Review: Tragedy and Hope [Quigley] by Stephen Zarlenga

A Deeper Look Into "Tragedy and Hope"

Prof. Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time was one of the most important historical and predictive works to appear in the 20th century. The book was also among the century's most misunderstood and under-appreciated works of historiography.

First published in 1964, the scope of Tragedy is enormous, with 1,348 pages providing important insights into the forces that have shaped Western civilization. Quigley divided these forces into six aspects: military, political, economic, social, religious and intellectual. These six aspects then "fall into the three major areas of: the patterns of power, rewards and outlooks."

Note that Prof Quigley placed military force at the head of the list. He was a hard-nosed realist when it came to the role of power in society; to the ultimate basis of power upon armed force; and of the dependence, reach and effectiveness of armed force upon weaponry. Thus he stated:

". . . [T]he nature, organization and control of weapons is the most significant of the numerous factors that determines what happens in political life." [p. 1,200]

Quigley was a highly creative mind in understanding how these forces influenced the evolution of civilizations. He taught what he had learned to his students at Georgetown University, at Harvard and at Princeton; and wrote a textbook for college students throughout the United States.

Tragedy is also presented from the vantage point of one who was dose to the official halls of American power, as a lecturer on diverse subjects at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, the Naval College and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. He was a consultant to the Congressional Select Committee, which created NASA, and to the Navy's Project Seabed whose task in 1964 was to project what U.S. Naval weapons systems would be like 12 years out. In addition are his memberships in scholarly bodies such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association and the American Economic Association, to name just a few. Any one of these accomplishments could be considered as a milestone lifetime achievement.

But what really intrigued many of Quigley's readers (or more accurately his reviewers) was his awareness, proximity and understanding of the workings of the unofficial levers of western power; and more specifically a group which evolved from what he referred to as the Anglo American Establishment in an earlier manuscript, and which he calls the "British-American Atlantic Establishment" in this book. Quigley clearly knew more about these matters than anyone else who has been cling to discuss them publicly.

Most past reviews of this book have suffered from overly focusing on their own area of interest-namely conspiracy--Quigley's fascinating references to the behind the scenes forces conspiring to affect the course of history. In large part, these reviews have really been the same review in different formats, and I don't believe they effectively encouraged people to actually read Quigley. Many reviewers also jumped to the conclusion that Quigley himself was one of the conspirators.

But those who convinced themselves that Quigley was a promoter of this conspiracy have been unable to give coherent explanations of why he wrote the book. The contradiction or paradox arises from the book's most quoted paragraph by these reviewers:

"I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960% to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known." [p. 950, emphasis added]

Obviously, acknowledging and publicizing the existence of this secret group operating in a conspiratorial manner is the single most effective way to thwart them. So how can that be reconciled with Quigley's professed support of "most" of their goals? Perhaps the minority of their goals which he didn't support, were the ones regarding their own positions of supreme imperial power in the unfolding development of mankind. Indeed, if we merely take Quigley at his word in the above quotation, aligning England firmly into the European Community and reducing its influence in the United States would in fact quickly reduce if not obliterate the power and influence of the "network."

Significantly, in these conservative reviews, when that paragraph is quoted, the key parenthetical is usually not included. It is left out, and an ellipsis is inserted instead.

It is also very noteworthy that powerful elements of the English establishment continue to act today in that behavior mode criticized by Quigley: refusing to join fully in the European Union and exerting far too much influence on the United States, for example through NATO, as is apparent from the Yugoslav war reporting.

For a dramatic example of this book's relevance to understanding current events, let's briefly examine the Yugoslav war, which analysts from across the political spectrum were unable to explain satisfactorily. Try as they might, none could make much sense of NATO's very disproportionate bombing campaign against that small country--a merciless campaign even waged against civilian infrastructure. But, what if we add one of Quigley's concepts to the mix?

In the ongoing civil war, there had been reports of many atrocities being committed by Serb and Kosovar alike. But the NATO bombing appeared to do more harm to those Kosovars it was supposed to be helping, than the offending Serbs had been doing.

Why was the campaign carried on with such a vengeance that it appeared the very survival of a great power was at stake? Perhaps it was/is.

Certainly not any of America's vital interests, or the English people's vital interests are at stake. But perhaps the vital interests--even survival--of the secret power network exposed by Quigley are at stake. Consider the dynamic consolidation of the European Union, with a greater population and greater economic production than the U.S., and now with the introduction of the new Euro currency the entire area will be able to get out from under Alan Greenspan's dollar "hammer."

True to Quigley's main criticism England has remained aloof from the European Community, though arguably it would be advantageous to the English people for her to join. But England's power structure would then just be one among 11 other states, and their system of balancing one European power against another would be relegated to history's dustbin of dirty tricks. Since they are not really at home in America either, if the European Community and its currency succeed as they in all likelihood will, then the so called Anglo American Establishment which Quigley exposed, would be largely isolated there in the Atlantic between two great powers.

One "solution"? Stop the European community. How? It may be impossible. But perhaps with enough destabilization on the Balkan underbelly, Europe can be put off balance for a time, giving the opportunity for more such actions to arise. Also, if the responsibility for rebuilding Yugoslavia can be dumped onto the Europeans, it would be hard to think of a worse way to lead off the new Euro currency's career. This is not to say that additional interests and factors are not also in play; they always are.

The section of Tragedy entitled 'European ambiguities" [p. 1279] presents invaluable perspectives for understanding the current disposition of the European Community, along with its potential strengths and historic weaknesses, and the role which must be played by England, for an optimal resolution of "the problem of Germany"--the fact that a united Germany eventually becomes such a powerhouse, that other states fear and act against her.

We return to Quigley's reasons for directing conciliatory remarks toward the goals of the group. Blatantly exposing the existence of this unseen power network could have jeopardized the publication of the book. By directing a few "friendly" phrases toward it (which when properly analyzed are not be so friendly after all), no red flags were raised--at Macmillan and Company Publishers. That this was a real problem was demonstrated later by Macmillan's refusal to print a second edition after wide attention was focused on the exposure of the secret network, even though there was a good demand for the book.

Moreover, Quigley's earlier manuscript, called "The Anglo American Establishment," which describes the group at the end of World War II in some precise detail with names and dates, and, in a more critical manner, had proved unpublishable and was gathering dust at Georgetown since 1949. I learned of its existence in 1980 through a strange and unique set of accidental occurrences beginning 14 years earlier on the Greek island of Rhodes. With the help of one of Quigley's confidants, I found it in the archives and published it in 1981.

While those secret power network discussions coming from a scholar of Quigley's stature are very significant and would be more than enough reason to read Tragedy and Hope concentrating only on them doesn't do justice to the totality of the book. For example by page 21, using his demographic concepts of how civilizations evolve, Quigley has predicted that the west should expect to be feeling "Asiatic pressure" about the year 2,000 A.D.

Further, he explains why a different sequence of developments in factors such as ideology, weapons and agriculture has produced very different results in the east as compared to western civilization. For example in the west the agricultural and industrial revolutions and raising of living standards occurred before the weapons developments of the early- to mid-1900s. This made it possible for individual citizens to have access to the same weapons at the disposal of the state.

But "In Asia these better weapon arrived before Living standards could be raised by the agricultural revolution. . . As a result governments in Europe in 1930 hardly dared to oppress the people and democracy was growing; but in to non-European world by 1930 (and even more by 1950) governments did dare to, and could, oppress their peoples, who could do little to prevent it" [pp. 22-23]. ( .... continue)

A Commentary on "Tragedy and Hope" by Robin Ramsay

Tragedy and Hope
Robin Ramsay

On a number of occasions, most notably during his inaugural address as President, Bill Clinton has paid tribute to one of the people who taught him as a student, a man called Carroll Quigley.1 To at least 99% of those who heard the speech, the name meant nothing. But it sent a major frisson through a section of American conspiracy theorists. They knew who Carroll Quigley was; what they didn't know was why the President of the United States was naming him in such a public way.
The American conspiracy theorist has always known that there were people out to destroy the paradise that was mythical America, land of the brave, home of the free. But they kept changing their minds about the identity of the evil conspirators. Was it the Catholics? The Masons? The Jews? The bankers? The East coast elite of 'old money'? Fabians? After 1917 they knew it was International Communism but they weren't sure if there was someone else behind the Red Menace. Some suspected that Communism was merely a front for international Jewry (weren't Marx and Engels Jews?). Sometimes all the suspects were amalgamated into one vast, muddled, fudge as in this early 1950s formulation in which the threat was a 'Fabian, Rhodes Scholar, Zionist, Pinko, Communist, New Deal, Fair Deal, Socialist-minded gang'.2
In the mid-1960s the most important of the American conspiracy theory groups of the time, the John Birch Society, discovered the 1920s writing of a dead English writer called Nesta Webster. Webster had been quite widely read in Britain just after WW1 and she claimed to detect behind both French and Russian Revolutions the presence of an 18th century Masonic lodge called the Illuminati. On finding Webster, the Birchers looked as though they were about to move from being the most fervent exponents of the Great Communist Conspiracy Theory - Birch leader Robert Welch famously called President Eisenhower a 'conscious agent of international communism' - to a belief in the Illuminati as the all-powerful secret group pulling the strings behind the facade.3 But just as the organisation was about to make this shift, the Birchers' discovered a book by the aforementioned Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope. Which is where the story gets interesting.
Quigley's Tragedy and Hope was published in New York by Macmillan in 1966. It was 1300 pages long. Its subtitle, a history of the world in our time, gives a sense of its ambition and scope; yet the 1300 pages carried no documentation, no sources of any kind. Educated at Harvard and Princeton, Quigley taught at the School of Foreign Service, Harvard, Yale, the Brookings Institute and the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department - all major league, American ruling class institutions.4
Despite his impeccable academic credentials, the book being published by a major firm, and its unusual length and scope, Tragedy and Hope attracted only two tiny, dismissive, reviews from Quigley's peers.5 The American academic world blanked the book. Having had no reviews, the book didn't sell and Macmillan destroyed the plates from which the first edition had been printed.6 When the American writer Robert Eringer tracked Quigley down just before his death, Quigley warned him that writing about him and his book could get Eringer into trouble.
What had Quigley done to deserve this extraordinary treatment? He had done two things. First, unusually for a mainstream American historian, Quigley had described in some detail the rise of what he calls 'finance capital' in 20th century history. Second, more importantly, he included two sections, amounting to less than 20 of the book's 1300 pages, which described the formation and some of the activities of an organisation known as the Round Table and its origins in the megalomaniacal fantasies of the 19th century British imperialist Cecil Rhodes.
In the sections of Tragedy and Hope which caused Quigley problems, he claims that an organisation, variously titled the Rhodes-Milner Group, the Round Table, and just the Milner group, had virtual control over British foreign policy for much of the first half of this century when Britain was one of the world's leading powers. The inner core of this group, the Round Table, was a secret society founded by Cecil Rhodes. Using Rhodes' money, this group set up the Round Table groups in then British Dominions; the Council on Foreign Relations in the U.S.; the network of Royal Institutes of International Affairs; the various Institutes of Pacific Relations; controlled The Times and the Observer, All Souls in Oxford and the Rhodes Scholarship program; was largely responsible for the destruction of the League of Nations and the appeasement policies of the 1930s and converted the British Empire into the Commonwealth. These 'gracious and cultivated men of somewhat limited social experience' as Quigley describes them, 'constantly thought in terms of Anglo-American solidarity, of political partition and federation... were convinced that they could gracefully civilise the Boers of South Africa, the Irish, the Arabs and the Hindus... and were largely responsible for the partition of Ireland, Palestine and India, and for the federations of South Africa, Central Africa and the West Indies.'7 And so on and so on.
It is not that the Round Table people have been unknown. The names Quigley gives - e.g. in the inner group: Rhodes, Rothschild, William Stead, Viscount Esher, Milner, Abe Bailey, Earl Grey, H.A.L. Fisher, Jan Smuts, Leopold Amery, the Astors - are well known.8
The Round Table group are conventionally viewed as a group of enthusiastic imperialists who had a period of some visibility and influence in the 1910-20 period. Their journal, The Round Table, was well known between the wars, and is in many university libraries. (It continued until the mid 1970s, folded and was relaunched in the 1980s.)
Orthodox historians who have written about the Round Table people offer accounts of the period which are, more or less, consonant with Quigley's thesis.9 Toynbee, for example, attributes the Royal Institute of International Affairs to the Round Table people; and Butler, himself part of the group in Quigley's longer account, acknowledges that the so-called 'Cliveden Set' of the 1930s were, as Quigley claims, merely the Round Table at one of their regular meeting places.
In his biography of Rhodes, Flint gives a good deal of room to an account of the size and possible influence of the Rhodes Scholar network. He writes of 'the excessive number of Rhodes Scholars in the Kennedy Administration' and of the Rhodes Scholars forming 'a recognisable elite in Canada.'10 Apparently unaware of Quigley, Flint notes that 'in each of the white settled Commonwealth countries, South Africa and the United States, a similar, if less influential elite, had emerged... and since 1948 India, Pakistan and Ceylon may be experiencing a similar development... Rhodes Scholars created links between American, British and Commonwealth "establishments"... and they have played a role in creating the "special relationship" between the U.S., Britain and the dominions after 1945.'11
Kendle, although he dismisses Quigley's thesis without an explanation, is of particular interest: he, at least, had read Tragedy and Hope. No other historian of the period seems to have done so.12

Enter the 'radical right'
The one group of people who took Quigley to heart were the conspiracy theorists of the 'radical right' in America for whom Tragedy and Hope became a kind of bible. Here was the proof, the academically respectable proof, of the great conspiracy. It may not have been quite the conspiracy they had in mind, but it was a conspiracy none the less.13 Only a handful of academics have taken Quigley on board - Shoup and Minter, Carl Oglesby, Pieterse and van der Pijl - and none of them are mainstream Anglo-American historians.14 To that august body Quigley remains unknown - or unmentionable.
Quigley's sketchy account of the Round Table in Tragedy and Hope comes to a halt after WW2. The Round Table was one manifestation of the power of the British Empire and, as that disintegrated after the war, to be replaced by the new American economic empire, so the Round Table network's influence waned. The Rhodes Scholar network is still there;15 the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is still the single dominant force in the formation of American foreign policy;16 and from the CFR grew the Trilateral Commission in the early 1970s. President Clinton has been a member of both - as well as a Rhodes Scholar.17 Even without the article of endorsement by the Trilateral Commission founder, David Rockefeller, just before the 1992 presidential election,18 Bill Clinton was obviously Jimmy Carter 2 - another southern Democrat governor, sponsored and groomed by the Trilateral/CFR networks.19 The Royal Institute of International Affairs is still going strong in this country but much of its standing as an 'unofficial foreign office' has declined with the rise of other foreign policy think tanks. The last sighting of the Round Table as an organisation I have seen is a reference to it in the early 1970s.20
Quigley's thesis presents the familiar problems raised by the existence of all such elite groups: how to decide whether any particular policy outcome advocated by such groups was in fact the result of their advocacy. Even in his book solely about the Round Table network, Quigley mostly alleges rather than actually proving, the causal connections. (But the fact that he was so comprehensively blanked by academic history is, of course, a rather substantial hint that was on to something.)
In a sense what Quigley describes as the Round Table's conspiracy is merely the traditional behaviour of the British ruling class - only systematised slightly. Instinctively secretive, until recently more or less protected from public scrutiny by its control of the mass media and from academic investigation by its control of the universities, in a sense the British ruling class is the most successful 'conspiracy' ever seen. But Quigley claimed more than that. He actually asserts the existence of an honest-to-goodness secret society operating at the heart of British foreign policy in the years between the war whose activities can be traced across the British Commonwealth and the United States. For an establishment professor of history this was a remarkable thing to have done in 1966 when discussion of the influence of elite management groups such as the CFR, RIIA and Bilderberg - especially the latter - was confined almost exclusively to the far right. These days such groups are discussed a little more openly; but the fact that the minutes of the 1999 Bilderberg meeting were leaked and posted on the Internet was not reported by any of the major British print media. It is thus perhaps not a surprise that Anglo-American historians remain almost completely ignorant of, or silent on, the existence of Quigley's two books.

Notes
1. An early sighting of Clinton's esteem for Quigley is in Antaeus: Journals, Notebooks and Diaries, ed. Daniel Halpern (London: Collins Harvill, 1989). This is on p. 73 from the then largely unknown Governor Bill Clinton: 'I had a course in western civilisation with a remarkable man, the late Carroll Quigley. Half the people at Georgetown thought he was a bit crazy and the other half thought he was a genius. They were both right.'
This is discussed in Daniel Brandt, 'Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy', in NameBase Newsline, no. 1 April 1993 - a supplement to subscribers to Brandt's NameBase data base. This is available on line at www.pir.org
2. Cited on p.77 of George Thayer, The Farther Shore of Politics (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1968).
3. On Nesta Webster and the Bircher's discovery of her, see Richard Gilman, Behind World Revolution: the Strange Career of Nesta H. Webster, (Ann Arbor: Insight Books, 1982), especially pp. 4-6.
4. Quigley's entry is in Who's Who in America, 1966 through 1977.
5. In Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1966, and Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 1966.
6. Robert Eringer, The Global Manipulators (Bristol: Pentacle Books, 1980) p.9. Tragedy and Hope was eventually reprinted in 1974 by the 'radical right' and has been in print ever since.
7. Tragedy and Hope p. 954.
8. Quigley wrote a book exclusively about the Round Table network which, though written in 1949, was not published until after his death. It is in this book, The Anglo-American Establishment (New York: Books in Focus, 1981), that the details of the group's membership and alleged activities are given.
9. D. C. Ellinwood Jnr., 'The Round Table Movement and India 1909-20' in the Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, November 1971; A. L. Rowse, All Souls and Appeasement (London: Macmillan, 1961); M. G. Fry, Illusions of Security (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1972); W. B. Nimocks, 'Lord Milner's Kindergarten and the Origins of the Round Table' in South Atlantic Quarterly, Autumn 1964; D. C. Watt, Personalities and Policies (London: Longman's, London 1965); J. Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1975); J. R.M. Butler, Lord Lothian (London: Macmillan, 1960); F. Madden and D.K. Fieldhouse (eds.) Oxford and the Idea of the Commonwealth (London: Croom Helm, 1982); David Astor, Tribal Feeling (London: John Murray, 1964); Arnold Toynbee, Acquaintances (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
10. John Flint, Cecil Rhodes (Hutchinson, London, 1976). In the US, six in the State Department and at least 12 in the upper reaches of the administration. See Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (London 1975) p. 181. JFK's father was close to the Round Table people while U.S. Ambassador to London in the 1930s. In Canada, Flint provides a list, circa 1973, beginning with the Governor General, three cabinet ministers, head of the armed forces, most of the permanent officials in the civil service, etc etc. Flint pp. 244-5.
11 Flint p. 245.
12. Kendle p. 305 - the last paragraph of the book.
13 See for example the best known of the Bircher's books, None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen and Larry Abraham (Seal Beach, California; Concord Press, 1971).
14. Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War (New York: Berkley Medallion, 1977); Laurence Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust (London and New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977); Kees van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1984); Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation (London: Pluto, 1989). Shoup and Minter are American Marxists and are only interested in the Round Table as the parent body of the Council on Foreign Relations; Oglesby is a maverick historian, former SDS activist, so far from mainstream intellectual life as to be publicly interested in the Kennedy assassination; Pieterse and Pijls are Dutch Marxists.
15. They had a great reunion in Oxford, attended by the Queen, in 1983. See Time, July 11 1983. When that article was published, Time had six Rhodes Scholars on it.
16. This is extensively and repeatedly documented by the Website calling itself roundtable at www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2807
17. So obvious has Clinton's education in the Anglo-American elite become, even the Sunday Telegraph had a long piece on the Rhodes Scholars connection, sneering at the Rhodies in the Clinton administration as 'charming dreamers'. See 21 March 1983, p. 22.
18. New York Times, October 16 1992.
19. On Jimmy Carter and the Trilateral Commission, see for example, Jeff Frieden, 'The Trilateral Commission: Economics and Politics in the 1970s', in Monthly Review, December 1977.
20. Cecil King, Diaries (London 1975) p. 52.

Low Dose Doxycycline Hyclate (SDD)

I have been aware that low dose Doxycycline may cure many stealth bugs growing insidiously in the body.

Article from the Rosacia Support Group.

September 19th, 2005 | doxycycline

Given the recent developments in periostat, oracea and COL-3 an interesting article about the applicability of low dose doxycycline. The term SDD refers to `subantimicrobial dose doxycycline hyclate’.

From US Pharmacist, Vol. No: 29:04 Posted: 4/15/04.

New Applications of Doxycycline Hyclate in Medicine and Dentistry

Golub and his colleagues were able to show that tetracycline exerted a unique property that was independent of its antimicrobial effects. The chemically modified tetracyclines (CMTs) showed no antimicrobial effect but rather inhibited an enzyme called collagenase, which is produced by host neutrophils (white blood cells) and structural cells (eg, fibroblasts and osteoclasts).

…

Certain skin diseases appear to have etiologies similar to those seen with periodontitis. Inflammatory, collagenolytic skin diseases that are involved with collagen destruction via the production and release of collagenase include acne vulgaris, rosacea, and other pathological collagen breakdown, such as arthritis.

…

In another recent study, 50 rosacea patients (manifesting all stages of disease) received monotherapy with doxycycline hyclate 20 mg tablets twice daily for eight weeks. Most patients had no previous history of treatment for their rosacea symptoms. Patients were evaluated at the initial visit and again between two and eight weeks for erythema, inflammatory lesions, and telangiectasias (spider veins). After an average of four weeks of treatment with doxycycline hyclate 20 mg, patients experienced an 80% to 100% clearing of inflammatory lesions and a 50% reduction in erythema. A decrease in the size and diameter of telangiectasias was also observed, although complete clearing was not achieved. There were no reports of GI side effects, headaches, vaginitis, or photosensitivity (including for patients who had experienced such adverse effects on antimicrobial dosages of doxycycline).

…

In an ongoing study, 150 patients with moderate to severe rosacea are randomized to receive doxycycline hyclate 20-mg tablets twice daily or placebo for four months.39 The primary efficacy parameters include change in total papule and pustule lesion counts and change in clinician’s erythema scores from baseline.Although doxycycline hyclate 20 mg tablets are not currently indicated for the treatment of rosacea or acne vulgaris, similarities between these diseases and periodontitis, as well as the encouraging results from studies of its use in acne and rosacea patients, have prompted FDA phase III studies involving orally administered SDD in rosacea patients. Ongoing and planned SDD studies include patients with blepharitis, postmenopausal osteopenia, periodontal implantitis, perioral dermatitis, and additional rosacea studies.

See also

• Full Article Online
• Periostat (doxycycline hyclate) 20mg Prescribing Information (PDF)

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Affectionate Living by Ajahn Viradhammo

Although my personal views on spiritual truth centers on the teachings of Jesus Christ, I believe that there is nothing inconsistent with the following philosophy and the practice of points in the direction of the truth:

- A talk by Ajahn Viradhammo given at Bodhinyanarama on 13 December 1998
Good evening. It is nice to see so many people here to use this lovely space to sit quietly and contemplate Dhamma.We have just finished a ten day retreat with about thirty lay people and the monastic community. It is a privilege to live without competition, worldly things or the usual struggle of life. At times like these, one can just observe the way things are. One sees spaciousness, and a trusting and moral environment where silence is encouraged and the beauty of nature is present. To be in this environment is a great privilege.

What one develops in a period of time like that is a strong sense of community and of relating to people. There's a common activity because the life of community is cooperative not competitive. There is no 'I want to get to nibbana before you and if you get ahead of me I'm going to trip you.' I know that if I work on myself, practice in this particular way, live morally and uphold the principles of the retreat and the teaching, then that encourages you to do the same thing. And if you do that too it encourages me. There's a reciprocity of encouragement, affection and aspiration.
This of course is something that is often lacking in a society which is geared to competition, money and ease, where life is a vicarious existence of watching rugby games or other forms of entertainment. Community life is I think an art form which is being much lost these days. It is hard to do if one has been conditioned to individuality. I certainly was. I had my own room. My brother had his own room. I had my records. He had his records. If he touched my records he'd be finished. The life of community is something that I have learned by being a Buddhist monk. As you know, we chant 'Sangha vandeh / I revere the Sangha'. In Buddhism 'Sangha vandeh/ I revere the Sangha' is seen to be the 'Sangha of Enlightened Beings'. Where do you find one of those these days? But if you bring Sangha to the ordinariness of life, you contemplate community.
To me community implies a sense of affection for one's place, for the trees, for the water one uses, for the air one breathes, for the food one eats, for governance, for the street one uses, for one's neighbour, for the shoemaker, for the greengrocer and so on. A Buddhist culture implies the sense of developing community by being responsible for all these very real things.
To live and work in community requires us to give. One of the great virtues of a Buddhist culture is dana, giving. Sometimes there can be a form of spiritual materialism, where giving is linked to a better material status in the next life. We need to think about what dana, or generosity, actually implies. What does metta, the idea of kindness and compassion imply other than being nice to my dog or my kids? Like community, metta also implies a deep commitment to affection at a very real and pervasive level. Affection for one's roads, for the air. For New Zealand. This monastery of course brings that up. When you come to this environment you notice the affection; affection for architecture, for workmanship, for a path which is laid out with beautiful stones you can walk along, There is also a sense of responsibility for the overall harmony of the community. For me to see it's not for you to make me happy but rather for me to try to participate with affection in your life, my own life and in our community life in order to create harmony. That's what an elder does.

The school of Buddhism this monastery is a part of is called 'Theravada' which means 'The Way of the Elders'. Of course traditionally that means the elder members of the ordained Sangha who have much wisdom and so on. All of us are moving towards that because one of the developments of a spiritual life is a movement to maturity and the taking of responsibility for one's community. That includes the family and all our associations.
Often the problems of society are pronounced in terms of a global or national problem. But there are no national problems, just individual problems. It's always individuals disagreeing or individuals fighting. That can be a national problem if the whole national psyche is geared towards that. But the solutions are always individual. They are about you and I working together with each other. People often say 'well I'm gonna wait for the other guy to recycle the plastic and then I'll start'. But why wait? Why not begin oneself?
The Buddhist teaching around compassion and empathy and affectionate participation in life puts up strong mirrors. We try to have universal empathy but it can be a challenge. The first monk I met said to me 'don't worry about the parts of Buddhism you agree with. It is the bits you find difficult to follow which are the tough ones'. These are like mirrors which present a challenge to the mind. So if I have a disagreement with someone or if I hate the polluters and I dwell in continual hatred for even that which is evil, then the Buddha's teaching says 'no that's not my teaching. You can call yourself a Buddhist but that's not what I'm teaching'. Then we can look inwards and ask 'why can't I live up to those high standards, what is it about my life that I am unable to do that?' Participation in the difficulties of the community as a spiritual practice is the great challenge. To use the committee meeting as your monastery or to use your adversary as your teacher is a way of introducing spiritual practice into problem solving. This is very rewarding. It's hard work. It's much easier to slope off and say 'well let them do it I'm going to watch the ball game tonight'. Sometimes we need to do that but that kind of participation in community where we think we'll let someone else take care of the trees or the water, doesn't bring many rewards.
Sometimes Buddhism can seem to involve an attitude of 'leave me alone I'm trying to get enlightened'. Even metta practice can be like that. You can be sitting there saying 'may all beings be well, may they be free from suffering', when someone interrupts your meditation and you snap at them. It's easier to idealise universal compassion than to actually live it. To be in a relationship with someone who really presses your buttons and to be aware of that is a spiritual practice. Now that doesn't mean that we don't feel alienation, resentments, anger or fear. These are natural conditions of the human heart. But to take alienation or resentment as my refuge or as something that I pursue, of course defeats community. It also defeats my own spiritual practice.
So what does a Buddhist have faith in? A Buddhist has faith in goodness and in virtue. You might say I didn't have to become a monk to do that. But to witness that which is unwholesome and unskilful in an affectionate way is the Buddhist path. Because we have both in our hearts; that which is divisive and that which is unifying. We have both because we're human beings and to have affection for one's inner worlds means to take responsibility for the whole business. But we don't have to take refuge in it all.

Sometimes when we do metta bhavana practices of loving kindness we begin with ourselves and our loved ones, then we radiate that love outwards to more neutral kinds of people and then we try to bring up into consciousness beings we think are our enemies. That can be hard because it's tied into memory. It's very interesting how memory works. When you mention someone who has harmed you, your memory pattern goes right to that doesn't it? To not pursue or feed that memory pattern is a way of ending the whole sense of alienation and separation.
The monastery I come from has about fifty people resident, often another fifty on retreat and maybe another hundred for a meal. So it's a pretty big outfit. Sometimes you get a clique of whingers. They're usually the behind the woodshed smoker types, complaining that the Abbot talks too much or that the monks took all the cakes again. They usually walk out the door and are never seen again. That's not how you form community.
When one hears that kind of divisive speech, maybe we can listen without buying into it. We can say 'yeah it sounds like you've got a problem'. To disagree is fine but we want to avoid feeding that continual tendency of the human mind to become negative.
To take responsibility in community for right speech is again one of these mirrors that the Buddha's teaching is presenting to us. Right speech is speech which is in concord, brings harmony, is truthful, beautiful and according to Dhamma. Wrong speech is speech which is divisive, untruthful, ugly, cruel, harsh or swearing and speech which is just foolish. If we're really working with Buddhism as a spiritual teaching then when our speech enters into disharmony and divisiveness we'll awaken to that because we're taking this training seriously. We'll say 'why do I need to do that? Why do I need to create disharmony?' Inherent in this is a joyous awakening to the peacefulness of relating and to intimacy. Intimacy isn't just about a relationship between two people. It's more than that. It's about non-alienation with and affection for all sentient beings. It's not an easy thing to do but that noble aspiration is worth it because it does bring joy. Not the joy of consumerism or the easy way out. It's a deeper sense of nobility in the human heart.
Community takes a lot of work. I've lived in community for 25 years and the image Ajahn Sumedho uses is of fifty rough green stones in one of these polishing machines. They come out all nice and shiny and you can buy them in the shop. The process is grinding. It's like being with someone you find irksome and with whom it's ok to disagree, but taking responsibility for that. Or like being with someone you find intimidating and working with that. It is a kind of a grinding which requires time, stability and commitment.
We have to ask ourselves why there is so much depression and suicide in our society. For me it seems the problem is that we don't have community and that we don't relate in a non-alienating way. We relate in a competitive way. We cut the trees down in order to use the land. We become alienated from our own bodies and they become bloated, overfed things that we have to carry around. What is a body? It is one of the environments we live in. What does it feel like? What kind of food does it need? A life of affection for your community of emotional beings, for what you're putting into your body and into your mind is a more complete way of living your life.

But what is the affectionate relationship to the emotions? Even within a spiritual practice we can have a cruel self hating attitude towards the very real difficulties that we face. We expect ourselves to love, or forgive. The spiritual part of community also includes an affectionate participation in one's own inner being and an understanding of one's own emotions. Within that inner affection or inner awareness one sees all kinds of limitations. One sees that one does resent, get angry and have fears.
This is a more complete, integrated way of living your life. A life lived for a weekend of golf doesn't make sense to me. To push one's body hard in some way and then have a few hours of pleasure a week seems to me to be disassociated and alienated from life. But a life of immediacy where we're living moment by moment in this kind of affectionate and caring way makes a lot of sense and has very good results.
This can lend a new quality to one's existence, because the process of existence is just as important as any other goal we might have. The doing is important because the doing involves affection for all the little things.
If the means are right the ends will be right. If the way I'm living this moment now is not conjoined with affection then how can I have affection later on? If my spiritual contemplations are bound by self hatred and self judgment and put downs of myself and all that, how can there be affectionate love at the end of the road? There can't be. It just doesn't work. The law of karma doesn't work that way. So this life of Buddhism is a life of responsibility, maturity and affection. A life of caring for oneself and for one's community.
I wish you well in your own spiritual journey and I hope this place is helpful for you in this way of developing community in your own spiritual life. Thank you for your attention.