Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on September 13, 2022 | 28 Comments
Today, small farm future brings you a rare guest post, authored by Sean Domencic who regular readers here will know well. But before handing over to him, I probably need to sketch a bit of background.
When I started thinking and reading seriously about food, farming and ecology in the late 1990s (and then doing it), it felt like a large gap in my education that I needed to fill with self-study, both in terms of practical skills and wider intellectual contexts. On the latter front, I came across eco-philosopher J. Baird Callicott’s Beyond the Land Ethic in a Seattle bookhshop, which introduced me to Aldo Leopold and many other thinkers and ideas that were new to me. One essay in that book, ‘Genesis and John Muir’, made a particular impression on me – a detailed exegesis of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and their fall from Eden, out of which Callicott fashioned a defence of Leopold’s famous dictum that Homo sapiens was a “plain member and citizen” of the land-community.
In 2007, I gave up my last gainful employment in academia and with much trepidation began a new career as a market grower. The switch had many plus points, but for a good deal of the time I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, or – more to the point – why I was doing it. To be honest, I still feel that, but now in a slightly richer and mellower way. And since old habits die hard, what better way to mark my passage from academia to the uncertainties of tending the soil than writing a peer-reviewed article about it for a scholarly journal?
My essay ‘Genesis and J. Baird Callicott’ duly appeared in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (it’s available at the bottom of the ‘Research and publications page’). In it, I make the case for a tragic interpretation of the Genesis story and, by extension, of farming and human livelihood-making more generally – tragic not in the everyday sense of ‘really bad’ but in the technical sense of simultaneously having to follow incompatible imperatives, as in the predicament of a tragic heroine like Antigone who is ethically enjoined both to obey the king and to bury her brother, but can’t do both. Basically, I argued that the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden dramatized human hubris in supposing ourselves to have godlike powers of judgment, and the consequent nemesis of our Fall and subsequent career as self-conscious, failed, would-be gods who can never get their interventions in the natural world quite right.
The essay was published fourteen years ago, and I daresay my take was coloured by my positioning at that time on my own particular intellectual and occupational journey. But I’ll say more about that in my next post. Much more recently, I did a podcast with Sean where I mentioned the essay in passing. He asked for a copy and then, in impressively short order, wrote the critical appraisal of it that I’m publishing here. I have to apologise to him for my long delay in making it public.
A couple of final points before I give him the floor. I wrote the essay from a secular atheist perspective, treating the Eden story as a brilliant metaphor for a wider truth about the human condition in general and the dilemmas of agriculture in particular. Sean has a different, but in my opinion supremely informative take. I plan to write a short response to his commentary, and to further comments anyone might wish to add below, in my next post. That will wrap up my present focus in this blog cycle on Chapter 16 of my book, A Small Farm Future, where I think this discussion properly fits, before moving onwards and endwards as I inch my way to concluding the whole cycle.
It’s possible that some readers might find this whole debate a bit niche or esoteric, homing in as it does on a few lines of ancient scripture that perhaps not everyone will find especially relevant to the pressing issues of today. My view to the contrary is that all of these texts – Genesis, Callicott, Leopold, my article and Sean’s response – are 100% relevant to contemporary issues, though no doubt it would be possible to cut to the chase without so much scriptural exegesis. Anyway, just to say if all this isn’t to your taste, of course feel free to skip this and the next post, but I hope you’ll come back to discuss health and social services in a small farm future with me a couple of posts down the line.
Now over to Sean.
Dear Chris,
I’ve read your 2008 article engaging with the creation narrative of Genesis and the environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott. Thanks for sending it my way. Below, I want to offer some thoughts, coming from the perspective of one strongly aligned with your vision of agrarian populism due to my Catholic faith, both on points of common ground and on important differences. Given the decade since you wrote the article (“sorry for the late reply!”), I’m very interested to see how your thoughts on the topic have developed. (All quotations are from your article, unless otherwise cited).
A Summary of Creation Philosophy
As you state by way of introduction, the topic of your paper was “human relationships with the land”, which is, at heart, a philosophical discussion: what is man in relation to animals, plants, and earth? This topic underpins a great deal of your arguments in A Small Farm Future, but receives no extended or definitive treatment. I believe such a principle of humanity’s relationship with Creation would be a great blessing, and perhaps a necessity, for any agrarian populist movement, a point I’ll discuss further below.
You offer a clear vision of potential ethics:
Your critique of the despotic ethic is well known in your treatment of ecomodernism, and I am in full agreement. Indeed, Pope Francis has authoritatively stated: “…to the charge that Judaeo-Christian thinking, on the basis of the Genesis account which grants man “dominion” over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), has encouraged the unbridled exploitation of nature by painting him as domineering and destructive by nature. This is not a correct interpretation of the Bible as understood by the Church” (Laudato Si’ § 67).
And your critique of the citizenship ethic, present both in this article and your book, is likewise compelling. Against the often rosy-eyed view that we can return to perfect harmony with so-called ‘pure nature’, you point out that “we cannot ultimately so level our own distinctive experiences of the world to that of other species or organisms.” This naivete often leads to practical errors, such as how the “the contemporary deep ecology movement consistently vaunts foraging over agriculture.”
We agree that while humans may be citizens of the biosphere, we are not the same as birds and bees, grass and trees, but rather “human beings, like beavers or elephants, are an intrinsically patch-disturbing species, the main difference from other patch-disturbers being the scale of operations.” Thus,
The implication of a good deal of ‘holistic’ and ‘deep ecological’ writing such as Seed’s (1985) and Shepard’s (1998)—that the natural world generally evinces stable states of equilibrium, that somewhere in our history humanity fell out of step with such states, but that with the correct consciousness or ideology in place it can be rediscovered so that we can slot back into a harmonious relationship with the natural world. My reading of [the author of Genesis] is that this is not the case—or not, at any rate, after the Fall.
Life as a Tragedy?
Here you arrive at your conclusion: that, in the final analysis, humanity’s relationship to Creation is a tragic one, i.e. one in which the protagonist (humans) are forced to make a choice (using our rationality to altering our ecosystems) that is ruinous, or at least undesirable:
“…[W]e are condemned to meddling with [Creation] on a grand scale in order to earn our bread. We are, as it were (and as Genesis tells us), frustrated gods—possessed of an immense imagination and technical power, but denied both perfect knowledge and immortality, thrown back as dependents upon the soil and its communities of plants and animals.”
Your philosophy of Creation is tragic because we are stirred up with a desire that shall never be fulfilled, a desire either for peaceful communion with the earth or for her rational subjugation to ourselves. But against “[t]he utopianism of both deep ecology and industrial agriculture, the tragic sensibility of enlightened agriculture insists that we shall not crack the code and live for evermore in peace and tranquillity.” Rather, “at the end of all our labours we shall still be hungry, and ignorant, and unredeemed.”
However, you attempt to soften the blow of this tragedy; this bucket of ice-cold Somerset existentialism serves as “a built-in defence mechanism against the hubris of some final enlightenment.” Thus, “the three rival interpretations of Genesis—the despotic, the stewardarian, and the land-ethical—are almost better seen as complementarities” in that their extremes balance each other out. From the land-ethical, we should draw our lofty idealism; from the despotic, our grim realism; and from the stewardarian, some kind of compromise.
This theme runs likewise through A Small Farm Future, which has a pronounced hesitancy about all it pontificates. At best, this cautious approach saves you from the closed, blind-sighted ideologies which you critique (whether neoliberal ecomodernism, orthodox Marxism, or utopian primitivism). But at worst, it avoids commitments, and perhaps loses some of its clarity and rhetorical bite by failing to commit to more solid principles. There is something very noble, even inspiringly humble, about a conservative estimate of the power of human rationality, but I wonder whether such an approach has the potential to bring about such a tall order as a shared earth of local distributist economies, especially given the dire timescale of the 21st century. Moreover, as a Catholic, I believe God has provided some solid rock on which to stand.
An alternative philosophic trichotomy
While you do cite Berry’s discussion of a stewardship philosophy of Creation, I argue that your treatment is flawed by not taking this Christian doctrine more seriously. Stewardship, in your trichotomy, seems to be merely a polite nod to an elderly-but-not-quite-coherent position, or a mid-point on the spectrum from “industrial technocracy” to “deep ecology”.
Here I outline my own trichotomy, with the notable difference that the stewardship position is meant not as a compromise, but as a Truth, and the extremes to either side are only degenerations thereof:
(“In Defense of Distributist Luddism”, delivered 19 March 2021)
This view obviously bears a great similarity to your own, but a common accusation is that the Stewardship Ethic devolves easily into the despotic. After all, if humanity is the arbiter of its own stewardship, who can hold it to account? How can Creation be treated justly if it is in a state of subjection? Surely, there is no real difference between submission and slavery?
The answer to these questions, particularly the last, go beyond the scope of this conversation, but I shall briefly allude to the solution I have evinced. In a response on this blog here, I argued that the central problem of the last five centuries, amid all the intractable arguments of the Right and Left, both philosophically and politically, lies in the divorce of liberation and hierarchy, a unique product of modernity. Briefly, the “leftist” deep ecologists can only imagine a liberated Creation if humanity is not placed in hierarchy over her, and the “rightist” ecomodernists defend anthropocentrism so as to reject any real liberation of Creation. But this line of reasoning, I must save for a more extended treatment.
A simpler answer to this critique—that stewardship seems inherently despotic—is to clarify that stewardship, at least of the traditional, full-bodied sort for which I argue, is more closely aligned to deep ecology than ecomodernism. Wendell Berry, cited by yourself as a prime example of the stewardship ethic, is clearly “one of us” politically: an ecological distributist with a luddite sensibility. You and I agree that the Callicott-revision of the Leopold land ethic is an excellent ideal, but I say let’s not be too dreary about it. Lighten up! The careful balance of the biotic farmer isn’t a miserable life of compromised principles, but a joyful adventure of pursuing a distant, but attainable, ideal: sainthood. We are not hemmed in by a cruel, alienated world; in Christ, we are restored to communion with all Creation, and our commitment to limits is born from love not fear. To prove this assertion, I must now turn to your exegesis.
Life as a Gift
In the beginning of your article, you outline Callicott analysis of the Fall at length, and agree with him! To summarize, before the Fall, “Eden resembles an idealized natural economy of foraging, a place of natal equality in which there is no alienation, no substantial difference between one sentient entity and another, no I and thou, no individuals, and therefore, in a sense, no death” (my emphasis). But the taking of the forbidden fruit to “become like gods” results in
“the inevitable alienation from nature that necessarily attends anthropocentrism. If the part would separate itself from the whole, and parse the whole into good and evil categories in relation to self-interest, then the part, by that very act, disrupts the harmonious life of the whole”;
and,
“[w]hen the author of [Genesis] says ‘they knew that they were naked’ [after eating the fruit], we may understand that to be just a graphic way of saying they became self-conscious, self-aware. That information…is just the knowledge of good and evil—if not the whole of the knowledge of good and evil, then the foundation for all the rest. For once aware of themselves, they may treat themselves as an axiological point of reference” (Callicott, quoted by yourself)
It may seem absurd or pedantic to harp on this point, but I quote this “highly metaphorical interpretation of Adam and Eve’s nakedness in terms of the emergence of normative thought” at length because it lies “[a]t the crux of Callicott’s analysis”, and moreover because you affirm this exegetical teaching, saying “[i]f we can accept this interpretation—as I believe we can…”
Simply, I could not disagree more. According to this approach, man’s interiority, subjectivity, and rationality do not exist except as fallen things. Yet these aspects of humanity are the most treasured of all, indeed, they are the very foundation of human dignity, at least from the Christian perspective, a tradition which places enormous weight on the fact that “God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good.” (Genesis 1:31, the climax of the “priestly source”) This is interpreted to mean that humanity, and all of Creation, is essentially good, and that this goodness persists even after the Fall. If this were not true, then it is not possible for Christ to redeem and restore without totally destroying us. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how a natural/secular humanism could persist without affirming this—the inherent, if imperfect, goodness of humanity—to be true.
This contradicts your pessimism which I discussed above, but it opens up an important question. How is the account of the Fall in Genesis 3 to be read? Here, I must quote at great length an entirely different exegesis from Pope Saint John Paul II (1920-2005):
“Let us turn afresh to the Yahwist account, in which the same man, male and female, appears at the beginning as the man of original innocence—before original sin—and then as one who has lost this innocence by breaking the original covenant with the Creator…the biblical description itself seems to highlight particularly the key moment in which, in man’s heart, doubt is cast on the Gift. The man who picks the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil makes at the same time a fundamental choice and carries it through against the will of the Creator, God-Yahweh, by accepting the motivation suggested by the temper, “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” According to old translations: “You will be like gods, who know good and evil.”
This motivation clearly includes questioning the Gift and on Love, from which creation has its origin as gift. As regards man, he receives the “world” as a gift and at the same time the “image of God,” that is, humanity itself in all the truth of its male and female duality. It is enough to read carefully the whole passage of Genesis 3:1-5, to grasp the mystery of man in it who turns his back on the Father (even if we do not find this name of God in the account). By casting doubt in his heart the deepest meaning of the gift, that is, on love as the specific motive of the creation and of the original covenant (cf. Gn 3:5), man turns his back on God-Love, on the “Father”. He in some sense casts him from his heart. At the same time, therefore, he detaches his heart and cuts it off, as it were, from that which “comes of the Father”: in this way, what is left in him is what “comes from the world.”
“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they realized that they were naked; they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Gn 3:7). This is the first sentence of the Yahwist account about man’s situation after sin, and it shows the new state of human nature. Does not this sentence also suggest the beginning of “concupiscence” in man’s heart? To answer this question more deeply and thoroughly, we cannot stop at that first sentence, but must reread the text as a whole. It is, however, worth recalling here what was said in the first analyses about the subject of shame as a “limit” experience. Genesis refers to this experience to show the “boundary” that runs between man’s state of original innocence (cf. Gn 2:25, to which we devoted much attention in the foregoing analyses) and man’s sinfulness at the very “beginning.” While Genesis 2:25 emphasizes that “they were naked… but did not feel shame,” Genesis 3:7 speaks explicitly about the birth of shame in connection with sin. That shame is, as it were, the first source of the manifestation in man—in both the man and the woman—of what “does not come from the Father, but from the world.” [1 John 2:16]
(Theology of the Body 26:4-5, original emphasis)
There is much that could be said by way of commentary, especially for a non-Christian reader who may not be familiar with the specific theological meaning of “concupiscence” and “the world”, but I believe that the central theme concerning “Gift” deserves the greatest attention. In this view, humans did not originally exist in a non-individuated “oneness” with God only to “fall” into their interior, subjective personhood (a view similar to Buddhist philosophy); rather, human consciousness—fully rational, deeply interior, and distinctly personal—was in “communion” with God, a communion made possible between two distinct beings by the constant exchange of Gift and Love between them. The Fall, on this Christian view, is synonymous with exploitation, the reversal of the Gift, in which we take rather than receive.
This view is a cause for great hope, contrary to the above-mentioned tragic view that the “return to Eden” is “an impossibility.” It is true to say that we are “frustrated gods” if we can only grasp at divinity; but we are joyfully divinized if we receive the Gift of God: the most perfect of gifts, in which He gives Himself to humanity, in the Person of Our Lord Jesus Christ. This is simultaneously the “final enlightenment” and the “expanded consciousness” for which the deep ecologists yearn and the “built-in defence mechanism against the hubris” of such claims. In Christ, we can attain to divinity; yet in Christ, we learn that the Divine is self-emptying, that it is defined by the spirit of the gift: “Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, Who, though He was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:5-8).
It is possible for human dominion to simultaneously remain humble and to avoid arrogating God’s sovereignty to itself, because humanity is contained in the divine hierarchy. Man is able to be a humble ruler only when he knows that he is not God; man is able to be a liberating ruler only when he knows that God is a Father, a gift-giver, a lover. The serpent is not tempting man into neolithic rationality, external to nature—rather, the serpent is tempting man to view God as a tyrant, an exploiter, a predator, in essence, to reject faith, hope, and love in the Gift.
We are also defended against hubris by learning that “my Kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36); Christianity remains ever open to self-critique (or as we call it, “prophecy”, which refers more to “speaking truth to power” than “fortune-telling”) because no temporal order can ever be identified with the Kingdom of God. This is perfect antithesis of the present Enlightenment order—liberalism-capitalism-technocracy—which, as Pope Benedict XVI argued eloquently in the first part of Spe Salvi, turned the principle of Christian hope into a purely earthly principle, “a ‘Kingdom of God’ accomplished without God—a kingdom therefore of man alone” (§ 23), which is animated by absolute faith in human “progress” and “reason”. This leads me to my concluding point.
Why Distributists Need Philosophical Principles
The above, I hope, is an adequate defense of the stewardship view, which I believe aligns strongly with the vision of A Small Farm Future. But I defend this view not only because I believe it, per my Christian convictions, to be True Doctrine, but also because it strengthens the critique of ecomodernism and the call for a bold political vision.
To the former, first principles are needed to critique ecomodernism. While your book musters strong evidence in favor of labor-intensive permaculture and in opposition to dreams of nuclear-powered electric sheep, there is no way of proving that tomorrow’s inventions will not outpace the optimism of the technophiles. Nor is there a way of proving that the climate catastrophic collapse will arrive in our lifetimes. Both camps muster impressive data, but it comes down to a matter of faith: “do you believe, as a matter of principle, that reason, progress, and technology make the world Good, True, and Beautiful?” You will always lose the battle if you make the argument on exclusively scientific grounds, not only because the people who reproduce every mainstream scientific discipline have their checks paid by the technocratic system, but also because ecomodernism is the default religion of the Global North, if not the entire world. It is an “automatic” or “assumed” faith, imbibed through our bourgeois lifestyles and ideological milieu, as integrally imbued as Roman Catholicism in Christendom or Homeric paganism in Greek Antiquity; I think you’ll need an alternative creed, rather than simply skepticism, to dislodge such a strongly held belief.
But this brings me to the latter point: a bold, political vision. You, and many other ecologists, reject the ecomodernist view. But you are rare among your secular colleagues in that you do not accept some form of idyllic primitivism. I would argue that the reason for this is that very few people will be able to maintain your intentionally cautious and pessimistic philosophy. People, particular political radicals, are always searching for something to fulfill their deepest longings. To wax poetic, humanity is suffused with eros, a yearning for the infinite. Whose heart does not leap at the thought of returning to Eden and walking with God in the cool of the day once again! Who among us does not want to be ‘redeemed’ of all that is ‘fallen’? It is no wonder, therefore, that the primitivists reinvent a form of religious faith and hope in ‘pure nature’; it is a replacement for the same faith and hope which the technophiles have in ‘reason and progress’. I can think of few, if any, successful socio-political upheavals which were not undergirded by specific doctrines about how the world works, how it ought to be, and how to change it.
In summary, almost everyone has something akin to a “religion”, even the most secular among us. One need not be Catholic to be a distributist, but I am eager to converse more with you, and all semi-secular ecologically-minded allies, on these points of philosophy and first principles which must nonetheless be carefully clarified to make agrarian populism a coherent and compelling vision for our age.
Yours in the Creator,
Sean Domencic
Director of Tradistae
P.S. an interesting line I found in an article while doing a little research on Callicott, who I haven’t read other than in quotation: “Yet Callicott’s method and, to a degree, his worldview bear an uncanny resemblance to Roman Catholic natural law thinking.” (Traina 1997: 81)
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Thanks for this, Sean, Chris.
I wonder, too, whether some of our current upheaval is because the people who believe in “pure nature” understand on some level that it is human ingenuity that gives us things like food storage, antibiotic medicines, and basic sanitation; and the people who believe in “reason and progress” understand on some level that we are hideously overextended and risk losing the lot if we don’t do something differently. When a cherished belief is threatened in that way, options include rejecting it and feeling unmoored, or digging in harder despite the evidence.
So: a manifesto of sorts, then, after all?
Wonderful! And I think St. Christopher has a certain ring to it 🙂
Casting back a little, I’d like to link to this discussion as it touches on some of the issues raised here, plus there’s a real warmth to it.
Among other things it mentions the saints, Russian culture, as well as shepherding, immersion in nature and even something called the Wim Hof method. I hope Sean and Chris will particularly enjoy it, if they haven’t already chanced upon it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiXXlt-8l40
I am consistently floored by the thoughtful discussions on this blog! A hearty thank you to Chris, Sean, everyone!
I haven’t yet fully digested Sean’s intricate and lovely response above, but I wanted to respond what I think was a useful observation about the ‘humility’ that I think one finds in everything I’ve read by Chris. From my first encounter with it, I’ve considered the Smajean rhetorical style to be beguilingly dialectical and anti-polemical — at the level of sentences, paragraphs, and overall analysis. One has the strong sense when reading Chris’ work that he has done his best to consider an issue from every angle that he could; he elegantly folds into his presentation of an argument the most important caveats to his conclusion, and seems always to be informing the reader about his own degree of conviction. One feels one has been invited into a ongoing, carefully-reasoned analysis — one that will admit and accommodate new evidence. (If the term weren’t already so overloaded, I might simply call his approach ‘scientific’.)
I take one of Sean’s points to be: such dialectical, self-critical, careful exposition isn’t always so effective at stirring people’s hearts, or fomenting a social movement. The psychological energy and commitment we associate with radicals and revolutionaries seems to require a vision that offers some promise of ‘fulfilling their deepest longings’ — a manifesto, a program, a clear set of principles and positive commitments. I believe I had a similar reaction, after reading A Small Farm Future — “this all seems right to me! Now, what exactly to do next?”
I see Chris’ “Neo-Distributist Proposal” in The Land as making a move in this direction; a sort of “notes towards a manifesto”. And I’ll confess that my initial reaction was both excitement at suddenly having concrete ‘doctrine’ to consider, mixed with trepidation. The trepidation, I think, was simply that by ‘committing’ to a particular doctrine or approach, Smaje the Scholar cedes some of his rhetorical status (in my own mental landscape, at least) to Smaje the Advocate. Smaje the Advocate might propose something to which I don’t feel I can commit — which shouldn’t have any necessary impact at all on my impression of Smaje the Scholar; but at the very least I might now need to distinguish the two entities. Perhaps far too many words to say: dispassionate analysis and passion-filled advocacy, if not always in tension, at least often seem to be.
My reading of Sean’s post might have been too quick (I read it, and am posting this, during a toddler’s nap of uncertain duration), but I think it usefully marks this advocacy / analysis tension / transition in Chris’ work as he, Sean, and others flesh out a Neo-Distributist approach.
For me, I think what is might ease this analysis–>advocacy tension/transition– allay my hesitation (mixed with excitement) at the whiff of manifesto and polemic — is to dig further into the body of work and thought that might be considered ‘Romantic Anti-Capitalist’ in nature. Chris references some key figures in his proposal; and I suspect that my copy of “The Enchantments of Mammon” (on its way to me in the post) will reveal yet others. My (extremely naive and cursory, but also very excited) impression is that there is a lovely, collaborative project to accomplish (if not already accomplished by some author?) here; a study group perhaps … endeavoring to create a sort of typology of Romantic Anti-Capitalisms … sorted and described by motivation, politics, social context … biographies of key figures and their commitments, and associated social movements …. perhaps an annotated anthology of writing excerpts? “The Romantic Anti-Capitalism Reader”? Again, this might already have been done (would love pointers to any relevant works!)
Oops! Toddler awakes! Thanks again to everyone in this community for all your thoughtful and inspiring work!
Sean said –
You will always lose the battle if you make the argument on exclusively scientific grounds, not only because the people who reproduce every mainstream scientific discipline have their checks paid by the technocratic system, but also because ecomodernism is the default religion of the Global North, if not the entire world.
Always lose? Every mainstream scientific discipline is corrupt? Ecomodernism a default religion…
Doesn’t leave much room for hope.
I can get on board with the notion of an alternative creed. I just don’t imagine our condition SO,/i> disastrous.
I can also agree that arguing on exclusively scientific grounds isn’t the best approach. I might offer here that to me the role we are faced with is similar to the role of the missionary. Science is a very powerful human invention. How the scientific mission is paid for is an important aspect for us to pay attention to; at the same time we should pay attention to how other forms of ‘knowing’ are proffered. Proselytizing is a tricky business.
At any rate, thank you Sean for this expansive and largely insightful treatise. If my quibble gives any pause, please share how one can find hope in the message.
Sean said –
You will always lose the battle if you make the argument on exclusively scientific grounds, not only because the people who reproduce every mainstream scientific discipline have their checks paid by the technocratic system, but also because ecomodernism is the default religion of the Global North, if not the entire world.
Always lose? Every mainstream scientific discipline is corrupt? Ecomodernism a default religion…
Doesn’t leave much room for hope.
I can get on board with the notion of an alternative creed. I just don’t imagine our condition SO disastrous.
I can also agree that arguing on exclusively scientific grounds isn’t the best approach. I might offer here that to me the role we are faced with is similar to the role of the missionary. Science is a very powerful human invention. How the scientific mission is paid for is an important aspect for us to pay attention to; at the same time we should pay attention to how other forms of ‘knowing’ are proffered. Proselytizing is a tricky business.
At any rate, thank you Sean for this expansive and largely insightful treatise. If my quibble gives any pause, please share how one can find hope in the message.
Thanks Sean for your well-made argument.
And thanks Chris for starting and hosting the conversation.
I’m not antagonistic to (organized) religion as it is usually defined, but I have found that religion doesn’t really work for me.
Accordingly, my personal reading of the ‘Fall’ story is as a memory of the long process by which our species came to gain more technological and mental leverage over the natural world.
But that is not relevant to Sean’s argument that stewardship need not equate to alienation.
And an excellent argument it is. Thanks!
What drew my attention though was this:
“humanity is suffused with eros, a yearning for the infinite”
Yes, and how.
And since Sean mentioned the Buddhists, I will too. You know that thing about ‘desire being inexhaustible, and vowing to put an end to it.’
Well, I tried that once, and it didn’t work.
It seems like such a lot of wasted effort. And for what? The peace of nothingness?
Much more apt, in my opinion would be to say something like “Desire is inexhaustible, I vow to not get too worked up about it.”
So, yes, we yearn for the infinite – that comes with the human package.
Destroying that yearning seems unnecessarily hard, and likely not even a good idea.
But seeking a fulfillment of the yearning is also fraught.
I believe the many thinkers who have taken fulfillment of yearning to be the beginning of despotism are quite correct.
I also recognize that Christian philosophy, properly applied, has correctives to the beginnings of despotism. Unfortunately, we see that philosophy only rarely so applied.
It is a difficult balance, and maybe despotism is the only way to bring difficult outliers into balance, but I believe that ordinary humility, however it is arrived at, is what is called for.
Go ahead, feel the yearning.
It’s only pain, you don’t need to act on it.
Thanks to Sean and Chris for this fascinating dialogue. It is both expansive and profound, and difficult to think through without deviating down all sorts of interesting tangents – or at least I found it so!
I take it that the core of this exercise is a question: by virtue of what fundamental reason should we as human beings limit ourselves? The question is clearly an urgent one in this day and age, but while consensus on it appears a necessary, it is also one that is likely to receive all kinds of different answers. I therefore appreciate the attempt here to explore it through both religious and atheist perspectives – the focus on the Biblical passage is a nice device to that end.
As I see it, the answers provided by both Chris and Sean are united in their reliance on metaphors provided by human development. Chris’s implies a notion of evolutionary transformation to draw a distinction between humanity as we know it and some kind of proto-humanity that existed before humans became self-aware. Sean’s is focused, I think, on the developing relation between a parent (God) and child (humanity). The answers differ in the modes by which they are intended to be effective: Chris’s is essentially literary, invoking the agency of stories to affect our actions; Sean’s relies on a religious commitment.
I’m uncertain as to how appeal to the kind of structural handicap in human nature that Chris invokes – our imaginative capacity set against our reliance on nature – can be made into the grounds of an effective philosophy of human limits. I’ll hold off thinking that through until Chris’s follow-up post, which might broach an update on his original article. Likewise, lacking Sean’s religious commitments, I struggle to see a broader non-religious extension of his reading, but I’m very interested in thinking it through a little more, if only to improve my own comprehension.
That the world is a Gift, given lovingly by a Creator to his children, is a beautiful vision – one that is familiar to many parents. Eden presents an idealised image of those early years (shorn of all the parental stress and self-doubt!) when a child appears totally accepting of their dependence and accepts without question those restrictions put in place by the parent. Eating the forbidden fruit represents that process through which a child begins to question the motivations of the parent, when restrictions previously unquestioned become uncomfortable inhibitions. This metaphor, for me, seems implied by Sean’s reading, especially the frequent references to God as Father.
The acceptance of a Christ as Saviour is presented as the revelation of God’s Gift as motivated purely by a self-emptying love – presumably this involve’s the ending of any questioning of God’s motives and an acceptance of His restrictions, the limits He imposes on humanity. Metaphorically the child must remain a child in their parent’s house, albeit now secure in the knowledge that the parent gives everything for them – humanity accepts their essential dependence on the universe that has been given to them.
My issue here is the nature of God’s limits on humanity – He does not speak them directly, and I assume that they are to be worked out through study of Natural Law. I won’t go over old ground trodden previously by Sean and I on this, but suffice to say there is unlikely to be broad agreement on the extent of these limits, or their practical implications for the organisation of society.
However, I think Sean’s reading does demonstrate that the answer to the question of why we should limit ourselves will be fundamentally a moral one. In contrast, tragedy is often compelling because its protagonists chafe and strain against their limits. Ultimately, we are far more likely to be able to accept the injunctions of a universal moral order, if we can only agree on what it is, than we are to accept quietly the inherent tragedy of our condition.
Excellent and thoughtful conversation as ever. It does appear that at least one crux hinges on discernment of the blessing from the curse… and then perhaps emptying oneself of the yearning to desire a broad general agreement on that.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%202&version=NIV
Dominic is wrong, you have it about right in your original article. But why spend so much time thinking about this ? Do the best you can. It’ll never be perfect. Leave the world a little better than you found it.
The path we are on runs over the edge of oblivion. 10,000 years after that, the world will still be here. No one would ever know that humans once were so wide spread.
“But why spend so much time thinking about this?”
I can see how the discussion can seem silly given how deeply enmeshed modern society is in secular relativism. To those doubting the importance of this discussion, consider this: can an architect build a good house before he understands the principles of physical engineering? Likewise, humans cannot build a happy society together unless they understand their first principles (metaphysics, ontology, ethics, natural theology). In either case, the architect and the political animals (humanity) need to understand what materials they are working with and how they function.
If we reject the modern ideology that says we can answer every question with more technology and knowledge to manipulate the purely material world (and what honest permaculturist doesn’t these days?), then our only choice is to return to classical philosophy inquiry about what is true, good, beautiful, natural, just, etc—and to treat these questions with the same seriousness that the worshipers of Growth, Progress, and Money treat their predictions and prophecies about the Market.
The transition to a SFF has come up before. The chances that any government saying ‘ we’re going to reduce consumption of energy and resources by 80%’ and surviving the next election (or economic fallout for non democratic states) are very slim. Forty years of warnings have not made a dent in business as usual.
The climate has changed and the weather weirdness is just getting started. Without a gentle path that leads to a sustainable future why ponder the details of what it could look like ?
No architect would plan to build on unstable ground.
Well, the World Economic Forum has implied this end to growth or de-growth, as has the French President. Unfortunately the WEF’s plan is a dystopian dictatorship (think of China and add a bit more surveillance via your ‘smartphone’) that I’d do almost anything to avoid living in.
Its promoters consider a traditional wholefood diet ‘unsustainable’ and ‘environmentally-destructive’. It must therefore be replaced by GMOs, insect protein, ultra-processed plant foods and other products of biochemical engineering: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/great-reset-ultra-processed-foods-cola/
Some people think anyway for different reasons that the whole ‘Great Reset’ idea is fatally flawed. For example, John Michael Greer, author of ‘The Long Descent’; Nate Hagens, whose website is ‘The Great Simplification’.
As far as I know, most people are unaware of the WEF, certainly didn’t vote for it (it’s a club for CEOs of multinational corporations) and wouldn’t support this food policy. In my view they’d better wake up because the ‘Reset’ is well underway, using ‘viruses’ and ‘war’ as cover/distraction.
I think you underestimate human capacity for survival, Greg. Even if we end up in a dire situation where seven in eight people die from climate catastrophe, that still leaves a billion people to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and start again. Yes, they’ll be doing it in an unstable, wrecked climate. That only makes it even more important to find or design, and implement, a system or strategy that doesn’t trash whatever is left of the planet by then.
I take some solace from the knowledge that Chris, at least, is taking practical steps in addition to his writing. Joe, another regular commenter here, has made the point before that his farm will be useful to *someone* in the future. I’m not actually sure whether Sean Domencic is also engaged in some kind of small farm endeavour (I think yes?) but I do have a lot of time for the Catholic Worker movement in general as being quite practically-focused. So while there is a lot of supposedly theoretical talk about what might be, it is nevertheless grounded in some action. These are not idle words from armchair philosophers out of touch with the real world.
I’m not that optimistic that humans will wipe themselves out. We’re better at survival than rats.
My point is that by the time that the hoi polloi get around to realizing that the rich have been treating them like a colony, it will be too late.
The game has gone on too long already and the losing side thinks they are going to be winners, be rich, someday. And if they aren’t it is the fault of migrants, environmentalists, socialists, etc, but never the system that they are living under.
By then it will be too late for the wealthy too.
By 2050 atmospheric CO2 levels are projected to be another 100 – 150 ppm higher.
Right now at 420 ppm we are seeing the effects of climate change. There is no denying it. If all CO2, methane, HFCs emissions stopped today the effects of climate change would continue to intensify for 30-50 years.
It is a serious problem that will get worse. We know that, but aren’t doing anything because it will wreck the economy. Of course, the longer we put off action the worse it gets. Imagine that anyone would propose a 10% reduction in energy and resource, use much less 80%. Business as usual will continue until it collapses.
It would be great to have a resilient SFF in place. But that is very hard to do since we depend on fossil fuels to make a living in the world as we currently find it.
How do the results of the thinking and planning survive the fall ? How do the plans get implemented ?
I believe that Chris’ point about a tragic view of farming and human livelihood-making comes into play here.
As an admitted secular relativist, I suggest that we just let everyone do what they want based on their best judgement/prejudice/stupidity and let evolution sort it out. That’s what happens anyway; why fight it?
The basic point here is that societies and cultures are not designed, they emerge from the influence of prior cultures, adjacent cultures, changing circumstances in the natural world and random strokes of good and bad luck. They adapt to the changes in the world around them as best they can. Some are better at adapting than others and maintain or increase their populations. Some just don’t make it and die out. It’s cultural evolution in action.
A “return to classical philosophy inquiry about what is true, good, beautiful, natural, just, etc” is not going to stop evolution. Such an inquiry will just be another variable in the millions of variations that will see selective pressure. Sometimes philosphical inquiry can have a big influence, other times not so much. It will never stand a chance against the influence of hunger, though, or being shot at, or having children. Some variations are more important than others.
Thanks Chris for publishing my response! I’m looking forward to your reply and our continuing dialogue on the subject.
I’ll try to respond to other reader’s comments when I have more time, especially those who have specific counter-arguments or clarifying questions.
Thanks Sean and Chris, it’s Nice to see a respectful, and deep, online dialogue from such different perspectives. It’s one of the virtues of a great old text that it can be so useful for thinking through our big ideas. I’m not entirely convinced the original author(s) of Genesis had any environmental ethic in mind (certainly there’s a lot more going on in the text than just man-nature), but I am convinced of the value of imagining they did. And there’s a lot to chew on in both your pieces, so for now I’ll pass along a couple stray thoughts I’ve been turning over.
Reading through your essays, I was wondering how Calicott came to use the phrase ‘citizenship’, when describing Leopold’s leave-alone, preservationist ideal? If this is citizenship, it seems a liberal variety where one’s just wants to leave their fellow citizens to their private spheres, and frets and fumbles when the spheres overlap. Chris’ talk of dilemma and compromise seems to point to a more republican ideal of environmental citizenship, where we acknowledge and respect our fellow beings but accept we must wrestle with them constantly, and hash out our respective private and public ends. I’m not quite sure that’s the same as the stewardship ideal, which seems a bit paternalistic, but then we sometimes have to accept some dominion over fellow citizens (children, incapacitated, etc), so perhaps it is.
On the ‘tragic’ reading of Genesis, I do concur with Chris that the message of Genesis seems basically tragic, although this is certainly coloured by my lack of Christian faith. Sean’s faith allows him to see a promise of redemption after the Fall, but for those of us agnostics, we can’t help but at least wonder if it would be better to skip all the struggle and heartbreak and go back to the unity of just being together with everyone and everything. And the story does leave one to at least wonder if God’s hands are really, entirely, on the wheel, or if the serprent and the Tree maybe didn’t go according to plan.
That being said, I heartily concur with Sean’s message to lighten up! There is certainly much joyful adventure to be found in a life of challenge. I’m also reminded of the message of Warren Johnson’s Muddling Towards Frugality (which I actually still need to read in full), which promotes the classical ideal of a comic hero muddling through, over the tragic hero standing in potentially hopeless battle. Most good farmers I’ve known seem to embrace being muddlers, and I can’t help but think an overly inflated sense of tragedy could be ill-advised in the small farm future!
Thanks for some great comments and kind words here. Don, I will ponder the pros and cons of Smaje the Scholar vs Smaje the Advocate. I’d almost go so far as to say it’s a tragic dilemma…
Think I’ll pretty much hold fire on the issues raised until my next post. But a taster of it in relation to Greg’s point: I’m going to try to argue that Sean and I are both right – but not in a liberal relativist ‘that’s my truth and that’s his truth’ kind of way. It’s a challenge, but I’m ready to take it on. Soon.
So there is a temptation to gain knowledge, thinking it will make us “as gods”, but then the price of awareness is shame, which then leads to artifice (fig leaves). Then we are kicked out before we eat the other fruit and have to get a job.
This, I think, is the real curse: god-like knowledge without the other things god has equals exactly where we are now.
Spit it out! This fruit is choking us.
This is good juicy stuff and well done to Chris and Sean, and all of the contributors. Having listened to the doomer optimist podcast I see that Sean has a wide ranging knowledge well beyond the esoteric Christian tradition. Still, I would like to hear Tyson Junkaporta’s take on this as the Genesis yarn maps nicely on to a western industrial history and not so well on to aboriginal. In that overlay – we’re the white Gods, tossing the aussie Adam and eve out of their garden! Crikey!
The other way I go with this is similar to the ‘story’ critique put forward by another contributor in the last post on distribution – that we’re stuck in a web of words, institutionalised by written word tradition – which gives the illusion that you can work it all out from some cloud on high. Whereas, if Greaber and Wengrove are to be believed, the book carrying Jesuits were blown out of the water by the children of the lands they came to proselytise, because they had a discursive tradition learnt in the tribe. Face to face talking, iterating along lines of embodied sense. This is where I think this thing goes. This is not to say Genesis is one of the yarns to learn from, and it is relevant to our culture. So is Mabinogion. We cannot overlook the enormous baggage the old book brings with it. The question is where you draw your optimism, is from a tragic view in ecstatic realisation of loss, or from belief that we are chosen? Like other contributors have said, this is a personal issue – not without relevance – but will come after the harvest is in and the cider barrel is cracked!
Thinking about this another way, my partner and I are planning a small farm centred around a care home, unretirement homes, family homes and accommodation for young people. The key seems to be creating structures and processes for the emergence of community rather than the object of community itself. So to bring it back to the discussion, if Chris is happy with his reading of the genesis story, is productive and congenial, and Sean is happy with his, the problem is not the seemingly incomessurable views but keeping Chris and Sean in their happy place. This would be a process of emergence, that can be helped by coaching and mentoring and all the basic human needs that embody the happy human state. Again, thank you Sean and Chris I look forward to how the discussion develops.
King James Bible
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Tangential, but another voice heard suggesting a route to something like a Small Farm Future. This from Alan Jacobs*
https://blog.ayjay.org/forking-paths/
A few will get frustrated by the fakery, minimize their time on the internet, and move back towards the real. They’ll be buying codex books, learning to throw pots or grow flowers, and meeting one another in person.
* Jacobs is the author of How To Think, reviewed here at SFF.
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Thucydides.jpg
That’s where we are now !
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Thrashing machine
Got here from substack abbey of misrule comments and wanted to encourage you to listen to the audio version of Braiding Sweetgrass, read by the author, botanist and grounded indigenous woman. You spoke of finding it rather difficult and did not finish. I too dropped it earlier when reading. Robin’s voice is gentle, Knowledgeable and kind until late in the book where her emotion comes through over current environmental degradation by the corporate overlords. I found the audiobook free on my library’s Hoolpla app. I rate it as one of the top nonfiction experiences of my life. I also feel she conveys an indigenous understanding and spirituality whose fundamentals are an important alternative to Old Testament mythology.