Free – the Resurgence 250, and MANAS he might be and could be

Offer expires when I stop speaking. – announcer on Late Night With Conan O’Brien reciting the accustomed reams of sweepstake-terms boilerplate at the speed of sound

One of our fave-all-right peery-oddicals (fellow eccentrics) here at the DSL. World HQ in the wilds of North Berwick (Maine, not Scotland) is a serious bi-monthly from England for the bi-[monthly]serious who read English, called Resurgence. Parts of the current issue are posted free. Better yet, you can download for free the entire Issue 250, from September-October 2008. Just as The Times Literary Supplement of London is an authoritative global crossroads and clearinghouse for literature, scholarship and the arts, Resurgence serves a like purpose built for what one might call the global wholistic, organic counterculture:

Since 1966 Resurgence magazine has been one of the pillars of environmental thinking, generating an ecological awareness essential for human and planetary well-being and survival. Resurgence is the leading international forum for ecological and spiritual thinking.

What’s in Resurgence? Edited by Satish Kumar , Resurgence provides an eclectic mix of articles on deep ecology, holistic science, creative living, spiritual well-being and sustainable agriculture, with a lively mix of arts and crafts and book reviews in each issue.

Contributors include: Holistic visionaries like the Dalai Lama, Wendell Berry, Theodore Roszak and Terry Tempest Williams

Environmental theorists such as Wolfgang Sachs, Hazel Henderson, and Amory Lovins

Scientists like Fritjof Capra, Brian Goodwin and James Lovelock … Activists like Vandana Shiva, George Monbiot and Jonathon Porritt, as well as poets and artists who explore nature, spirit and imagination such as David Whyte, Andy Goldsworthy and Margaret Neve.

“Inspiring stories, practical examples, visionary proposals, stunning graphics, historic insights, international perspectives, and beautiful poetry. Resurgence is a valued friend and essential resource for all who believe that another world is possible.” David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World

Here’s a great anthology of 100 profiles of the leading inspirational figures from the Resurgence orbit:

world leaders: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and The Dalai Lama

spiritual figures: Krishnamurti, Desmond Tutu, Thomas Moore, and Thich Nhat Hanh

writers: Wendell Berry, Kahlil Gibran, Aldo Leopold, and Arundhati Roy

scientists: Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall and James Lovelock

educators: Ivan Illich and Rabindranath Tagore

economists: E. F. Schumacher and Muhammad Yunus

ecological activists: Vandana Shiva, Terry Tempest Williams, and Wangari Maathai, among others within each category.

A fine American analogue to Resurgence is Orion, from Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

A fine American publisher specializing in books cognate with the above, many opening the reader to what are often called the Perennialist or Traditionalist streams of thought, is World Wisdom, of Bloomington, Indiana.

Perhaps the finest of them all was the most remarkable weekly you’ve probably never heard of, called MANAS, edited and written, almost singlehandedly for forty-one years [1948-1988] by a Los Angeles commercial printer, Theosophist and Second World War C.O. of draw-joppingly wide reading named Henry Geiger , who wrote and edited under purest anonymity, preferring to let his ideas, and those he channeled in virtual organic absorption from others, speak for themselves. Imagine that, in our latter-day media landscape, so drenched in ego! MANAS [the word is Sanskrit for "mind" or "the thinker"] argued unapologetically for a philosophy of soul that dated back to Socrates and such ancient Indian wisdom literature as the Bhagavad-Gita. Occasional bylined contributions by emerging thinkers of its time, often reprinted from hard-to-find lectures and prophetic contributions to little magazines and academic journals, such as Abraham Maslow, Wendell Berry, E.F. Schumacher, Theodore Roszak, and Robert Maynard Hutchins, belied its tiny circulation of around 2500. Its missionary annual subscription rate, at its close twenty years ago next month, ran a mere ten dollars for 44 issues; Geiger beached MANAS each year in July and August.*

* He died within weeks, aged 80, of ending his prophetic weekly as of the last week of 1988 – so his launch of MANAS just after New Year’s 1948 made for a clean 41 years to the week.

Hypnotic surveys, virtually nineteenth-century in their bookish erudition, on man’s place in the universe and relation to nature, on the ineffable sparks of character development within individuals and the cultures shaping them, alternated in each issue with heartening on-the-scene reports of practical and voluntary actions by small and determined groups worldwide, to feed, clothe, house, heal and educate themselves and their communities outside the dominant imperatives of the state-corporate-educational complex.

MANAS was especially remarkable for its attention to the relentless colonisation in the West, since the seventeenth century, of the social and moral spheres by materialist habits of thought and sources of authority: it upheld ethical thought as sovereign master of subordinate instrumental modes of thought, of ethics as humanist and independent from the chilling and oft-smuggled authoritarian dogmas of scientism, statism and organised religion alike. Hardly less remarkable was its regular department “Children…and Ourselves”, in which the education, cognitive and ethical alike, of the young, received some of the most philosophically-astute treatment I’ve seen anywhere: try this short essay [pp. 10-11] from 1949, on the need to equalise growing freedom in developing children with growing and form-fit responsibility for, and connection to, the material conditions of their existence.

You’re not going to believe me when I tell you that every issue of MANAS is free online [hosted by the E.F. Schumacher Society of Great Barrington, Massachusetts], and that as you explore it and are engrossed by its content and tone, a blend of the phenomenological and the everyday, you’re going to feel as though you’ve fallen into a Looking Glass rabbit-hole, and are more than happy to emerge other in thought and spirit from your earlier self, before bookmarking and searching and browsing times without number. Here is a roster of the thinkers discussed most often within the MANAS archive. And here is a review at Amazon.com, by a blogger I’ve known and argued with since I was born in a blog gabbin’, of THE MANAS READER, a sampler of about a hundred of the weekly’s choicer articles from its first twenty-three or so years. Pick up a copy therein for under three dollars. As my long-ago bookseller colleague/friend/supervisor/roommate Norman used to say to the Arlington dowagers to whom he attempted to handsell his great stacks of Wendell Berry, Jacques Barzun and Albert Jay Nock, “I haven’t lied to you yet.”