  It was a popular
  success.

  Annie Besant herself was that connection between Malthus and the New
  Age movement that I mentioned.  She was the young wife of a
  clergyman and mother of a son and daughter when her study of the
  Christian Bible brought to her awareness a number of internal
  contradictions.  When she told her husband that her conscience
  would not permit her to take Communion, he ordered her out of their
  home.  A legal separation was arranged; their son remained with
  his father while Annie and her daughter moved to London.

  After the publication of Annie’s book and the publicity surrounding it,
  Rev. Besant used the hoopla to convince the courts to give him custody
  of their daughter.  Annie Besant then became an activist for
  women’s rights in the factories and sweat shops of England.  Among
  the friends she made were a number of prominent Socialists and atheists.

  As I listened
  to the calls from the sandhill crane out there beyond the open muskeg,
  I moved from one opening in the treeline to another, trying to get a
  glimpse of it.  I know it’s there.
  
  Besant’s own definition of her Freethinking brand of nineteenth century atheism is a masterpiece of clarity and reason:

  The position of the atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know
  nothing about God and therefore I do not believe in Him or it. What you
  tell me about your God is self-contradictory and is therefore
  incredible. I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me. I do
  deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God.

  Her booklet, Why I Do Not Believe in God, published with Charles Bradlaugh in 1887, is online in two parts.  Part 1  Part 2

  In the 1890s, Besant became associated with Theosophy and with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.  

  Blavatsky’s legacy, through all of the planes and subplanes, and eras and sub-eras, was a new occult vision of reality (further developed by
  later Theosophical and related esotericists such as Rudolph
  Steiner, Alice Bailey,
  etc), which offered a detailed occult analysis
  of the structure of manifest reality and the spiritual forces and
  hierarchies behind it.  And in spite of all its convolutions, it cannot
  be denied that in her cosmology and anthropogony Blavatsky recovers and
  repopularises the universal emanationist
  cosmology
  of previous esoteric teachings, stating it in a form that
  was to sustain the intelligent and mystically orientated Westerner at
  least
  until the explosion of occult knowledge and influx of original Indian
  mysticism that began in the late sixties, and that still has power and
  influence in both the Hermetic tradition and the New Age movement even
  today.

  See, I told you there was a connection between Malthus and the New
  Age.  That pleasant humming sound you can hear if you listen
  carefully is old Malthus the moral restrainer, spinning in his grave.

  This one looks better large.  Click it.
  
  

  • 12:49 am
  • 5 Comments