Tag: philosophy

John Rawls described society as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.” There is a value proposition underlying the formation of an organized community and submitting to its laws. While an individual loses freedom, they receive a wealth of opportunities to cooperate with others to secure more resources than any of them could secure alone. The freedom of the individual outside of community is a meager freedom that promises no security, but community allows a person to get everything they need for themselves by participating in formal and informal support networks. Given that people are generally born into their communities rather than forsake primal independence to join, the value proposition should be understood as framing what community does for people and what people do for community.

The value proposition also provides a motivation for obeying a community’s laws. Law makes up the fabric of society, defining the rights and duties of citizens to the community, and of the community to the citizens. Knowing those duties and knowing that they will be enforced by the collective power of the community defines a space in which cooperation can take place. All individuals involved can be secure in what the law promises, and they can form cooperative agreements within the framework of law.

The benefit of law only follows when all individuals in the community follow the law. Citizens then have motivation to obey the law and abide by the consequences when they do not. Even the most cynical perspective can recognize that the law provides more advantage than disadvantage. The value of predictability alone motivates a self-interested preference for obedience to the loss of security in a lawless society.

When the laws are arranged to systematically disadvantage a group, members of that group will not experience the same sense of protection as members of the privileged group. In such a case breaking the law has no connection with forfeiting security. One who already lacks that security must then evaluate upholding on the basis of expected gains agar mere avoidance of consequences.

In addition, one must always consider two paths: obtaining a benefit within the boundaries of the law or obtaining a benefit outside of those limits. If breaking the law offers a greater benefit or a benefit that one could not obtain through lawful means, breaking the law becomes a pragmatic option. Where obtaining a benefit lawfully is made impossible due to systematic disadvantage stemming from the arrangement or enforcement of the law, the motivation for individuals from disadvantaged groups to obey the law becomes thin.

Where privilege bounds economic success, the ability to secure basic needs will differ across advantaged and disadvantaged identity groups. Members of the advantaged group may look at their peers and elders and reasonably believe that they can secure their living by conforming to expectations. No degree of conformity and obedience protects a systemically disadvantaged group because their group identity alone is nonconforming. Gains can be erased when the advantaged group decide to raid what they perceive as undeserved rewards, as happened at Rosewood and other race riots.

In that light the consequences of property crime become equivocal across legal and illegal acquisition. In either case one’s gains might be taken at a later time. If the illegal path presents a shorter and more certain path than the alternative, property crime becomes a rational choice. Where past injustices disrupt generational wealth for disadvantaged groups, property crime may also serve as a means of reparations, a restoration of unjust takings.

In liberal democracies police officers work to apprehend perpetrators of petty theft or the drug trade while ignoring wage theft undertaken by managers against workers. Unwarranted taking is a criminal matter only when the working class takes from the owner class. Public money pays for police officers to apprehend shoplifters, and members of disadvantaged groups provide ready scapegoats. When the owner class steals from the working class, the only remedy lies in expensive civil courts, giving the owner class the advantage of wealth. Confronted with these asymmetries, members of disadvantaged groups do not enjoy the protection of the law at all. One loses no security by breaking the law if one is unable to rely on its protection.

If one supports a law or government policy, one can be presumed to support the associated consequences. It is not clear why one would desire a certain law to go into effect if they did not desire its consequences to follow. Expressing dissatisfaction with unexpected consequences could be consistent with support for a policy, as when one’s support wavers when once unexpected but undesirable effects come to light. Nevertheless, desire for expected outcomes can be readily inferred from desire for the policy that will cause them.

Capital punishment provides a straightforward example of support for both a law and its consequences. If one supports capital punishment, one then supports the resulting deaths. One may believe that those people justly convicted and sentenced deserve to die, or one may believe that the ultimate consequence is an acceptable cost for deterring others from crime. Without such an attitude toward death, one’s support for capital punishment would be incoherent. While it would be consistent for a supporter of capital punishment to desire that no one is mistakenly executed, they have nevertheless found desirable the execution of at least some people.

When considering rectification of historic social injustice, a person who supports only gradual change must also support the consequences of sustaining injustice. If a person believes social injustice is wrong and should be corrected but not immediately, they have implicitly accepted the resulting limitations on the life and well-being of the the disadvantaged group. Arguing for gradual change or maintaining a status quo of injustice implicitly argues that the oppressed accept the limitations on their health, wealth, and well-being in order not to discomfort the privileged.

Requiring gradual change to rectify social injustice places an unequal value on the lives of the disadvantaged and the privileged. Members of disadvantaged groups face shorter lifespans due to bias in healthcare, hiring, and education. If a welfare program’s food assistance does not allow for a family to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, or not enough of any food, people who rely on that program will suffer the effects of hunger. When the disruption of generational wealth places most of a population at an economic disadvantage, members of that group will more often suffer the effects of hunger. As long as the structure of social institutions maintains this situation, human lives will be shorter and more painful. Webs of disadvantage like this one render social institutions as a whole prejudiced against disadvantaged groups.

If one understands that support for a law entails support for its known consequences, one must also recognize a shared culpability when those consequences manifest. When members of a privileged group reject the discomfort of negotiating new boundaries or receiving less undeserved deference, they express a disregard for human life. They bear moral responsibility for the lives lost to that disregard. Instead, members of privileged groups should study the dynamics of injustice in their society, forsake their privilege at every opportunity, and demand immediate rectification. Asking people to wait means asking them to die.

In order to mobilize the working class against itself, the owner class offers significant privileges for workers who agree to enforce owner class interests. Police forces, military personnel, and other security forces bring order to society by enforcing a law crafted by the owner class. Workers in these professions compose a martial class, a identity group clustered around the essential function they serve in society. Their fellow workers are often the targets of enforcement because the law regulates the behavior of workers more extensively than the behavior of the owner class. In particular, the owner class employs these forces when the working class organizes to advance their class interests.

The legal system pits the martial class against the working class by focusing efforts on crimes committed by the working class and ignoring crimes committed by the owner class. The disparity becomes evident when comparing the relative impact of property theft as opposed to wage theft. The owner class deprives the working class of far more money in wages than property stolen, but wage theft is not the focus of any police activity.

Since the martial class often stands between the owner class and the working class during moments of class struggle, the martial class bears the brunt of actions often directed toward the owner class. The owner class exploits the martial class by using them as a bulwark against collective action of workers. While the martial class enjoys additional privilege associated with their work, they risk their health and standing in the community by serving their occupation. The intra-class divide deepens as the martial class forms a distinct identity that supersedes other identities or communities, directly pitting members of the martial class against their communities.

Nevertheless, the martial class must be judged as class traitors when they blame the working class, not the owner class, for the risks associated with their occupation. When the working class rallies to end exploitation, the martial class works to end the demonstration and discourage further action. They ensure that the owner class can ignore the demonstration while the martial class forces the workers to abandon the struggle. Despite sharing in oppression by the owner class, the martial class silences their fellow workers so that the owner class can continue growing wealthy through exploitation.

Since the mission of the martial class is framed as enforcing the law, the martial class identify as protectors of society as a whole. The owner class maintains some working class support for the martial class by promoting this protector narrative. However, the laws governing property and criminal behavior are arranged to benefit the owner class, so the martial class advances their interests by enforcing those laws. Where the members of the martial class accept this narrative, they commit to seeing the rest of the working class as threats to the stability of society and therefore just targets of violence.

Framing the mission of the martial class as a sacred duty to society motivates extreme responses to defiance of the law. As protectors of society the martial class frames themselves as a public service and bulwark against disorder. In this framing extreme measures to punish criminals or suppress organized demonstrations are justified in the same way that one would justify self-defense or defending one’s community from outside invaders. Supportive members of the working class, especially professionals already aligned with the owner class, ignore the martial class’s violence because they take it as an assurance that their interests will be protected just as fiercely even though this is rarely the case.

With the worker class divided among professionals, martial occupations, and privileged identity groups, the owner class has many potential allies against the remaining workers. Professionals empower the owner class through soft power, political, social, and artistic support for nationalist capitalism. The martial class directly supports the owner class by providing hard power in the form of security and suppression of dissent. A worker who begins to understand their position must also confront a fragmented social environment where many natural allies have already been suborned. Effective resistance requires building alliances among others who recognize their situation due to critical reflection or experience with systematic disadvantage. The power of the working class will remain limited unless we can overcome divides that uphold the power of the owner class.

 

In The Meaning of Witchcraft Gerald Gardner offers a historical narrative constructed from select facts arranged in a web of interpretation woven by Margaret Murray. Despite being initiated by a coven whose lineage stretched back to pre-Christian Britain, Gardner does not relate a history handed down through that tradition. His claims largely rest of the fact of the coven’s existence as demonstrations that his narrative enjoys support from both Murray’s folklore scholarship and direct evidence.

Gardner begins the witchcraft story in prehistoric Old Stone Age spirituality as interpreted from cave drawings in Europe. Hunting tactics accompanied by superstitions connected to success eventually yield formalized ritual and an individual specializing in the ritual performance. As needs transitioned from hunting to herding to farming, the ritual specialists transitions from shaman to priest to witch. Witchcraft is then humanity’s oldest religion and magical practice, stemming from a time in without that distinction.

While Gardner then frames adherents to Old Religion as holdouts against Christian conversion and eventual victims of “the Burning Times,” his account of what a witch does and why they do it remains rooted in this primitivist framework. As such Gardnerian Wicca anchors itself in times much older than Celtic or Germanic pagan cultures that give form to some traditions of modern witchcraft. The gods of Angles, the Saxons, and the Britons feature only as expressions of the primordial god and goddess. Gardner gives witchcraft an anthropological narrative rather than a strictly historical one.

An anthropological turn places witchcraft closer to an area of expertise in which Gardner can boast authentic credentials. During his colonial service, Gardner had extensive contact with tribal peoples in Southeast Asia and wrote some of the first reports on their traditions and legends about weaponry. Although he had no formal training, Gardner’s work was well received by the scholarly community. His interest in both weapons and superstitions about weapons likely brought Gardner a number of stories about magic, hunting, and ritual. Wicca’s embrace of animism, karma, and reincarnation all reflect a distillation of the cultures where Gardner spent his time abroad.

Once the primitivist framework becomes clear, Gardner’s claims about historical witchcraft need only explain how the thread from the Old Stone Age comes to the present day. Where Margaret Murry’s witch cult hypothesis begins in Pagan Europe, Gardner moves the Old Religion to an even earlier time, rendering it the Oldest Religion instead. As such, the Gardnerian framework rests on two principle claims.

1. Witchcraft originates in primitive spiritual and magical practices.
2. These practices have been handed down in unbroken lineages since prehistoric times.

The second claim strains credulity unless one admits that the practices change over time, potentially so much that the members of a later generation do not recognize an older generation as the same tradition despite shared lineage. On a weak interpretation of that thesis, all human traditions stem from the practices of our primitive ancestors, continually changing, differentiating, and converging as humanity itself does. Witchcraft would then have nothing remarkable about it as all religious traditions could claim the same lineage.

A stronger interpretation of the first claim recalls the Witch Cult Hypothesis as framed by Margaret Murray, a source explicitly acknowledged by Gardner as support for his claims. Murray does not locate her Old Religion in a strictly primitive context, claiming only that witches practiced an ancient fertility cult. The Dianic rites that Murray imagined could have belonged to a Hellenistic or Celtic pagan cult centered on a goddess rendered nameless by secrecy but belonging to historical times rather than prehistory. Gardner then reaches further backward in time, possibly to bring his religion closer to something he understood more clearly, the beliefs of tribal peoples he studied and documented. In other words Gardner may have understood the first thesis as identical to a more specific claim.

1a. Witchcraft originates in spiritual and magical practices of indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia.

The conflation of indigenous peoples with prehistorical humanity generally reflects an interpretive lens generally accepted in Gardner’s time but no longer. Scholars now largely reject the framework of a single path of development from primitive conditions to modern civilization as an imperialist bias not supported by evidence. This mistaken belief does require some framework for identifying beliefs succinctly ancient to be part of the primitive witchcraft lineage. Both Murray and Gardner rely on the same additional thesis to account for knowledge about surviving and original witches.

3. The Old/Oldest Religion beliefs and rituals can be known by analysis of rural folk stories, superstitions, and rituals.

The third thesis turns out to be the most important since the epistemic status of all other conclusions rest on it. Without a reliable method to trace the secret tradition and recognize its continued presence, there is no evidence for the other claims. To the detriment of both Gardner and Murray, scholars have failed to find such support. As noted by other scholars, Murray cites customs as evidence of ancient rites without sufficient research to uncover the recency of the practice. Murray interprets her evidence based on her own understanding of rural folk traditions rather than documented evidence or self-report from the people who lived those traditions.

Contemporary folklorists generally agree that theories regarding ancient customs preserved among uneducated rural peoples align better with prejudices of the academic community than available evidence. Many of Murray’s specific claims regarding folk customs contradict available evidence. While the Witch Cult hypothesis remains well known among popular audiences, scholars have rejected it and the methods that brought it into being as unreliable. Gardner offers only one piece of evidence beyond Murray insofar as he claimed to be have been initiated by a surviving witch coven. Historians have likewise rejected Gardner’s claims about the coven as fabrications, a story to frame the founding myth of his new “old religion.” In the absence of any reliable support, Gardner’s second thesis may be safely rejected.

Only the first thesis remains plausible, but it only allows us to conclude that Wicca is connected to an authentic experience of the divine that spans the human condition. Such a thesis would be true of all modern religions, so Wicca is not distinct in that way. While one should then see Wicca as equivalent in authenticity to religious traditions with a longer historical legacy.

When I learned about the Wiccan Rule of Three, I often saw it associated with the concept of karma in Indian philosophy. For a long time I understood the two concepts to be essentially the same; the universe returns good for good and evil for evil. The implied moral theory is that one deserves to receive what they send out into the world. My teachers often used “karma” and “Rule of Three” interchangeably. While both principles orient moral judgments around actions and consequences, they differ significantly when analyzed critically.

In Wicca, “karma” is described by the “Rule of Three,” stating that whoever one sends out comes back to them threefold. The rule or its consequences are often casually referred to as “karma,” and the pagan community I found as an adolescent appeared aware of the concepts association with Asian religious traditions. For the most part, “karma” is the reason Wiccans caution one another against casting curses or working any destructive magic. Doing so would be foolish because the witch would eventually suffer three times the destructive force they had called down. Retribution may not be immediate or in kind, but Wiccans believe that the Rule of Three guarantees that no one escapes it forever.

The norm against cursing does not prevent self-righteous witches from crafting rituals to encourage karmic return for perceived wrongs. A person sufficiently convinced of their blamelessness can readily use the Rule of Three to spiritually bypass any self-reflection since it does not distinguish between correlation and causation. Vague misfortunes can be aligned with perceived failings, enabling one to embrace a more convenient penance than reforming their behavior or apologizing for their role in a conflict. The Rule’s loose framework allows a person to interpret moral consequences for themselves by disconnecting result from action, cutting moral introspection short.

Furthermore, the Rule of Three relies on a widely open timeline for karmic retribution. Karma can always come around at some undefined later point. When someone appears to be profiting from harm, one must assume the dues will be paid eventually, but evidence does not support that conclusion. The classic Problem of Evil asks how an infinitely good god could allow for evil in the world. The Rule of Three posits that harm is returned to the offender, a denial that evil is allowed in the world. When presented with manifest and continued evil in the world, a strict adherent of the Rule must assert their faith in some eventual corrective action. Nevertheless, an injustice that is corrected only after a century allows for many people to suffer injustice and never see retribution in their lifetimes.

Indian philosophy contains a diversity of views about karma, but the word means “action” or “deed” in Sanskrit. In the Buddhist tradition, karma represents a causal principle that binds a person to the consequences of their actions. A harmful act produces the harm itself as well as a number of additional effects, setting off a chain of events that may take a long time to unfold. Both the agent and the subject of an action experience emotions that can shape their responses to future events. The patterns formed by repeated actions and their effects prevent a person from achieving liberation from the cycle of rebirth. A person who breaks the pattern overcomes their karma, their desires, and their attachment to those things and become free.

The Buddhist account of karma enjoys a few structural strengths when compared to the Rule of Three. When framed as a cascade of cause and effect, karma becomes plausible if not trivially true. The Buddhist account of causation, dependent co-arising, understands causal relationships to include necessary conditions, sufficient conditions, and necessary and sufficient conditions, so some causal links may be remote but nevertheless logically connected. By definition a cause produces effects, and a single event can be described in such detail as to identify multiple causes of the event as well as multiple effects. Karma provides an acknowledgment that such consequences become part of an individual’s life history, whether they were the agent or patient of the event.

Karma provides an ethical framework for reflecting on the morality of one’s actions. When an agent sees themselves as the originator of later events, they can consider whether they are content to be of a piece with the results of their actions. Recognizing that one’s behavior does not reflect self-belief presents an agent with the opportunity bring themselves into alignment. Since the agent may also recognize themselves as the outcome of previous events, they gain the ability to discern the boundaries of their personal responsibility. As a moral norm, karma implies a value in taking responsibility for one’s actions and for forgiving oneself for circumstances beyond their control. Karma complements the Buddhist value of compassion by placing a person in the roles of both agent and patient to frame suffering as a shared experience.

Since Paganism and Buddhism are distinct religious traditions with their own origins and practices, there is no assumed need for Pagan concepts to conform with Buddhist definitions. One need not deny the influence of Buddhism on modern Paganism to claim that the Pagan tradition has nevertheless developed its own interpretations of shared concepts, a branch from the same root. While there is no need for Paganism to be consistent with Buddhist doctrines, analysis of the Rule of Three reveals fatal internal incoherence. The Problem of Evil raises a foundational plausibility question that the Rule has no means to address. Furthermore, the Rule of Three lacks any account of value so that one can discern good from evil. While karma also lacks such an account, it does not need one since its framework does not invoke any notion of good or evil. Desirable and undesirable consequences are relative to the agent’s desires, not to an absolute moral law. Morals derived from karmic introspection do assume valuing compassion and disvaluing suffering, and Buddhist philosophy provides accounts of those values and their relationship to karma.

As a witch I believe that I should consider the consequences of my actions both magical and mundane. Recognizing suffering as an ill, I believe that I should avoid causing it and rectify it where I am able. To fulfill these duties effectively, I need to understand the scope of my ability to influence events directly and indirectly. The Rule of Three leaves too many of these questions open to interpretation and cannot account for its own plausibility. The Buddhist account of karma fulfills these needs and withstands critical analysis. As such, I prefer to adopt the more robust view of karma even though it distances me from a core Wiccan tradition.

The demand for more rigorous proof marked a turning point in my spiritual practice. Like most teenagers who discovered contemporary paganism through books, I had little means to differentiate reliable sources from fabrication. Teachers and elders in the craft sometimes corrected inaccuracies, but the information they supplied often turned out to lack any more robust grounding. I set aside my practice for a while because I could find no truth to support it.

As a young Wiccan, I learned about karma, reincarnation, and chakras. While I knew that those ideas originated in Indian philosophy, I read only shallowly in Buddhist and Brahmanic sources. My understanding was shaped by the Pagans around me and the books I read. High school history classes brushed these subjects broadly in order to encapsulate a deep literary tradition in a few sentences, so I had no more reliable source available.

At university, I took courses on religions in Asia and philosophy of mind. My professors assigned yoga sutras and sermons of the Buddha. I began practicing meditation again, this time under the direction of classical Zen teachings. As a graduate student, I served as teaching assistant for a class on Indian philosophy. The professor was scholar, linguist, and storyteller. He asked his students to read primary sources, and in class he decoded them, ornamenting them in history, vocabulary, literary style, and philosophical argument. While he was not a member of the philosophy department, I learned more from him than any academic philosopher.

Karma and reincarnation all appeared in his lectures. They sat among dissections of Buddhist logic and Vedantana phenomenology. Yet they appeared very differently than they did in the Wiccan books where I first encountered them. My studies into the occult resumed so that I could trace the concepts back from Wicca to their introduction by Theosophy and embrace by the Golden Dawn. With the rise of more generic New Age thought, the meaning had twisted into reflections of Christian retribution and transmigration of the soul.

The concepts as understood by their original traditions contain much more robust philosophical foundations. As a cause and effect framework, karma calls attention to the myriad consequences of our actions and how those consequences follow us until the chain of causation is exhausted. When embedded into Brahmanic or Buddhist metaphysics, rebirth describes little more than the Law of Conservation of Matter. Wicca had appropriated these concepts and wove brittle shells of themselves into its core metaphysics. From that perspective, I saw Wicca as foolish because the tradition anchored itself on mistaken interpretations that cannot withstand critical analysis. They did not note the weakness in their views and seek to repair it.

The religious traditions I learned from the cradle had clear chains of authority. Evangelical Baptists point to the literal words of the Bible, but individual congregants tend to defer to their pastor who in turn references the received view of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Roman Catholic Church codifies its doctrines and the processes by which those doctrines are altered. While authority can be confining when one disagrees, it provides certainty about the boundaries of theology. Paganism, and occult traditions in general, lack any doctrinal authority, so the theology remains unbounded. Beyond common anchors in the practice of ritual magic, polytheism, and animism, internal metaphysics can run wild.

With a heavy emphasis on introspection and mysticism, personal gnosis plays a prominent role in Pagan spirituality. The gnosis drawn from a visionary experience or deep meditation may provide a guiding light for one’s practice and core beliefs. William James discusses the power of such insights in The Varieties of Religious Experience. According to James, mystical experiences form the foundation of religious traditions as insights become codified in doctrine and ritual. Since the experience can be so powerful, James allows that the mystic has every reason to believe the content of their own insight and apply the lessons they draw from it.

However, the same cannot be said for those people who have not had the same experience. Altered states of consciousness can be described, but one must experience them to have a complete understanding. Instead, one must judge the mystic’s message by the observable outcomes that arise from it. The content of the insight cannot impose any justification to believe absent directly sharing the experience. An insight so profound that it cannot be expressed in words cannot be readily transferred to someone else. As such, the mystic can spread their message and demonstrate the good it has done for them, but every other individual may decide to accept or reject that message based on their own experience and observations.

In the Pagan community I encountered, knowledge was learned through books and personal gnosis, often shared through word of mouth. Covens and circles of fellow travelers engaged in a dialogic exercise around asserting personal gnosis and collectively reframing it to harmonize everyone’s paradigm. The resulting consensus usually degrades over time as individuals have new experiences or read new books or pick up ideas from new people. Critical analysis did not have a significant place in this exercise. Rejections were discouraged as intolerant or narrow-minded, so only modifications and reframing were permitted. As a result the Pagan theology I learned from my teachers consisted of ad hoc metaphors threaded with inconsistent principles.

In time, epistemology helped me sort the substance from the fluff. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, what it is, and how we get it. Classical epistemologists defined knowledge as beliefs that are both true and justified. While there are many views among epistemologists and metaphysicians on what makes a belief “true” or “justified”, a belief that lacks either direct sensory evidence or other robust indicator of truth will not pass muster. Many grandiose claims about “energy” with regard to working magic fall flat when the believer is asked “How do you know that?” With that perspective I began to reason about Pagan concepts and my own experiences. In the process I rejected many of the specific beliefs and practices I learned as an initiate, making it difficult to engage with the Pagan community for a long time.

Scholarly study and critical inquiry became important boundaries for my spiritual journey. Buddhist philosophy became a more prominent influence on my daily practice although Pagan imagery continued to provide metaphors and structure for ritual magic. I read more widely in the occult, especially authors that my Pagan elders discouraged. Many streams of influence have fed my curiosity and informed my practice, but no single framework pulls all of them into view. These entries are helping me build that framework as my studies continue.

Delta Paganism advises seekers to take only what is freely given, so it must supply some way to make that judgment. The motivation for this principle is avoiding cultural appropriation, specifically colonizer cultures adopting elements of colonized cultures to augment their spiritual practice. Cultural exchange benefits individuals and communities by creating ways for people to learn about one another and interact in a shared space. Cultural appropriation lacks equality between participants, removing the mutual respect required for shared understanding. The Delta Pagan’s journey should not be an expedition to plunder the wonders of the world’s traditions. Instead, the journey should be characterized by authentic study and respectful exchange.

Some religious traditions frame experience of the divine within a very specific location and environment. The tradition changes over time, both organically and through cultural exchange, but connection with the rhythms of a specific place remain a prominent feature. Rituals and regular observances may be impossible to conduct outside of the tradition’s home region. Where the religious experience attaches to holy sites or local seasonal cycles, adherents may have difficulty traveling with their faith. A person who moves to a region where such a tradition thrives may take a long time to become folded into the religion, if they ever do. Usually, an adherent is born into a regional tradition and passes through rites of passage to mark life transitions.

Some religious traditions value spreading their doctrines to others and bringing new adherents into the fold. When they thrive, these traditions tend to take root well beyond their original location, carried by missionaries. Initiation rituals welcome new members into the community whether they are born or converted to it. Converts tend to incorporate core doctrines into local practices, introducing new ideas into the tradition. A missionary tradition then becomes a nexus of core doctrines, internal developments, and syncretism.

Mystery traditions keep their doctrines and rituals secret, only selectively admitting candidates. An aspiring member often must study or undergo a ritualized ordeal before being formally initiated into the religion. Rituals of initiation form a common thread with regional, missionary, and mystery religions. Regional religions may have rites of passage to mark stages of life but no formal ritual to initiate new members. Missionary religions typically have a formal initiation ritual, and they may develop or incorporate rites of passage from regional religions. The former assumes that new members enter only through birth, but the latter allows that new members may join as adults. Initiation rites form a centerpiece of a mystery tradition as it serves as a boundary between those allowed to know and those who are kept ignorant.

A spiritual journey might wind through traditions that belong to all of these categories, and the seeker cannot help but be influenced by what they encounter. At the same time, every seeker exists in relation to their history, in particular their ancestral relationship to imperialism and colonization. Members of privileged classes and colonizer cultures should consider the historical relationship between themselves and the traditions they study. White people who study Buddhism should be aware of the “Orientalization” that characterized the original popularization of Buddhism in Europe and North America. While Missionary traditions invite exchange, regional traditions with a history of suppression by colonizers might find syncretism disrespectful. Without developing strong personal ties by growing up in the area or spending a significant phase of life there, one may not think of regional traditions as being freely given.

Colonizer cultures cannot demand the same respect for their traditions because they have made an active effort to export their culture and force colonized people to conform to it. An individual dislocated from their culture’s original home and isolated from their traditions will adopt what they are given and make it their own. When colonizer cultures erase the traditions of colonized people, those descendants will necessarily inherit the colonizer’s traditions. Even though a living individual may not have participated in any historical atrocities, they benefit from that history and enjoy a position built on that violence. While no one person can correct past injustices, one can and should avoid reproducing colonization dynamics when studying or interacting with cultural tradition that are not one’s own. Nothing that a colonizer has taken is freely given.

In the interest of harmony, an individual should cultivate tolerance of beliefs different from their own. While one may go beyond tolerance to cultivate curiosity or appreciation, the virtue of tolerance serves as the minimal moral demand. However, tolerance alone does not provide any framework for resolving conflicts between belief systems. When a belief cannot live and let live with another belief, tolerance alone does not tell us what to do.

In his later work on justice, John Rawls stresses that a liberal society must ultimately maintain a pluralist stance about good and acceptable beliefs. Individuals must be free to define and pursue good as they understand it as long as they can do so without causing harm to others. A pluralist must be tolerant, but pluralism also provides a standard for resolving conflicts of tolerance.

A pluralist society cannot support beliefs that do not themselves admit pluralism. Otherwise, one highly intolerant belief system can drive out all other beliefs, and pluralism collapses into monism. Karl Popper refers to this dynamic as the Paradox of Tolerance. Intolerant beliefs exceed the bounds of tolerance because they cannot coexist with other beliefs. While Popper’s Paradox has intuitive appeal, the normative proposition does not follow from the definition of tolerance alone. An additional value is needed to supply the moral judgment that Popper’s paradox endorses.

Pluralism locates tolerance in a framework for judgments about the bounds of acceptable beliefs. Where two beliefs are in conflict, pluralism requires adherents to practice tolerance for one another. A pluralist community should generally discourage overly rigid belief systems that render tolerance impossible. Where such beliefs arise organically, a society must resist accommodating them in order to preserve pluralism. Otherwise intolerant beliefs will drive more tolerant beliefs to the margins, and pluralism will collapse.

Dividing workers against one another prevents formation of class consciousness and collective action against the owner class. Racism and sexism provide obvious examples, aligning white men against what should be their fellows, black workers and women workers. Police and military forces compose a martial class that defends the wealthy’s class interest from the rest of the working class, dividing them from and pitting them against the “civilian” population.

Class consciousness arises from recognizing the alignment of one’s own needs with the needs of others in the same economic situation. Where one worker sees that their colleague suffers the same exploitation they do, and both wish it to end, they can build trust and cooperate with one another against the owner class that exploits them. The owner class also recognizes their shared interest in continuing to exploit workers, so they cooperate with one another to undermine collective action.

Class consciousness can be undermined by disrupting the perception of shared interest. Highlighting non-class identity traits invites workers to align with their identity group above their class. Where the owner class privileges one identity group, workers who identify with that group see their interests more closely aligned with their identity group rather than their colleagues. As a result, the owner class need to contend only with a subset of the working class, and they can mobilize the support of privileged identity workers in the struggle.

While whiteness and maleness continue to serve this divisive function for the owning class, the introduction of professionalism has also done widespread damage to class consciousness. Workers in “professional” careers enjoy high wages and flexibility in their work environment, making such careers highly desirable among workers. Entry into a professional career usually requires tertiary education, limiting the pool of qualified workers. Social inequalities expands access to higher education for members of the privileged group, so race and gender disparities influence the composition of the professional class.

Tertiary education serves as a shared experience between the owner class and the most privileged members of the working class. Many social signifiers students learn in order to enter a professional career are also signifiers of the owner class. In their eventual jobs, professional workers engage in status games similar to those played by the owning class, notably conspicuous consumption and the pursuit of positional goods. When a professional considers the experience of the working class, they may find that experience much different from their own due to their income and working conditions. Professionals may reasonably question whether they belong to the working class or instead to some middle class that stands between the two.

Nevertheless, professional and non-professional workers alike experience exploitation by the owning class. While professionals enjoy an elevated status due to their income and social signifiers, their household wealth remains a fraction of that held by the owning class who employ them. Professional workers generally hold their jobs in order to support themselves and their household because they lack sufficient wealth to do otherwise. Owner class employers claim property rights in all of the creative labor produced by their professional employees, alienating them from the products of their labor. Professional workers usually draw salaries rather than hourly wage, so their employers can demand variable amounts of time from them, alienating them from their family and community.

The owner class also exploits the professional class by making them complicit in the exploitation of non-professionals. Given unbounded demands on their time, professional workers have an incentive to leverage their earnings to pay for time-saving services usually provided by non-professionals. When the owner class creates an opportunity to extract work from non-professionals, professional workers provide the demand for services and become the primary customers. A non-professional then expends their effort and time on the needs of a professional for the profit of an owner rather than serving their own analogous needs. The professional as customer directly engages with the non-professional who must then treat their customer as if they belonged to the owner class, alienating them from one another. As a result, the professional stands in a similar relationship to the non-professional as the owner does, reinforcing the professional’s perceived alignment with the owner class.

By focusing on wealth disparities, professionals can see themselves in the same frame as the rest of the working class. When the class signifiers and delegated oppression are removed, the professional worker finds themselves more similar to non-professional workers than to their owner class employer. Their lives are just as contingent on the whims of the owner class. They have similar ability to influence their working conditions and terms of employment, weak as individuals but strong as a collective.

The owning class creates the illusion of a “professional” middle class to disrupt class consciousness among workers of the most and least privileged classes, limiting their ability to act collectively. Professionals must resist acting as delegates in oppression and reflect on their shared motivation with the rest of the working class. Otherwise, the oppression of both classes will continue.

Abstract political theory creates frameworks without reference to material conditions or historical events. Like many Enlightenment philosophers, John Locke approached property acquisition as an ideal thought experiment. The ahistorical perspective allows a theorist to ignore the history of unjust acquisition. Instead, a Lockean philosopher can defend situational injustice by showing alignment with the ideal theory. Locke himself argues that ownership claims arise from the investment of labor, so one must work to own property and profit by it. Anyone lacking property must have not done the work and should invest their effort if they want to improve their situation. With this framework a Lockean does not need to address past injustices that prevented equal opportunity for acquisition.

Acquisition of private property needed justifications during Locke’s time as traditional commons arrangements transitioned into private ownership. Locke’s theory justifies the enclosure of common lands because private ownership improves the land over its natural state, and anyone else could do the same by enclosing a different parcel. In practice, there are distinct class differences in who was entitled to enclose the commons and who would be forced to abide by those enclosures. New property claims dissolved traditional usage rights, removing claim to the land from the very people who worked it. While these seizures should be condemned in Locke’s theory, an abstract political theory conceals these injustices. The framework projects from an idealized original state to the current situation. The placement of the present moment becomes a rhetorical act intended to connect “now” with the idealized “state of nature” and disregard the permutations in between.

Supporters of regressive political economies benefit from convincing the working class that all positions in society have been earned fairly. The poor deserve poverty, not aid, and the wealthy are owed influence, not stewardship. Scholars are never entirely isolated from political interest, as evidenced by privately funded research originated solely to vindicate a politically important narrative. If the community of scholars widely endorses a perspective that aligns with politically interested narratives, we have reason to challenge it with historically grounded scholarship. Abstraction cannot absolve moral wrongs against actual people.