Triadic Commentary - Aesthetics is vastly more than an artistic quality

Among the revolutionary aspects of Triadic Philosophy the most important may be the elevation of aesthetics  to its rightful place in the triad  which is the root of how we think and therefore  of how we live and move and have our being. 
In Triadic Philosophy the root triad is Reality Ethics Aesthetics Aesthetics is the plane of activation Of iteration Of emergence from the struggle betwen  Etthics and Reality In Triadic Philosophy  anything can be any one of the three in a triad Triadic Philosophy always sees whatever is first as reality It always sees the Second as the challenge to this first Aesthetics the Third takes the result of this linkage and translates it into a hypothetical action a stab at doing something an experiment Its criteria are that truth and beauty be found in the action When these are lacking life is diminished The cosmos is set back We lose some of what we have gained
If this seems fanciful bear with me Every word of Triadic Philosophy has a place and a justification which  validates it as an aspect of being as ontological   as Reality   If today aesthetics is seen merely as artistic quality that is a reduction that will not stand. Philosophy has not done much better relegating aesthetics to vastly less than  Keats' equation of beauty and truth.

Triadic Philosophy follows Keats

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What Has Actually Become of Saul Allinsky?

When I wrote a 1965 article on Saul Alinsky for Christianity and Crisis magazine - later anthologized in the book Witness to A Generation -  Alinsky had seven years to live.  By 1972 when he died at age 63, he was the dean of community organizers in the United States. He had largely overcome the objections of his critics. save for the most obdurate on the hard right. 

Researching prior to the Obama run in 2008, I found two others had taken in-depth looks at Alinsky - Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Alinsky was clearly a major stop on the learning tour these two took before they decided that electoral politics is the best way to actually get things done in America.
And that's the story in a nutshell almost fifty years from the time I entered Alinsky's modest Michigan Avenue  office  and began an investigation of several months duration. The verdict then, which has not been contradicted, is that Saul Alinsky was a crack organizer whose basic values were tolerance, democracy and helpfulness. He  applied these values to get things done in a country where the ultimate prize was  and remains the control of governance itself. 
That Alinsky championed a confrontational, in-your-face militancy is   true, but the provocative things he did were like  the Yippies, not their violent cousins. Alinsky was good at scaring media and ginning up controversy. These were weapons of the powerless and marginalized. Saul gained very least a voice at the table for such folk.
Alinsky also left a legacy that was explicit, the Industrial Areas Foundation which continues his work and extends his influence. Community organization was responsible for the ground game of the Obama operation and the various permutations of the Tea Party insofar as they have involve grass roots efforts. Even the now-hapless Karl Rove achieved some successes by assiduous grass roots organizing.
That's all we are talking about. Grass roots organizing with a patina of Yippie sensibility. If one looks back today, one would have to conclude that Alinsky helped to fashion in the American mind a role for the community organizer, a role that transcends political party or religious persuasion. Today and in the future, there will be no democratic politics or social movement that does not make an implicit bow to Saul.
That said, both President Obama and Secretary Clinton realized the clear and daunting limitations of community organizing. Both entered electoral politics precisely to get things done that cannot be achieved just by gaining some power at the grass roots.  I went back and looked at one of the organizations Alinsky lofted into the stratosphere in the 1960s - the Woodlawn Organization (TWO) in Barack Obama's neighborhood in Chicago. At the time, Alinsky could stimulate apoplexy in the adjacent University of Chicago community with a few well-chosen sound bites. Today the conflict has morphed into what can only be called an arrangement in which both sides of the dispute have had successes. Suffice to say that without TWO things would have been worse over time. 
      I would hazard the guess that in the future Alinsky's methods and aims will be integral to American politics and determine both winners and losers, just as they did in November, 2012. The key to community organizing remains constant. Doing it and doing it well. Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store 


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Triadic Philosophy What I Believe

Following a conversation in which I was called obscure I offer the following as a concise statement  of what I believe 
I believe that Triadic Philosophy is an apt name for  a system of understanding which is as true as possible  
Triadic Philosophy has a root three or triad that is a frame for all thinking
It is Reality Ethics and Aesthetics
Reality is the realm from which all things rise and anything that rises can become a thought or word or sign
Ethics is the realm that Reality encounters abruptly In particular Ethics challenges all products of Reality and parses them in terms of four ontological values Tolerance Democracy Helpfulness and Non-Idolatry
Aesthetics is the realm of actualization the result of the encounter between Reality and Ethics You form an aesthetic plan or hypothesis aimed at bringing a thought word or sign to hypothetical reality If the Reality sign is your finances and the Ethics suggests changing a priority the Aesthetic is an action that will  have within it both truth and beauty
The values of Ethics are drawn  from the Reality of Jesus manifested in the Gospel of Mark Tolerance Democracy Helpfulness and Non-idolatry represent a huge advance on all prior ethical systems and their use in Triadic Philosophy could be a massive and universal pedagogical breakthrough
Anything can become a triad Triadic thinking trumps dualism and binary thinking Ethics belongs at the center of philosophy Aesthetics belongs at the center of building a human reality Religion is on the way out Universal spirituality based on some iteration of these beliefs is on the way in

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Two Strands of Progressive Effort Now Dispersed into The Ether

There were two small strands of renewalist effort nipping at the structures of American Protestantism in the 1960s and 1970s. One could be described as the Renewal Grass Roots Church effort and the other as the Sojourners effort. The difference between the two had to do with ethos. One rose up within the structures of the mainline denominations and of what was then the American Protestant establishment. Folk gravitating to this mode might be at home in any of the offices in the then-bustling Interchurch Center in New York City. The Sojourners strand takes its name from the magazine Sojourners and owes its ethos to the more amorphous but soon to become influential evangelical wing of American Protestantism. There was within the Sojourners constituency a certain element of pacifist sentiment and Roman Catholic linkage. There was a substantial desire to wrest from conservative and fundamentalist Christianity an initiative more faithful to the radical Jesus of the New Testament than the garden variety orthodoxies of, say, the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. 
Both of these strands had influence and more or less rose and fell with personalities who held high the torches of their points of view. On the renewal, local ecumenism side, the trajectory was initially strong but it went the way of the actual leaders of the various denominational and ecumenical efforts of the time. One of the most salient investigations I ever undertook was for the Lilly Endowment under the leadership of my friend Bob Lynn. Bob tasked me to determine the ecumenical hopes of church leaders of the late 1960s. With one exception, all of them predicted that the ecumenical structure of the churches  would move toward local cooperation and even merger over the coming decade. They were dead wrong. Denominations under duress circled their wagons and the local churches remain largely unchanged to this day, save for aging and closing. The shards of our common effort were a few inner city  cooperative ministries and a few other cooperative efforts which could be seen even today as progressive lights under the bushel of a declining enterprise. Oddly, interest in the renewalist grass roots cooperative model still exists. But the denominations are almost gone - shrunk to their current survival mode.
The Sojourners effort was more robust during the decades following the 1960s than the renewalist effort that preceded it. The waters it plied were entirely different from those of the church renewal effort. Sojourners was largely a reactive movement at the edge of the emerging evangelical surge toward a dominant place in American life. As such it was the province of Jim Wallis. a founder of Sojourners, to be a public face of the effort, voicing its progressive premises, with considerable deference to the conservative origins of evangelical theology. Eventually Jim Wallis and perhaps the late Bill Coffin became the voices of Protestant progressivism during the years of the mainline's precipitous decline. 
Though Bill Coffin was a good friend with whom I once lived, I took issue with both Coffin and Wallis who insisted they needed a place in the public square. This seemed to me part and parcel of the move to a talking head culture.As far as I was (and remain) concerned, these voices were a weak antiphon to the rising tide of today's nativist and retrograde GOP evangelicalism. They became locked in the same room with their opponents as the minor key in a major movement. And what remains the problem is the room itself. 
That is really where  this all comes down. In the Grass Roots Church. I said we lacked a theology. That is still the case across the board and today extending through all religion. Observers like Jacques Ellul and my colleague and friend Will Campbell were right in seeing a life beyond this room, beyond the confines of institutional Christianity. 
Today the question is not one of who will control the structures of the churches and decide how their dwindling financial power will be deployed. It is what is reality and what is ethics and what are the aesthetics of life on the planet.  Institutions are articulated by successive generations. The institutions now being empowered are those of the spiritual city. A city that venerates diversity, that espouses sensuality, that is at root iconoclastic. That gravitates toward tolerance, democracy, helpfulness and non-idolatry. It may not look like a city nor does it look spiritual to many, but it is rising as we speak. As it takes shape, thinking is changing. And my hopes lie with the future - a world escaping the deleterious domination of binary understandings, moving toward an appreciation of universality, taking pride in the potential of every person on the planet.

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Triadic philosophy moves well beyond liberation theology

It has been many years since liberation theology made an appearance on the cultural horizon. I may have been among the first to publish materials that helped frame the movement. As editor of RISK at the World Council of Churches in 1966, I dedicated The Development Apocalypse to Camilo Torres who died in the same year. His strand of liberation theology was bound up with the effort to reconcile Catholicism and Marxism and, in particular, to justify armed struggle as a Christian option. I was and remain sufficiently steeped in the ethic of nonviolence that this sort of liberation theology held scant appeal for me at the time. I became even more critical as I watched the emergence of what I would call Liberation Theology Lite in subsequent decades. I found these iterations superficial. We already knew that Jesus was on the side of the angels.  That he cared more for justice than being worshiped. To construct so-called liberation theologies to tell us so seemed to me a concession to the creedal messianists, AKA the church we now designate as Evangelical. We were saying we're the other folk in the room when the room was the problem.
The most recent manifestation of a slight public presence for liberation theology came with the emergence of Barack Obama. That imbroglio involved flagging what Reverend Jeremiah Wright was preaching as liberation theology. In reality he was preaching nothing new and he was operating within the creedal messianic framework.  The difference between liberation and evangelical theology was cultural, political and hermeneutical - not theological or philosphical.  

It was not until I followed my own instincts, and attained sufficient age that most of my colleagues had passed on, that I settled on a viable philosophy that will not come off as an insistent echo back in the sound chamber of the institutional church with little relevance to the future.  To find a genuine alternative to the intellectual heritage of organized Christianity, it is necessary to go back to the beginning. When one does, one can construct a narrative which  precludes the formation of any religion, one which cleaves to values that are universal, one which understands that there is no conflict between science and religion, indeed that both are subservient to  values one can infer from the texts. 
There is a tension in the New Testament between the articulation of this universal reality and its truncation into the creedal messianic narrative that still holds sway. That sway will end. There will be a liberation from creedal messianism. It will spell the last gasp of organized Christianity. The triumph will be that of spirituality over religion. And in that context liberation theology will be a footnote not a leading indicator. Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store 


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Triadic Philosophy Why are ethics and aesthetics fundamental to the thought process?

Why are ethics and aesthetics fundamental to the thought process these are premises but do they reflect truth  why is this premise revolutionary why is pragmaticism revolutionary why is this right for now
Because signs are whatever they are and rise up in Reality Because activation rises from resistance and  resistance to Reality can be called Ethics in the sense of always questioning even opposing And because Aesthetics is the objective of our living and breathing response to the coalescence between Reality and Ethics This is pragmaticism This is Triadic Philosophy Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store



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Triadic Thinking - Minimal Impossible Acceptance

Limiting life to what we use would make us minimal Our limits widening the use our sole horizon But what we don't employ  we're loath to toss We think we will go back one day So there things sit We dust them off They sit some more We wander then say Stop this silliness  Get back to work and leave what we ignore in view
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