The Far East of late has become something of a spawning ground for spiritual leaders bent on converting the world. There was South Korea's Rev. Sun Myung Moon, 55, a self-ordained Christian missionary (and self-made millionaire) whose message of repentance was blatted across the U.S. last year by thousands of zealous young converts to his Unification Church (TIME, Sept. 30). Yet another prophet is Daisaku Ikeda, 46, president and spiritual leader of Japan's Soka Gakkai (Value-Creation Society), a laymen's Buddhist organization. Ikeda is fast earning a reputation as a super missionary for peace.
Although the sect's Utopian approach to global problems often sounds like an Oriental echo of Moral Re-Armament, Ikeda carries more political clout than most religious leaders. His organization is the founder of Japan's Komeito (Clean Government) party, which emerged second only to the combined forces of the Socialists and Communists as an opposition party in the last election. Moreover, on his global mission for what he calls "lasting peace," Ikeda last year was received by both Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin and Chinese Premier Chou Enlai. When he visits the U.S. this week to address his organization's 200,000 converts in the country, Ikeda will meet U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to inform him that Soka Gakkai has collected 10 million signatures against nuclear armament.
Lotus Sutra. Although Soka Gakkai is based on the teachings of a zealous 13th century Japanese monk named Nichiren Daishonin, who sought to demystify and simplify Buddhism, it has little in common with Zen or other more meditative sects. The emphasis is placed on repeated chanting of the Diamoku, (worship formula) in praise of the lotus sutra. Members must prove their piety by making fresh converts. One of their most debatable practices is shakubuku, or forcible persuasion, which some critics charge has often bordered on brainwashing.
The organization had a phenomenal growth after Ikeda, the son of a Tokyo seaweed vendor, became its leader in 1960. Since then, membership has grown from 1.3 million to 10 million, and converts have been made in more than 30 different countries. To propagate its teachings, Soka Gakkai publishes a daily newspaper, Seikyo Shimbun (circ. 4.5 million), operates its own university, Soka Digaku, near Tokyo, and has built a temple as big as the Houston Astrodome at the foot of Mount Fuji.
In 1964 the organization founded the Komeito party in hopes of wiping out corruption in government. Although the party is now theoretically independent of Soka Gakkai, believers in the sect account for 90% of party membership. With 30 representatives in the lower house of the Diet and 24 in the upper house, Komeito has become a force to be reckoned with. Says Yoshiaki Masaki, the party policy board chairman: "We stand on the side of small people and work against the base of authority in Japan."
Faith and Power. Ikeda himself has moved more and more into the political arena recently. He called for re-establishing diplomatic relations with China long before most other Japanese leaders did, and has written a bestselling book about his impressions of Mao's revolution. In other books, lectures and articles, which are seriously and lengthily analyzed in the Tokyo press, Ikeda has advocated a world food bank, cutbacks in defense expenditures, and nuclear disarmament. His most consuming passion is the creation of an international people-to-people crusade against war. "Government leaders come and go," he explains. "Not the contact established and fostered for peace, people to people."
Ikeda lives modestly in a Japanese-style house with his wife and three children. By many of his followers, he is regarded as a reincarnation of Nichiren, and he obviously relishes the role. True to the teachings of Soka Gakkai, Ikeda equates faith with power—and he makes no bones about the fact that power is what his organization is after. Why not? Says he: "You have to have power to do anything at all meaningful."
We find our individual freedom, by choosing not a destination but a direcion. You do not choose the transformative journey because you know where it will take you but because it is the only journey that makes sense.
左翼の論文は偏見だらけの空論
Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship
Posted on October 2, 2018
·47 minute read
·byJames A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose
This essay, although hopefully accessible to everyone, is the most thorough breakdown of the study and written for those who are already somewhat familiar with the problems of ideologically-motivated scholarship, radical skepticism and cultural constructivism
Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem.
We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.
We undertook this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research. Because open, good-faith conversation around topics of identity such as gender, race, and sexuality (and the scholarship that works with them) is nearly impossible, our aim has been to reboot these conversations. We hope this will give people—especially those who believe in liberalism, progress, modernity, open inquiry, and social justice—a clear reason to look at the identitarian madness coming out of the academic and activist left and say, “No, I will not go along with that. You do not speak for me.”
This document is a first look at our project and an initial attempt to grapple with what we’re learning and what it means. Because of its length and detail, it is organized as follows, putting the factual information up front and more detailed explanations thereafter.
•Our methodology, which is central to contextualizing our claims;
•A summary of this project from its beginning until we were eventually exposed and forced to go public before we could conclude our research;
•An explanation of why we did this;
•A summary of the problem and why it matters;
•A clear explanation of how this project came to be;
•The results of our study, including a full list of all of the papers we submitted, their final outcomes, and relevant reviewer comments to date;
•A discussion of the significance of the results;
•A summary of what may come next
8606:アクエリアン
19/07/10(水) 20:51:24
左翼の論文は偏見だらけの空論
Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship
Posted on October 2, 2018
･47 minute read
･byJames A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and
(文字略)
IN A STUDENT AREA OF Tokyo called Takadanobaba, behind a peculiar sculpture showing a nude Marilyn Monroe about to pounce on a sumo wrestler, lies the office of Kunio Suzuki, leader of a ''spiritual movement'' called the Issuikai.
The group produces a monthly paper called Reconquista, which aims to reconquer what Suzuki thinks has been lost: the pure Japanese spirit. On the wall of Suzuki's tiny office hang pictures of Emperor Hirohito in uniform, snapped sometime during the 1930's, and of Yukio Mishima, the ultranationalist writer who committed seppuku, a form of ritual suicide, in 1970.
Suzuki is a quiet man in his early 40's, casually dressed, more like a research fellow than a right-wing activist. He receives many fan letters from young women, who profess to admire his romantic spirit.
He explained that ''because of biased textbooks'' many people of his generation felt guilty about the Japanese role in World War II, ''and people who did better than I did at school all joined the left-wing student movement.'' He concluded that there was something wrong with Japanese education. He also worries about the spiritual state of most Japanese, ''who spend their time reading comics and watching TV,'' but he conceded they were probably quite content. A young member of the group, who had been engrossed in a book on terrorism, suddenly broke his silence to exclaim that it was all America's doing: ''They want us to be weak. That is why they rigged our education system. To stop Japan from being a major power.''
