Not sure that is the historical timeline for Collectivisation in USSR and definitely no China. Collectivisation and Land Reform was a primary goal in itself in China from the 1950s. Communist Liberation was 1949 so right from the onset.
"state gradually withers away as a communist society is built" is 19th century Marx. I think 20thc Leninism, in practice, had a less sanguine view of the evolution of the state. The NEP was a tactical move.
You could argue that Mao was always suspicious of state and party machinery which inherently had reactionary and counter revolutionary tendencies. However even when he was Mobilising the Masses, it was not restore to "autonomy" to the people but to clear the deck for further revolution. In Mao Zedong thought, "autonomy" is a very bourgeoisie.
Don't forget the encyclical with the German ("Mit brennender Sorge") rather than Latin (Ardens curarum?) title written by Pius XII and promulgated by Pius XI.
Is that really the position of the Catholic Church or what is a caricature of what people think it believes? The nice thing about the Catholic Church is that required beliefs have a formal spec. For something has important as this, there would be a clear and unambiguous references. Catholic Catechism / church council / papal encyclical. Do you have a quotable reference?
What I can find is only Aquinas that all living things have souls (anima).
Humans have rational human souls. Animals have animal souls...
Descartes believed that only humans have souls. But that definitely represents a clear alternative to traditional Catholic beliefs. Many modern philosophers might argue that only humans have "consciousness" in a way that implies animals do not have souls.
Indeed, the Cartesian position is not the Catholic position and, in fact, directly contradicts the Catholic position.
The soul, according to an Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding, is the form of a living thing. Form is what makes a thing what it is. If you deny form, then you deny that things have any identity whatsoever and the world becomes unintelligible. Science itself becomes impossible.
So, the form is the formal cause of a thing's identity, and so everything that exists has a formal cause, because you cannot not have something that isn't something. In living things, we call this form the soul; we sometimes say that the soul is the form of the body. Accordingly, it is absurd to think of the soul and the body to be two things (like Descartes thought), just as it is absurd to treat the spherical shape of a ball of bronze as a distinct thing from the bronze. There is no sphericial-shape-as-such or bronze-as-such as things in the world.
While Descartes denied the consciousness of non-human animals, this was never the Aristotelian-Thomist position. In fact, it is taken to be flatly wrong. So denial of the consciousness of non-human animals is not really traditional at all. It is very much modern.
Yes, and this immortality is attributed to the immateriality of the intellectual faculties. According to this view, you can think of human death as more of an amputation of the body from the totality of the spiritual-bodily composite. Bodily resurrection is thus a restoration of the body.
You might find a spectrum to be more useful framing than a binary. Asking when does consciousness seem more present? Are there different aspects of consciousness that can individually be validated as apparent or not? That sort of thing.
In which case the "crimson carpet" appears to be the loose invention of the translator. The original just says "brocade" or I guess, "quilt", implying some sort of silk bed cover?
Try an image search with 紅葉 落葉. The result will be the typical image a Japanese person imagines when hearing 散り紅葉. Then try the same search with "crimson carpet." From the standpoint of literary and artistic sensibility, the difference is not small.
Agree 10,000 fold.
English and Japanese are so different and have such different standards of aesthetics and literary form that good translations are like independent creations inspired by the original.
I would like to know that the original form was.
Even a word by word ungrammatical transliteration would be helpful. But not to have the Japanese available means I cannot even look it up...
The use of the "font" spelling variant rather than "fount" is any case a clearer indication of etymology.
After all, a "fount" of types refers not to its role as a fountain of printing (fons fontis L -> fontaine OF -> fountain) but the pouring out, melting and casting of lead (fundo fundere fudu fusum [fused!] L -> fondre / fonte F).
Fraternal societies (everything from "greek" societies in universities to the Masons and elk lodges) did this quite well until recently, collapsing membership along with other communal organizations.
I think we still have rituals. Rituals are often invisible to the participants, so it wouldn't surprise me if ours were invisible to us. I can't think of strong ones off the top of my head. Perhaps social media rituals, like posting certain content to "appeal to the algorithm".
From an anthropological perspective, ritual just means "repeated behavior with some significance". So yes they aren't going anywhere; you can describe most behavior that isn't strictly biologically necessary as a ritual.
There is an argument to be made that the current loss of a sense of community and the meaninglessness epidemic can (at least in part) be attributed to a lack of shared rituals. S. Junger (https://amzn.to/4nSaxfY) and M. P. Some (https://amzn.to/4eB5sUW) do a great job of making this point from somewhat different (and non-eastern) perspectives.
"There is an argument to be made that the current loss of a sense of community and the meaninglessness epidemic can (at least in part) be attributed to a lack of shared rituals"
Or that in the older days, people lived and worked mostly closely together. Now people live isolated, don't interact with their neighbor at all (I don't even know most of the names of them after 1 year) bring their kids to one place away, then go to work on even another place with again another set of people. So lost rituals maybe play a part as well - but mostly I see it just as a very uncommunal livestyle.
(but thanks for the book recommendations, they look interesting)
After virtue is definitely going on my reading list. The idea that we use moral language vacuously because we don’t share the same worldview as the people who invented it is fascinating.
I’m concerned about theories that state that a larger society-wide effort has to be made to bring ethics back to life though. This is because I’m gay and historically societies haven’t always had a great outlook on me. Maybe I could live in a world that had a coherent telos for gay men that didn’t involve them being stoned to death.
"We Chinese have lost the ritualistic practices that undergirded society 2500 years ago. Let us therefore just come up with a new set?
That sounds sensible to me.
"Who have been the most successful at inventing new rituals for our age? The Axis Powers starting with the 1936 Olympics. Hmm."
I don't know where that train of thought is going but the 1936 Olympics is generally considered a fact but not a happy one. Jesse Owens was a shining light there ...
I think the author handles this by pointing out the constant in change: human nature which does not change plus change itself.
In that context ritual symbology has a half life in human nature. It needs to be periodically made anew.
Ritual becomes form without substance or becomes corrupted eg.Martin Luther's grievances to the church.
As another writer (I believe Joyce) once analogized, periodically there's nothing left but to pick up the broken shards of colored glass from the cathedral and reassemble it making anew partly connected to past but mostly reconfigured to now.
Whence the 64 million dollar question here: why broken?
I am not sure that Tolkien was a supporter of "Deontology" (ethical systems like Kant's). He was more probably a fan of virtue ethics of Aristotle and Aquinas. There is a large gulf between them. Wikipedia does a decent job of summarising the differences. We can not lump together into one category everyone who disagrees for many different reasons why we can sum up future consequences almost mathematically to come up with an "optimal" ethical choice. I am not sure that Tolkien is particularly interested in "greatness" either.
Some of your points are very curious. Biologists did not reject horizontal gene transfer. Or at any rate it has been part of the canon for pretty much the last 60 years which is essentially forever in biology. (The mechanisms for heredity, i.e. DNA were only discovered in the early 1950s). Besides, scientists are always "tweaking" theories as you put it. More precisely, a fruitful and productive scientific program leads to more and more discovers and elaborations that have to be accomodated. Look at the changes in the Standard Model in particle physics. The current controversy is whether and why the Standard Model is no longer being "tweaked". In other words, some physicist wonder whether current research is no longer yielding discoveries that allow advances and hences changes or elaborations to the Standard Model.
I find the efforts of the archeologists not to apply cultural norms particularly interesting:
In other circumstances, a caste system might be seen in a less favourable light:
> I like the egg myth because it suggests that the Chimú understood that social and political inequality is ‘baked in’ to humanity from the beginning,” says anthropologist Robyn Cutright of Centre College.
Similarly the discussion of preferring other people's children for child sacrifices. This is ascribed to their support desire for cultural diversity and laying new cultural roots.
> “The Chimú had the ability to draw on a large terrain, and I think they were reaching out to diverse regions to find children for the sacrifices”
> By sacrificing the children and burying them, they were, in a way, planting new ancestors.”
I hope the original archeologists have not been quoted out of context or that I have not misinterpreted them.
Either way it is quite amusing. I do not think I would regard child sacrifices in entirely the same positive light or even neutrally ...
"state gradually withers away as a communist society is built" is 19th century Marx. I think 20thc Leninism, in practice, had a less sanguine view of the evolution of the state. The NEP was a tactical move. You could argue that Mao was always suspicious of state and party machinery which inherently had reactionary and counter revolutionary tendencies. However even when he was Mobilising the Masses, it was not restore to "autonomy" to the people but to clear the deck for further revolution. In Mao Zedong thought, "autonomy" is a very bourgeoisie.