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 October 9, 2022 | 50 Comments
This post is the third and final instalment of my engagement with the Eden story and its contemporary implications for a small farm future, based on the debate I’ve had with Sean Domencic and other commenters here. My thanks to Sean and everyone else for raising so many interesting issues. I can’t pursue everything that everyone’s raised, but below I address a few of the points that came up, and this (with apologies) already amounts to a pretty long post. If you’re not so interested in all this stuff, hopefully you’ll join us next time for a look at welfare and social policy in a small farm future (but maybe have a look at subhead #1 below).
To save words, I haven’t always engaged with people who’ve commented by name or by their specific comment. The original posts and the relevant comments can be found here and here.
While on the face of it the debate between me and Sean has been about how to interpret an old biblical story from the past, really I think it’s about how to build a viable culture in the future. Even so, I confess the debate is quite abstract and I do understand the frustration of commenters wanting something a bit more grounded. ‘What’s the pitch?’ is a fair question.
Unfortunately, it’s a hard one to answer directly or succinctly. But I’ll give it my best shot.
First, to speak plainly on a point I’ve prevaricated over in the past, in my opinion our present high-energy, heavily urbanized world of globalized politics and commerce is unravelling and will continue to unravel due to climate, energy, material, socioeconomic and geopolitical realities that are now unavoidable, if not exactly predictable. Very few people, and no whole countries or societies, are remotely prepared for what’s in store. A good response in these circumstances is to focus on producing food, fibre and other material necessities for local use with renewable local inputs as far as possible, or on supporting local communities through education, health and social care. To do this doesn’t require any particular political, theoretical or religious take on the kind of culture one is building.
But the kind of culture one is building does matter, and focusing only on renewable local farming, construction, healthcare or whatever will not be enough in themselves to meet the challenges of the coming age – not least because how localities interact with one another will be vitally important to their ability to meet their needs.
It’s a lot easier to say that culture matters than to specify exactly what it will or should be like. I’ve increasingly come to embrace this uncertainty with an element of defiance in the face of the disastrous consequences of catch-all answers in modern history to the question of what integrates or drives society (“The market! Class struggle! The nation!”). Ultimately, I think small farm localism will be widespread in the future because, in the words of a commenter under my last post, it aligns with how the ecosphere functions. But there are many ways to arrive at that outcome from the present. For me, this discussion is about how best to shape that process, but it’s a long-term thing involving many hands. So I can’t offer any simple answers. Nor, I think, can anyone else, although many claim to.
Regrettably, then, I don’t have a pitch. I don’t think any one single person or social entity can formulate a political program, a set of cultural meanings or practices, an ‘ism’ or a new religious movement that fully settles these wider questions. The history of attempts to build a new heaven and a new earth from scratch is not a happy one. But I still think it’s important for (some) people to attend to this and to consider how we might try to form good political communities in the future. A good resource for this is to consider how people have done it in the past. It’s in this spirit, I think, that the debate between me and Sean has proceeded.
Sean mentioned Alasdair Macintyre, whose book After Virtue was a milestone in reviving virtue ethics in contemporary times. I’ll say more about him below, and perhaps in another post. I’m going to quote at some length Macintyre’s thoughts on how virtue ethics were revived in turn in 12th century Europe as a resource for fashioning a more unified political and intellectual culture from the weak and fragmented medieval kingdoms that had emerged out of the Roman Empire and its ‘Dark Age’ successors:
What were the political problems whose solution required the practice of virtues? They are the problems of a society in which the central and equitable administration of justice, universities and other means of sustaining learning and culture and the kind of civility which peculiarly belongs to urban life are all still in the process of being created. The institutions which will sustain them have yet for the most part to be invented. The cultural space in which they will be able to exist has yet to be located somewhere between the particularist claims of the intense local rural community which threatens to absorb everything into custom and local power and the universal claims of the church. The resources available for this task are slender: feudal institutions, monastic discipline, the Latin language, ideas once Roman of order and of law, and the new culture of the twelfth century renascence: how is so little culture going to be able to control so much behavior and invent so many institutions?
Part of the answer is: by generating just the right kinds of tension or even conflict, creative rather than destructive, on the whole and in the long run, between secular and sacred, local and national, Latin and vernacular, rural and urban1
I don’t think the successors to our present global imperium will face exactly the same problems as these 12th century forebears. In many ways, I fear their problems will be much worse. Still, I do believe they will likewise need to try to create an expansive political culture, partly from the slender resources bequeathed them from our present age, and probably also through establishing creative tensions.
As I see it, my discussions with Sean involve marshalling aspects of these present resources for that purpose. And for me it’s an “on the whole and in the long run” thing. It’s not about how we’ll get food on the table next year. This is another important question – a moreimportant question, I concede, because if we can’t do that, then we won’t need any long-term culture. But if we do manage to keep putting food on the table year to year then we’ll need some renewable political culture in the longer term, and doing the former won’t entirely inform how we can do the latter. I agree with Sean that in view of the urgent crises upon us it’d be good to get a move on. But I don’t think it can be rushed, even if the world as we know it is collapsing around our ears.
So now a few words about the renewable culture I’ve argued we must construct – without, as I’ve stressed, any resolution as to exactly what it is.
In my 2008 article that kicked off the recent debate with Sean, I basically said that the message of the Eden narrative is that humans are alienated from Earth and Heaven. We have to make our culture up for ourselves as we go along.
Sean disagreed, suggesting that there’s a moral incoherence to this position. And on that point I think he’s right. Through his Christian framing, Sean argued that there’s a source and a truth, what he nicely calls a ‘God-breathed’ foundation that can in principle resolve the human relationship with Earth and Heaven, if we accept its gift.
Not every commenter agreed with him, and indeed as others pointed out I too struggle to accept that Christian framing as ‘truth’, much as I might like to. But where I align more with Sean than with some of his critics here is in accepting that there’s a problem with taking a more relativist stance on truth, that cultural ‘truth’ is merely arbitrary and conventional, effectively a matter of choice. Again, Alasdair Macintyre is relevant here, because much of his book is taken up with an argument that in modern times we’ve lost a secure conception of what morality is. This is not, I must stress, the superficial argument of a moralist that people behave more ‘immorally’ today than in the past. It’s the complex argument of a moral philosopher that when we talk about morality in modern times we don’t really know what we mean. This is why we run into such difficulties and disagreements nowadays when we debate the issues at hand.
Imagine a near future where the modern system of states is in retreat, the ambit of power vested in political centres like Washington DC, London, Moscow or Beijing is shrinking, and all sorts of fractious and potentially predatory local and regional power centres are emerging, their constituent peoples jostling with each other and among themselves to define the terms of their relationships. In such a situation, a common basis of cultural or spiritual truth – ‘traditional wisdom’, as it was termed in the previous discussion, could potentially mitigate a lot of conflict, disorder and bloodshed. But, given the present confused state of our moral sense per Macintyre, where should we find this common basis?
I can think of five possibilities, which I’ll briefly outline.
First, there’s the option of letting evolution sort it out, much discussed under my previous post. I’ll say a little more about this later, but I can’t myself see this as providing the necessary cultural basis for forming a political community. The concept of evolution persuasively encapsulates the nature of biological change, no doubt including the emergence of culture, but it doesn’t specify the correct content of that culture, and it has no evaluative content that helps determine what one should do. In fact it doesn’t have any evaluative content at all except as tautology – whatever is, is good, by virtue of existing. So while maybe it works to invoke evolution in a loose sense, as analogy (‘let’s experiment with lots of different possibilities and see what works’), the problem is that it doesn’t really have a politically usable account of how to define ‘what works’.
Second, there’s the Christian framework that Sean embraces. This avoids the problem of evaluation via a first principles or ‘God-breathed’ evaluative framework which appears right at the start of the Bible (“God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” Genesis 1:31). It’s subsequently been elaborated in the Christian tradition in various ways, as Sean describes. One aspect of this involves Aristotle’s ethics, which were melded into a Christian framework by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). This Thomist tradition influenced the aforementioned Alasdair Macintyre’s modern revival of virtue ethics. I think it contains some important insights, but I’ll mostly reserve that discussion for another day.
An advantage of a sacred tradition like Christianity is that people take it seriously, so it has good leverage in creating a moral universe of the kind people need for good politics. But that’s also a disadvantage, because sacred traditions inevitably have gaps and ambiguities which different human gatekeepers can claim to fill, buttressing their position by claiming special access to the sacred. I agree with Sean that gatekeepers are a problem in every tradition, not just Christianity. I also agree with him that there’s an “ungovernable and seditious” aspect of Christianity that makes it difficult for its gatekeepers to secure long-term control (I’m not sure I agree Christianity is unique in this respect, but perhaps that’s by the by). However, while it’s good to know that no gatekeeper is going to control the story forever, I don’t think this is quite good enough as an answer to the problem of gatekeeping as such. Gatekeepers still gonna gatekeep.
So maybe the price of a first principles, ‘God-breathed’ sacred tradition is moral ambiguity, gatekeeping and schism, which potentially sends us back to square one in terms of a basis for finding common goods in politics. Well, maybe not quite square one. Pitching for a relativist take against Sean’s moral universalism, Joe Clarkson wrote “whose goodness, whose justice and whose virtue”? Important questions that echo the title of another of Macintyre’s books – Whose Justice? Which Rationality? For Macintyre, such moral questions are never abstract isolates but are always embodied in traditions, practices and histories that are in argument with each other and with themselves. That doesn’t exactly answer Joe’s questions, but maybe it puts a limiting frame around them. The answers aren’t going to be just arbitrary, eye of the beholder stuff. They direct us back to traditions and their common basis.
Of course, there are – third option, now – ‘first principles’ traditions other than Christianity. This would include other religions as well as non-religious modern political doctrines such as Marxism and nationalism that nevertheless rely on some notion of the sacred. The details differ, but the potential problems are the same – ambiguity, gatekeeping and schism. But if we can invoke other first principles traditions like Marxism we can bring different traditions into argument with each other, and hence at least hold out some hope of better refining or defining common goods. Which I think is the approach Sean and I have taken in debating each other. We could emphasize differences, but we may also find overlaps and in that way possibly help to define or augment a common tradition.
A fourth option is to build a moral narrative around a first principle that you treat as something less than sacred, perhaps as something sacred-ish, or else as generically sacred in a gnostic sort of way that doesn’t commit you to any particular moral framework. Candidates for this view might include Stoicism (seeking to practice virtue for its own sake as a kind of ascetic practice), or nature worship, or the belief that aboriginal wisdom has the answers.
is…traditional wisdom true? If so, it is our only worthwhile choice, and it will surely provide whatever we need. I notice that a large number of eco-leftist types will praise “traditional wisdom” and “ancient philosophy” in various forms… but remain unwilling to commit to any of them. I think that position leaves us in the halls of postmodern academia: endlessly deconstructing ourselves, but never building an alternative. Every building requires a foundation, and we remain facing the choice for our own: classical philosophy…and modern ideology… Perhaps it’s a point worth debating, but I see all the “third options” between the two as incoherent mixtures, often made by modernists who want the veneer of antiquity without the obligations.
I agree there’s a lot of superficial vaunting of traditional (particularly aboriginal/indigenous) wisdom on the left without any authentic commitment to its metaphysical claims. Inasmuch as I’m guilty of that myself, I guess it’s because once the modernist/relativist genie is out of the bottle it’s hard to embrace the truth of traditional wisdom unambiguously, even while acknowledging that modernist wisdom itself is fatally flawed. But I’m less inclined than Sean to reject third options out of hand, and more inclined to think people can successfully inhabit the uncomfortable terrain of behaving as if traditions are true. The long-term culture-building that I’ve been talking about is a way of making it less uncomfortable and eventually more unambiguously true.
I acknowledge all the same that in this ‘as if’ world there’s a thin line between leaning into the sacred as truth, which reverts us to the problems we’ve just looked at, or falling away into desacralized arbitrariness. Poised teetering on that thin line is the tradition of civic republicanism that I’ve explored in other posts. The basic idea is that people themselves define the common goods of their community (so it is they, rather than God, determining what’s ‘very good’) thereby, in the words of republican theorist Iseult Honohan, “enabling interdependent citizens to deliberate on, and realise, the common goods of an historically evolving political community, at least as much as promoting individual interests or protecting individual rights”2 (p.1). An ‘evolving political community’, huh? Maybe it is all about evolution after all! But seriously, the point is that in civic republicanism people willfully create something like a common sacred tradition.
In practice, republicanism usually manifests in times of trouble when a small political community (classically, a city state) unites by defining its common goods against a larger threat or foe. There are those who argue the founding of the USA was grounded in republican opposition to British colonial power, but that threat has long since faded and so have most of the tenets US civic republicanism, although they’ve retained a pallid afterlife that I sometimes think does more harm than good.
So there are difficulties treading the thin republican line without being swallowed up by the larger forces of secular power, or else perhaps tipping into theocracy. And there’s a further difficulty for my purposes here – the issue isn’t so much how to define a republic as how to define a system of republics when each individual one has potentially conflicting aims and goods.
The fifth and final possibility is to define some wider universe or organizing principle that makes such a system possible. I’m no student of religious history, but the Catholic church is probably a good example of that in European history. But that was largely because its rituals and structures were the warp and weft of everyday common life in a way that’s mostly no longer true today, even in Catholic countries. I’m not yet persuaded it has the capacity to fulfil that role in the future. It interests me that Alasdair Macintyre converted to Catholicism, seemingly after becoming convinced intellectually of the philosophical merits of Thomism. That seems an unusual path to the sacred, and I doubt many will tread it – just as I doubt many will embrace the rigours of Stoicism or what Sean previously called the ice-cold Somerset existentialism of my 2008 Genesis piece.
So I fear such wider universalisms don’t allow an escape from the problems of the sacred-ish, the behaving as if. But maybe that’s as good as it can get – simply, we need to cultivate the best practices we can and make them habitual. Not so much practicing what we preach, as preaching what we practice, in both senses of the word.
Just as with an individual farm, there are numerous options as to what we might cultivate as individuals. Alasdair Macintyre converted to Catholicism, but not everybody would. The bigger task is choosing what to cultivate at the level of society – indeed, at the level of the system of societies. I think the options here are probably fewer, just as the farmed landscape takes on a more uniform look despite the idiosyncrasies of its constituent farms.
To use the term loosely in the sense that Honohan does, I think this bigger task, this more universal sense of the culture undergirding a livable future – a small farm future – will have to ‘evolve’. It will be slowly put together out of antecedent events and ideas, classical and Christian ‘first principles’ universalism among them. It will not resemble them exactly because it will be operating in a different context. It will not be some pick ‘n’ mix culture cobbled together from bits and pieces of all its antecedents, because it will require functional coherence. Though on second thoughts, it probably will be some pick ‘n’ mix culture cobbled together from bits and pieces of all its antecedents, because ultimately that’s what culture always is. In that sense, it’s different from evolution by natural selection. It involves sharing, borrowing, inverting, repurposing, communicating, collaborating. But I agree with Sean that ultimately it must also involve building rather than all this deconstructive shapeshifting. And that the building must cohere, and therefore needs foundations. To press the metaphor, I’m just saying that it’s good for the builders not to exhaust themselves with over-heavy foundations, and be sure to build some flexibility into the rest of the structure.
It’s a big task. Anybody who asks me to write the blueprint for it is giving me way more credit than I deserve. Thanks, but no thanks. I would, however, like to play a part.
Now for a few more thoughts on evolution. The way culture works, I just said, is pretty different from evolution. But on third thoughts, maybe not. We tend to focus on the ruthless elimination aspect of natural selection. The ‘good’ is whatever’s left standing. But there are other things going on. Is Homo sapiens sapiens ‘better’ than Homo sapiens neanderthalensis because the latter are extinct – possibly as a result of their contact with us? Well, there are Neanderthal genes directly alive in us, and the Neanderthals may have been around for longer than we’ve been thus far. Maybe they even taught us a thing or two about how to live in the forbidding landscapes of Pleistocene Europe. Evolution builds stuff, cobbles things together and then knocks them down, but usually not completely (we even still have dinosaurs, though now we call them birds), in a kind of continuous present. There is no ultimate judgment in it. At most, a that’ll do for now.
I’m not sure how useful it is to invoke evolutionary metaphors in relation to, say, the European colonization of Australia, as was implied in some of the discussion under my previous post (historically, invoking evolution in such contexts has often been an exercise in racist self-justification, but that certainly wasn’t the case there). All the same, we don’t say that the Roundheads defeated the Cavaliers in the English Civil War because their culture was better fitted to the circumstances, so … what’s the difference? It would be easy to imagine a future post-industrial, climate-wrecked Australia whose inhabitants – probably descended mostly from white Australians, but also from aboriginal Australians – followed lifeways closer to, and probably informed by, those of precolonial aboriginal Australians than most of what’s happening in Australia right now. I’m not sure that framing all this in evolutionary terms yields much analytical advantage.
As I see it, evolution is a long-term biological affair, a vector of multiple short-term events, which rarely involves a final word and never involves judgement or intentionality of the kind that necessarily invests human life.
Therefore I find myself somewhere in between Andrew and Ruben in the debate about evolution that Joe started and that they thought-provokingly continued. I pretty much align with Ruben in my doubt that searching for the grounds of human superiority over other organisms has a positive payoff, for humans or other organisms alike. I also agree with him that humans have less choice than they think, especially individual ones in everyday life decisions. Still, I think it’s a bit of a logical leap from there to Ruben’s point that “We can’t choose evolution, it is happening whether we like it or not”. That’s true enough, but it doesn’t negate Andrew’s point that we do have some choices – the key one that I’ve been banging on about in this post being a kind of long-term choice aggregator concerning how we form political culture.
So ‘choice’ doesn’t have to be individualized. But sometimes it is. Politicians and seafarers can choose whether undocumented migrants or recreational boaters in trouble at sea should drown or be saved. I’d argue that provided other lives aren’t at risk the right choice is always to save, regardless of the circumstances – mostly because human lives are ends in themselves, so there’s no other choice to make. But also because if you treat human lives as means rather than ends, then a lot more people will end up sunk than you might imagine.
I wouldn’t always extend the same logic to non-human organisms – inevitably so, as a raiser and eater of plants and animals. We do, after all, have to eat. Hence I would generally define humans as superior to other organisms from a human point of view (as per the diagram of hierarchy in my previous post), but not in any wider existential sense. As Callicott puts it, humans accord themselves rights they don’t accord to other organisms – but we do also have responsibilities towards other organisms that they don’t have towards us.
Incidentally, the ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood’s essay on being attacked by a crocodile is worth a read in this connection. It brilliantly discusses numerous issues relevant to this debate in a few short paragraphs, not least in its focus on the brute contradiction of the encounter between a person, with a sense of herself as her own end, a narrative continuity, and a crocodile with a sense of her as … meat. I really like the way Plumwood embraces that duality, without compromising either side. How fiercely humans resist the idea that we might be the eaten as well as the eaters!
So I agree with Ruben when he says “I think all species shape their niches and we should too” and I also agree with him when he says we should do it in a way that aligns with how the ecosphere functions. The trouble is, we only have a sketchy idea of what that is, and we have no choice but to use our abstract thought, our symbolic systems, our culture to try to align ourselves. Which means that we do have choices. Probably most other organisms don’t have to give as much attention as us to shaping their niches in ways that align with how the ecosphere functions. Lucky them. This was basically my point about the tragic nature of human action in the world in my 2008 article.
4. Equality and tolerance
These themes featured too in the discussion under my last post. A few comments to close…
Sean is no doubt right that the cosmos in aboriginal metaphysical systems is rarely egalitarian, but my point was more that the conception of human or at least household standing with respect to other humans/households more often is (I’m not really convinced by Graeber and Wengrow’s revisionism on this point).
I think there’s a place for hierarchy in societies in the sense of different parts contributing to wider wholes. This is an admittedly somewhat idealized but not entirely false aspect of caste systems, for example. To render it in modern western terms, the caste of hedge managers might consider themselves superior to the caste of hedge fund managers, because they know how to make a stockproof hedge. The latter might take the opposite view, because they make more money. Both could be considered correct, according to their distinctive logics. But in practice, the hedge fund managers are superior because their money gives them greater instrumental control, including control of hedge managers if they wish. The kind of inequality and hierarchy I favour would not yield them such control. It would give people more personal autonomy. So it would be distributist, though not necessarily heavily re-distributist. I’ll come back to that another time.
To Kathryn’s points about tolerance, I think this is relatively easily handled when people come together in a well facilitated meeting space. Everyone’s voice counts and everyone must feel safe from one another (I accept that this is not quite so straightforward in practice, because of often implicit power differences, although good facilitators can make a difference). People who don’t accept those terms are ejected. A problem is that those people still exist in the world, even after they’re ejected from the meeting. At its best, the liberal-modern state has tried to make of society a well facilitated meeting space where everyone’s voice counts and everyone feels safe. But inevitably and increasingly it’s failing, and the renegades who wouldn’t play by its rules are waiting in the wings. That’s why we need to be discussing renewable long-term culture in the twilight of the liberal-modern state.
Sean and Kathryn discussed the example of Jesus in this respect – a non-tolerator who expressed his intolerance through love and who was martyred for it. Presumably the narrative truth here is that Jesus had to be martyred, to establish the gift of love that sets the terms of Christianity’s divine moral universe. I’m not a Christian – not yet, anyway (looking at you, Alasdair Macintyre). But I’m quite drawn to Sean’s arguments about the promise of this moral universe. It’s just that I’m still not entirely convinced the promise can be adequately realized.
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Though on second thoughts, it probably will be some pick ‘n’ mix culture cobbled together from bits and pieces of all its antecedents, because ultimately that’s what culture always is. In that sense, it’s different from evolution by natural selection. It involves sharing, borrowing, inverting, repurposing, communicating, collaborating.
But “pick ‘n’ mix” is a key part of the evolutionary process; it is the “variation” from which the “good” (the survivors) are then selected by all the natural and human forces at play in the world. Whether or not a firm foundation of virtue, or universal truth, or religious truth is part of the mix, cultural evolution will indeed sort it out. And yes, evolution applies to culture, too, whether or not genes are involved.
I have to agree with Joe on this matter… that cultural change over long time windows does resemble evolutionary change more than it doesn’t.
There are many examples of genes that are shared, borrowed, inverted, and repurposed. As for communicating and collaborating, the interactions of commensals evolve over time and often demonstrate change in both partners of a relationship (cf the Red Queen hypothesis). For instance, our reliance on domesticated plants and animals has shaped the human genome to a remarkable degree. And cultures change in response to resources – whether those found to hand or those resources generated through human agency.
But this drawing out of genes as a sort of litmus test for evolution is fraught; and here too I’ll agree with Joe that unless the discussion specifically requires that evolution can only be offered in relation to genetic change we will miss the larger benefit of evolving (changing) phenomena being considered with a very powerful thought tool.
Were we as natural creatures (ourselves evolving [changing] – even in the course of the relatively few years we have allotted us as an individual) might be thinking our culture can escape evolution would be through our agency, our opportunity to act and plan our actions. But following the actions we choose we are subjected to the fruits of those choices – whether we subsequently judge those fruits as good or poor is not necessarily how others might render a judgement.
So to the matter at hand, how should we anticipate the future? What choices should we make? On this I depart from Joe’s thesis in only a very slight manner. Here I agree slightly with Chris’ contention that as we do have some agency, still some cards to play, that with such agency we might continue to bend the arc of history toward a more fulfilling future. I have hope for this. Though evolution will ultimately ‘sort it out’ – what exactly evolution gets to sort through – what options are on the table to be evaluated by evolutionary forces in the future…. these we get to put on the table in the first place (at least some of them – here a nod to Reuben).
Finally then, I think Sean’s ideas reflect a valuable way to consider how to manifest the agency we still have at our disposal.
Oops… in the above “Were we” should be “Where we”
Sorry
I’m honestly not sure where this debate is going anymore. If cultural transformations are ‘selected’ for by ‘all the natural and human forces at play in the world’, then we’re essentially just having a literary discussion about whether ‘evolution’ is the most pleasing word to describe the development of human societies across time – it has no more precise content than that.
To put it another way, if those ‘human forces’ include the organised promotion of ideas about justice, beauty and love, then letting evolution ‘sort it out’ may well mean the emergence of a word more aligned with those ideas. And yet the whole point of Joe’s original intervention in this ongoing discussion was to argue against the search for specific principles on which to create a future in favour of letting everyone just do they’re own thing. At this point in the conversation, ‘evolution’ seems to have expanded to become the explanatory idea that contains all others – almost a religious doctrine!
It still appears to me that the deployment of ‘evolution’ in this conversation is basically intended to naturalise a specific attitude to the how we plan for the future on this planet. Much has been said about our inability to know the consequences of our actions, to plan for every contingency or to design new cultures from the ground up. The preferred way forward is that we should therefore ignore the larger questions, work at very small scales on our own projects, and hope for the best. Joe even raised the prospect of the use of force to mediate conflict between these little outfits.
This is a specific vision of the future, appealing to those who would see the survival of them and there’s as paramount. The idea that we should instead work on collaboration on the basis of universal principles is a threat to this vision, because it will not allow people simply to focus only on the ground beneath their feet, but forces them to acknowledge wider obligations to the rest of the world and its inhabitants. Naturalising the survivalist project as something aligned with ‘evolution’ provides a way to counter this.
Likewise, the idea that our choices are always limited at any given moment is true, but choices always remain. The choice to turn inward to the particular, away from a quest for any kind of universal basis for collective action, has huge ramifications, and yet the survivalist move is to frame it as no choice at all, because free will is an illusion and ‘evolution’ (may its natural selections be praised!) will sort out everything in the end.
To end with a little exegesis of Chris’s post above, when he talks about human lives as ‘ends in themselves’, I would say he’s making a moral commitment, one that makes it impossible simply to turn away from the knowledge that we owe each other care and concern. It is possible to turn away from this knowledge, but only if ‘you treat human lives as means rather than ends’. Treating a large portion of them as potential losers in an evolutionary process that defines winners as those who survive it is, I would suggest, a very dangerous ideology.
I think there’s a place for hierarchy in societies in the sense of different parts contributing to wider wholes. This is an admittedly somewhat idealized but not entirely false aspect of caste systems, for example. To render it in modern western terms, the caste of hedge managers might consider themselves superior to the caste of hedge fund managers, because they know how to make a stockproof hedge. The latter might take the opposite view, because they make more money. Both could be considered correct, according to their distinctive logics. But in practice, the hedge fund managers are superior because their money gives them greater instrumental control, including control of hedge managers if they wish. The kind of inequality and hierarchy I favour would not yield them such control. It would give people more personal autonomy.
Perhaps a bit too niche, but I recently heard someone use the phrase “class as in Dungeons and Dragons, not class as in Marxism” which I found useful; functional order and even hierarchy do not denote some kind of moral superiority. (I think the hedge fund manager loses their moral authority at the point at which they start exploiting the hedge manager, though.)
To Kathryn’s points about tolerance, I think this is relatively easily handled when people come together in a well facilitated meeting space. Everyone’s voice counts and everyone must feel safe from one another (I accept that this is not quite so straightforward in practice, because of often implicit power differences, although good facilitators can make a difference). People who don’t accept those terms are ejected. A problem is that those people still exist in the world, even after they’re ejected from the meeting.
Indeed. Though “everyone must feel safe from one another” is… difficult. One of the things fascists are pretty good at is claiming some kind of underdog status while actually wielding considerable power. So there needs to be some kind of way of evaluating claims of threat, and often the people in a position to facilitate that are people who already hold considerable power.
I suspect that the only longer-term solution is to make fascism (and other forms of authoritarianism) socially unacceptable, which in fairness is part of any long-term cultural project (because a cultural project with too much room for authoritarianism just becomes… authoritarianism). But while the centre falls apart there is all kinds of weird, wonderful, and horrible stuff going on at the fringes.
Just on the evolution point for now, if the argument is that human cultures change in response to various endogenous and exogenous stimuli in a manner we might term ‘evolutionary’, or if it’s that human culture(s) is/are an outcome of biological evolution, and natural selection acts upon the humans that human cultures produce, then I have no quarrel. If, on the other hand, the argument is that there’s no point trying to define common political goods in the here and now because evolution will sort this out, then I do have a quarrel – I think this would be a category error in the hierarchical structuring of biological nature and human culture. If that’s the argument, then I align with Andrew.
I’m in total agreement with your first sentence.
As to the defining of “common political goods”, I think that trying to figure out a morality to underpin a political structure that could be used to organize the polity of an, as yet, non-existent small farm future is getting too far ahead of reality. Plus, it’s too far astray from the task of getting as many people as possible on the land as small, low-tech farmers, regardless of how they want to organize themselves.
In the beginning there will still be legacy institutions. After those are gone, we know what will happen; different localities will try different things, some of which we would now find very noxious. But those different things will sort themselves out (cultural evolution). This pre-collapse blog is not going to do it for them.
Now, if you think that we need to propagandize for some wonderful “vision of a small farm future” and its politics just to entice people out of cities, go for it. We know that fantasy often sells when reality doesn’t. But I don’t think that kind of salesmanship is really your intention with these latest posts.
Joe, I think the intention is to discuss and discover what kind of morality /is/ reality, the very possibility of which is dogmatically rejected by the materialists. It’s at minimum a shame, and perhaps a bit bonkers, to excise so vast a world as morality from the realm of the Real.
As Chesterton put it,
“The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.
“Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way…” (Orthodoxy, Chapter II: The Maniac)
I guess I’ll just leave you and the others to your discussion of the fine points of “moral reality”, which is just as well, I suppose, because my “spiritual contraction” induced “madness” must forever taint everything I say as being from a “small circle” only, “small and cramped”. Still, to paraphrase Chesterton, “Nevertheless, I am right”.
Thanks, Chris for this response.
I’m afraid I must begin with a criticism: in your effort to mention all the themes which have been up for discussion, I think you’ve dropped off from engaging with a critical line of argument, which is really at the core of the entire philosophic debate.
I’ll be referring to several concepts I’ve already described, so I’ll be citing my lengthy comment of October 1st for the sake of brevity: https://chrissmaje.com/?p=2006#comment-253186
You propose that there are five “options” for how we discuss first principles, which I’ll summarize as (1) materialist/evolutionary ethics, (2) Christianity, (3) other sacred traditions, (4) “sacred-ish” traditions, ie broad and vague appeals to “ancient wisdom”, (5) wider universalisms which leave room for subsidiary polities and philosophies to flourish (with reference to medieval Catholic Europe).
I don’t think this is an accurate division of concepts. Here is an alternative: first, there is a choice between materialism or what I’ve been calling “classical philosophy.”
In the former, all of reality–from nations and kingdoms down to atoms and void–is reducible to the interaction of the forces and powers which make constitute them. In other words, every /thing/ (from dogs barking to human relationships to the concept of “goodness”) is explainable by something which is “lower” on the hierarchy of complexity; every thing is reducible to a sum of its parts. In this worldview, there are no “invisible realities” (Oct 1st, TRUTH, AND OTHER INVISIBLE REALITIES) because everything can be understood by its smaller and smaller parts, which can be measured. If a reality is “invisible,” it’s only because we don’t have sufficient scientific tools, knowledge, or power to analyze its components. (Those who read Kuhn may grasp that this worldview means that even certain knowledge about natural science is impossible.)
In the latter, all of reality is not reducible, but can only be explained through the principles of participation, analogy, and teleology (Oct 1st, THE MEANING OF HIERARCHY). That sounds very fancy, but it’s actually quite simple: everything is defined by its purpose, which gives it intrinsic, internal unity. A cup is made for drinking; if it can’t hold water, it’s a “bad” cup, and if can’t even be identified as /possibly/ holding water for drinking, then it’s no longer a cup at all. Said another way, every /thing/ is explainable by something which is “higher” on the hierarchy of complexity; every thing participates in the invisible reality of Pure Being, Truth, and Goodness. This Reality is invisible because it is more real than our sense organs, our intellect, or even our souls; therefore, we can never measure or understand it through merely numerical or physical instruments. To do so would be, as you note, a “category error.”
What I’m calling materialism is commensurable with what you describe as Option 1. But what I’m calling classical philosophy doesn’t line up with any of your Options 2,3, and 4. Regarding 5, philosophy is, in some ways, a “wider universalism,” but not in the way the Catholic Church (a historical institution) is. Rather, philosophy (and the natural law and virtue ethics discourses that it entails) can act as a common ground for diverse polities, peoples, and places to discuss and share Truth and Justice. Importantly, as I said before (Oct 1st, CONCERN II), “philosophy has no gatekeepers: anyone can read Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, or MacIntyre.” (However, this is just an abstract possibility, the historic, global institutions which allow for such conversations still have to exist–which is another vast conversation).
So where do your Options 2, 3, and 4 come in? These are examples of /Revelation/. Philosophy arrives at its first principles empirically (albeit through logical inductive reasoning based on qualitative experiences /not/ on physical evidence), learns slowly within schools of thought, and ultimately can’t answer certain questions which lie at the edge of our capacity to know. This is where Revealed Religions claim to have received a specific, historical message from Pure Being. (NB: Revelation is taken to add to and/or inform philosophy, not to /replace/ it.)
It’s these Revealed Religions that have provided all of the universal, global institutions in human history, and yes (of course) I’m including the Modern Ideologies (liberalism, nationalism, and socialism) among them–with the important difference that they root themselves in /materialism/ and so are impossible to root within a classical, metaphysically realist, philosophic framework.
Here, I’m glad to accept a distinction between (2) Christianity and (3) other sacred traditions. As I’ve argued at length before–here (https://chrissmaje.com/?p=1996#comment-252676) and here (https://chrissmaje.com/?p=1996#comment-252513)–Christianity is truly unique amoung all world religions, and the life and message of the historical Jesus need to be considered in light of His place in world-history.
But what about Option 4: the “sacred-ish”. Can we have our cake and eat it? Can we have the “comfort” of interacting personally with the Divine without the “danger” of taking the relationship too seriously? No, we cannot. I understand the desire to do so; as you point out Chris, “once the modernist/relativist genie is out of the bottle it’s hard to embrace the truth of traditional wisdom unambiguously.” It’s grating and painful to accept that our modern, materialist, ideological worldview and way of life is really rotten to its core; for many of us, even those raised nominally as Christians, it’s all we’ve even known.
I think it’s essential to discuss whether Option 4 is a real option. You propose that we can choose this difficult choice, “poised teetering on that thin line” by engaging with “civic republicanism that I’ve explored in other posts. The basic idea is that people themselves define the common goods of their community (so it is they, rather than God, determining what’s ‘very good’).” But your very definition of the common good as a contrivance is not gracefully poised, but falling precipitously down on the side of materialism. If the common good is reducible to its constituent components (the will of citizens), and not grounded in the invisible reality of justice, then it follows precisely the reductivist, materialist metaphysics outlined above. (I’ve made this same argument before, in a different way, last December:
https://chrissmaje.com/?p=1894#comment-243961).
Now, I’m not saying that the only way to believe in Truth is to accept Christianity (though it is certainly the ideal way!). Classical philosophy is premised on the True and the Good. To be a Stoic, a Platonist, or an Aristotelian is not a “half-way” point between religion and liberalism. It is a “full” commitment to a teleological worldview and virtuous way of life, based on the invisible realities of Pure Being. It can easily cohere and synergize with many religious traditions, but is not strictly based on any of them.
However, when this relates to politics, there is no escape from gatekeepers. As before (Oct 1st, CONCERN II): “religion makes claim about the Divine (the foundation of reality, in a metaphysical sense) and our relation to the Divine (which includes publicly recognizing this Reality through social-rituals).” And while virtue ethics doesn’t claim to have a /revelation/, the classical tradition hear recognizes that one of the “connected virtues” of natural justice is “religion” (a masterful, classic discussion begins Thomas’s Summa II-II Q81 ff.: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3081.htm). “The fact that liberalism, socialism, and nationalism have become religions in the name of ‘secularism’ is proof that there is no society without gatekeepers of higher truths, whether a tribal lineage of Storykeepers, a Levitical Priesthood, or a gnostic cabal of murderous human sacrificers (Economists).” The same is true of the politics of the virtue ethicists, who at least can provide a common ground for the pursuit of a just social order. There is no human politics without implicit claims (backed up by the structures which maintain political order) about what is objectively Good for and True about humans, their acts, habits, and societies, and the natural world. There is no escape from hierarchy, only better and worse ways of ordering our socio-political reality in relation to invisible realities.
So, to reiterate, the most important question here is: are invisible, ineffable, and infinite Truth and Goodness /real/ or are they mere content-less symbols reducible to the absurd movements of atoms and void?
(And perhaps to be answered only afterward, is Jesus of Nazareth Who He said He was?)
To summarize, your view is that the Catholic Church knows and / or is the absolute Truth about morality, society and reality in general.
Jesus Christ (God) /is/ the Truth (John 14:6), but yes, the Catholic Church knows the this Truth insofar as it can be expressed historically in revealed doctrines (John 16:13).
However, the Church teaches that their are other sources of Truth outside Her, for example:
“The First Vatican Council teaches, then, that the truth attained by philosophy and the truth of Revelation are neither identical nor mutually exclusive: ‘There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only as regards their source, but also as regards their object. With regard to the source, because we know in one by natural reason, in the other by divine faith. With regard to the object, because besides those things which natural reason can attain, there are proposed for our belief mysteries hidden in God which, unless they are divinely revealed, cannot be known’. Based upon God’s testimony and enjoying the supernatural assistance of grace, faith is of an order other than philosophical knowledge which depends upon sense perception and experience and which advances by the light of the intellect alone. Philosophy and the sciences function within the order of natural reason; while faith, enlightened and guided by the Spirit, recognizes in the message of salvation the ‘fullness of grace and truth’ (cf. Jn 1:14) which God has willed to reveal in history and definitively through his Son, Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Jn 5:9; Jn 5:31-32).”
—Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio § 9
And that’s why I’m making the case above for classical philosophy (including natural law and virtue ethics) which all humans can know by their natural reason.
Insistence on moral absolutism seems like a dead-end approach if society-wide adoption is the goal (true adoption, not forced). Even among Christians (a subset of the population), the debate is still not settled.
“Moral diversity is a fact. Across history and culture, within faith communities and families, people profess divergent, even contradictory moral convictions and values, and forge different ways of life. Christians have always confronted some measure of moral diversity and disagreement, both within their own communities and in relation to other communities. Even a cursory examination of Scripture and early Christian sources displays a variety of attitudes, arguments and practices for responding to moral diversity. Not only do contemporary Christians inherit a mixed record, differences regarding how we ought to respond to moral diversity now contribute to significant internal polarization among Christians. Christians disagree vehemently and too often viciously about all sorts of moral issues.”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0953946819884551
Repeating my earlier question which remains unanswered: How can Distributism be developed without becoming yet another set of “shoulds” that will be similarly ignored by many? I’d like to see a distributist strategy that could get widespread support, regardless of religious affiliation.
If Goodness is real, then it doesn’t matter to our decision how many or few others choose to seek it, only that we choose to live virtuously. I’m not arguing for something in a pragmatic way to maximize support; I’m arguing for an objective reality (the life of virtue) which we all have the joyful opportunity to embrace.
If morality is a mere social construct, then there’s no hope for human society to be “better” or worse. People can either live for what pleases them or die in nihilistic despair, but every soul and all this meaningless chatter will vanish into the void.
On first reading, that Goodness is real looks a bit like Joe’s evolution proposal. How do you distinguish them ?
There may be other options between living for pleasure or dying in nihilistic despair. Not many choices are limited to black and white.
That Goodness is real doesn’t deny Joe’s effort to observe and describe material forces. It just denies that the world is limited to reductive, physical observations and offers a complementary line of observation: yes, you are a physical body and you can easily observe and learn that you need food to survive. But you are also a rational being, with an inherent desire to find meaning and to do things that make you fulfilled–therefore, you can observe and learn that you need to make decisions that are rationally ordered. Accepting the qualitative data of our inherent desire for meaning, purpose, truth, and goodness is the way out of “living for pleasure or dying of despair.”
Thanks for the comments. I’ll respond briefly to a few points (apologies, writing in haste):
Joe, I think I now better understand your main point. I agree that it’s possible to run too far ahead defining detailed political structures for as yet non-existent small farm societies. At the same time, I think there’s a value to describing in outline the emerging political meta-structures that might contain these societies, if only because it involves a potentially worthwhile critique of the problems with our present political meta-structures and a potentially worthwhile analysis of the alternatives. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but still worth thinking about IMO.
Sean, thanks for that clear statement of your position. You’re probably right that postponing a discussion of classical political philosophy as I did is quite artificial, but I felt the need to put some boundaries around the present discussion. I certainly intend to return to classical political philosophy in the future.
I’d question your framing on a couple of points. In terms of describing political or ethical meta-structures you can start from philosophical first principles, and this is where you seem to be planting your flag: “If Goodness is real, then it doesn’t matter to our decision how many or few others choose to seek it, only that we choose to live virtuously.” Fair enough. But you can also start from what political science folks call ‘realism’ – i.e. by taking a view on how different people, views, factions and communities are going to interact in practice, which in a sense is Joe’s point. I’m interested in both, but not so much each one without the other.
To locate classical philosophy in medieval and modern history, it seems to me that one reason Aquinas and later Thomists articulated it as they did was because it potentially solved actual problems of political relations they were facing in their societies, as per my quotation above from Macintyre. In some ways, the architects of modern political philosophy were reacting against the corruption of classical philosophy in the actual societies they inhabited. I think we now need to react against the failure and corruption of modern political philosophy, and classical philosophy has many insights to help us do it. But I see this as a long and uncertain journey, rather than as a done deal. It seems I’m more sympathetic to your position than various other commentators here. I guess I’m most interested in trying to build wider purchase for classical philosophy for its ‘realist’ potential to intervene in the political problems of our times – which would involve trying to persuade commenters here, and many other people, of its, ahem, practical virtue. For me, propounding its first principles correctness might be a necessary part of that, but is insufficient in itself.
Regarding your points about whether Option 4 is a real option, I think it contains a diversity of positions, some more ‘real’ IMO than others. I agree that civic republicanism is constantly in danger of falling into materialism (I also fear the other danger of classical politics falling into corrupt theocracies), but I don’t necessarily see ‘the will of citizens’ as a contrivance (I confess I’ve probably used that word in the past) so much as at least potentially emergent truth. So I think there can be a relationship between ‘will’ and ‘justice’ which is more complex than you propose.
Anyway, I think I’ll be more comfortable discussing this in the future when I’ve devoted a bit more study to the issues, so I hope to come back to it.
Finally, to Steve’s question, “How can Distributism be developed without becoming yet another set of “shoulds” that will be similarly ignored by many?” my preliminary answer would be by trying to build common political goods, that meta-space I mentioned, rather than operating as a faction or a tendency with a manifesto of shoulds. Which isn’t easy, because it too has a lot of gatekeepers (I have a lot of respect for Sean’s efforts to keep the gate open in this respect!) Again, I hope to say more about this in due course.
To be sure, I think classical philosophy does have a lot of “practical” utility: for example, the virtues make people happy (in the sense of “fulfilled” in the long run) in a way that the vices don’t (even though they provide short-term pleasure). And a just (in the sense of natural law) government is more peaceful than a tyrannical one. There’s a lot of classical arguments for the natural virtues which can be made from empirical-qualitative observation of the human person and society, which gets at “taking a view on how different people, views, factions and communities are going to interact in practice.”
However, how do you propose that virtue–as discovered by the “political realists”–can be reliably known and articulated without a commitment to transcendental realities–as discovered by the “philosophical realists”? I’m not saying that the first principles need to be discovered and imposed top-down; it’s essential that the society as a whole (“the will of the people”) discovers and practices them. I entirely agree about the “complex” relationship between the bottom-up and top-down.
But if truth is /only/ “emergent”, how is that not reducing everything to the bottom-up? I think that hesitancy or skepticism about objective Truth inevitably falls into materialism and political Machiavellianism–I’m not accusing you personally of intentionally advancing that, but I think that’s the logical conclusion.
Also, I think that the only reason that Enlightenment-era “civic republicanism” /seems/ to balance between these two views is that it existed in the process of modernity arising. I don’t see a precise balance, but a murky pollution of classical words with liberal thought. As MacIntyre points out, there was a long and slow process of rearranging the meaning of virtue, teleology, and truth.
After the Fall—a response to the response.
Chris, I feel like I got off well in your summary, which I am grateful for. I certainly had some worry that you would find less to agree with in my argument or presentation. Huzzah!
And I realized while reading your response that I had spent all my ire arguing against the idea of human supremacy, but I had not talked about what I am actually for, and what I and my wife Carmen are doing. So…
Here again you have laid our your worldview:
in my opinion our present high-energy, heavily urbanized world of globalized politics and commerce is unravelling and will continue to unravel due to climate, energy, material, socioeconomic and geopolitical realities that are now unavoidable, if not exactly predictable. Very few people, and no whole countries or societies, are remotely prepared for what’s in store. A good response in these circumstances is to focus on producing food, fibre and other material necessities for local use with renewable local inputs as far as possible, or on supporting local communities through education, health and social care.
I agree completely with this statement. I appreciate how in your writing you take this analysis as the foundation, and explore broadly around it to try to outline the implications. We are not the same people we were 50, 100, 200 years ago or more, so our future is not simply the same as the past—though we are very likely to find ourselves rediscovering many past solutions as we find ourselves dealing with many of the same problems.
And I appreciate how you have recognized and have the character to face the deep changes that are coming, but also hold to a moral centre. You do not want a return to feudalism, nor to the rank subjugation of women. You want to maintain great strokes of modern knowledge and practice, and grow up a new subsistence of smallholdings with a more modern balance of power.
Or as I like to say, we need to plan for the world we are going to get, not the world we want.
There is no choice we can make that is going to keep the cheap and easy oil flowing, nor is there any choice we can make that will return us to a stable climate. That is the world we are going to get.
Smallholdings are a pretty small unit of subsistence, and I think we are going to get a lot more of them.
The question is how much we can avoid the bad of the small farm past as we move into the future.
So what I see you doing is occupying space.
Times of constraint and collapse seem to always come with more authoritarianism, more racism, more isolationism. Rather than allow the Puritans to squat on the small farm future, you are occupying space, talking about sharing power, talking about maintaining justice. Reminding us all that place-based subsistence can be a location of community and love.
…
So, I appreciate your analysis, and am comforted by your writing. We have not returned to the small farm yet, but we are active urban homesteaders. Again, we are trying to occupy space.
This, by the way, has solid neurological foundations.
Since we have so little capacity for conscious choice, we have developed countless coping mechanisms to help us get through the day without breaking down from overload.
And one of those is just copying what other people do. The more people doing something, the more contagious it is.
So, by occupying space, by plainly living differently, we increase the chances of someone catching a small farm future.
Now…
Times of constraint and collapse seem to also come with more spirituality and superstition.
The weave of justice wears awfully thin sometimes, and people seek an explanation for their travails.
We have seen a great flourishing of Evangelicals and Pentecostals and we will likely see a small return to the mainstream churches.
We have seen a great flourishing of conspiracy theories, QAnon, belief in the Lizard People, contrails, 9/11 was an inside job, etc.
But we are also seeing a great movement into neo-paganism, animism, witchcraft, divination and other folk practices and revivals.
What I and especially my wife do, is occupy space.
Again, the world we are going to get is one with more fear and suspicion, salved with more spirituality and superstition.
I want to occupy space against the anti-abortion zealots, against the homophobes. I want to occupy space against the persecution and the witch burning. I want to occupy space against the religions that deny science.
I want to take up space with what Carmen calls Earth Honouring Activities.
So, Carmen has written a cookbook, The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes and Rituals for the Wheel of the Year.
It comes out on October 31st, and I encourage you all to pre-order a copy from your favourite bookstore (though due to the publishing industry, it is actually better for Carmen if you order it from Amazon).
The Spirited Kitchen is a cookbook, with recipes for the Solstices and Equinoxes and the halfway points in between, but it is also a DIY introduction to how to develop an animistic and magical practice. It introduces the technology, sometimes cross-cultural and sometimes very specific, of animistic relationships. It is a very beautiful book.
…
I am sure someone has mapped Christianity onto one of those quadrants, with axes labelled something like Centralized Dispersed, and Mediated Direct.
So, Catholicism is very centralized and very mediated. If I understand Anglicism, it primarily move the centre away from Rome, but fixed it in England.
Many of the Protestant faiths are pretty centralized, but less mediated. Some have a preacher functionally as the conduit to god, some have a direct link to god.
Evangelicals might be very dispersed, and somewhat to fairly mediated.
Here in Victoria, we got married in the Manner of Friends, in the Quaker Meeting House. Most Canadian (and I believe British) Quakers enjoy “unprogrammed” meetings of expectant waiting. So this is a little centralized, but not very mediated.
And it is this Quaker belief of removing the middleman between us and god that I find interesting.
For example, at a Quaker wedding there is no officiant, because they believe god has already joined the couple. The heresy of early Quakers was that they preached that each of us could have a direct, unmediated relationship with god, with no middleman.
Now, Christians may cite scripture to exhort us to steward the earth. God gave us this perfect gift, and it is an affront to not care for it.
And I ask, why not cut out the middleman?
Why honour the earth in order to please god, when I could just love the earth directly, with no mediation, and no need to bring a Christian god into the picture?
I mean for crying out loud, the middleman wants a 10% cut—how much more clear could it be?
So, I think nature spiritualities and magic are undergoing a… Reformation? Is that the right term?
There is an increasing move into the dispersed and direct forms. I don’t know if people are moving away from the Order of the Golden Dawn and the Druidic orders and whatnot. But it looks like Wicca was a loosening up of those schools, and the current flourishing of DIY folk traditions is very unmediated.
…
Now, I was raised an atheist, and am a recovering rationalist. I now say I am an animist with only a little awkwardness.
Chris, I enjoyed seeing you say you were more inclined to think people can successfully inhabit the uncomfortable terrain of behaving as if traditions are true.
The person I first heard that from suggested we “Proceed as if it is true.”
“Proceed as if”.
So where I live, on Lekwungen Territory more recently called Victoria, BC, the Coast Salish peoples knew eagles and ravens to be magical creatures, to have great power and sometimes the ability to transform and take different shapes.
Now, if you have never been here, once you get out of town the place is positively lousy with eagles and ravens—and what that means is that when an Indigenous person got up and walked outside in the morning, they were in the presence of magical creatures, and they would see these creatures several times every day.
Well, that sounds awesome. That sounds really incredible. Imagine living in world so suffused with magic.
So I tried to proceed as if. I simply started treating small parts of the world as if it was magical, as if it was alive and in relationship with me.
And this year I fed the crows, and eventually they would chase me down on the way to work and make me go back to feed them. Hearing the deep croak of ravens feels like a blessing. I can feel the pull of the moon in my chest. A visit from an owl is absolutely a wonderful omen.
I have cut out the middleman, and am having a direct, unmediated relationship with magical beings.
Another one that feels very strongly to me is more ancestral winter celebrations.
My mother talks about Fimbulvinter, which is a winter that lasts three years without summer, and precedes a terrible war that ends the world.
I now embrace winter celebrations as the fierce spells and offerings for survival that they are. As the days get shorter and the long cold starts to wear on you, bringing evergreen trees and boughs into the house is a spell to call forth green life again, a devotional act.
Lighting candles on the tree and hanging reflective ornaments to multiply the lights is sympathetic magic, a small act trying to call forth a larger one—that the light may return, the winter will end, and that we won’t die starving and frozen in the endless Fimbulvinter.
And even all the feasts—they are ceremonies that mark the harvest that has been, but they are also rituals that call the future in, that we may live and prosper and feast again.
And of course they are technologies of resource management and food safety…
So… we occupy space against capitalism, and the fantasies of infinite resources. We occupy space against the eco-fascists, if they are even real, and against the Bright Green hucksters, and against the spiritual bypassers and snake oil sellers.
In addition to putting my tomatoes in the front yard, where they occupy space against the stupid fake meat and vertical farms, we occupy space with our unmediated relationship with the earth and how it sustains us.
Ruben, thanks for this. I appreciate your genuine commitment to transcendence, devotion, ritual, and spirituality. Though I disagree with you about human’s being subordinate to the natural world and the nature of divine mediation, those very topics have been discussed and studied at great length within the history of philosophy, so I think there’s lot of room to reach logical conclusions about them from shared premises.
The main thread of this series of posts concerns metaphysics, how the world works, and the implications that has for our actions. I’d like to pick up on the distinction Sean makes between a materialist metaphysics (the amoral universe defined by ‘evoutionary’ or mechanical development, in which reasoning is ‘pragmatic’ or arbitrary) and what I’ll call a teleological metaphysics (the universe in which moral imperatives can be deduced through empirical reasoning).
Sean’s teleological metaphysics is more expansive than the materialist one, because while it recognises a mechanical element in the material domain, it also insists that morality as such (or perhaps ‘purpose’, echoing a dicussion we had under a previous post) is also a property of the Universe, demonstrable empirically by our constant awareness of moral implications or problems in our everyday lives, even if we try to escape them in some way. The materialist metaphysics is intent on denying morality as such an essential role in the Universe – although, from a moral point of view, it is always smuggled back in; Joe may think that ‘trying to figure out a morality to underpin a political structure that could be used to organize the polity of an, as yet, non-existent small farm future is getting too far ahead of reality’, but to ignore the moral questions around acting to create such a future is itself a moral choice, because it involves deciding to treat (some) people in one way rather than another.
I agree with Sean up to this point. However, I don’t think the teleological element necessarily follows. Sean reasons from the particular to the general to state that, given everything in our lives has some kind of purpose, we can identify a nested hierarchy of purposes that end with Pure Being, the Good, the great Unmoved Mover, that gives purpose to everything else. Accepting this, we can talk about the ‘the’ purposes that we as humans have in the universe, safe in the knowledge that they inhere in the structure of the universe and that we should choose to live by them in order to be happy.
This is a ‘zero-point’ metaphysics, in which ‘the Good’ is always imanent everywhere at every moment. Wherever and whenever we find ourselves, our best bet is to reason from first principles to decide what to do next. I think this can be contrasted with an ‘extended’ metaphysics (emprically, the Universe is extended in time and space), in which each moment needs to be viewed as essentially unique and specific. Morality as such remains an essential property of any given moment – we are always poised on the cusp of the wave of our world as given to us by the previous moment and the crashing transformation of the next, and we must decide what to do, even if we decide to do nothing. But the content of our choice cannot be derived from first principles.
It’s important to state that this isn’t an ‘anything goes’ metaphysics. Each moment has its own truth (perhaps this aligns with Chris’s ’emergent truth’), but that truth is an essential property of the situations we find ourselves within, their specifics, histories and possible futures. Equally, it is profoundly moral because it is defined by choice. I have no truck with this idea that ‘we have so little capacity for conscious choice’ (as Ruben puts it); our choices are always circumscribed in some ways, but exploring the limits and possibilities of the choices available to us is one of the nearest approaches to defining ‘the meaning of life’ as I can find – one doesn’t suggest that blue is limited in its capacity for blueness because it has no claim on the other colours around it. The idea that neurological inquiry should be able to settle quesitons about moral choices looks like a category error to me.
Finally, I do think that our capacities as a species, as constituted now, in this moment, in this epoch, inform the moral choices available to us. As I tried to explain under the previous post, the fact that we grow up to develop capacities for thinking together through language determines that we also appear in each other’s purposes because our articulation of them relies on profoundly shared concepts. As such, treating each other as if we all matter is most conducive to our happiness, if so seldom realised, and to that extent I would connect virtue ethics to metaphysical reasoning, but only to that extent – call it a predominant principle rather than a first principle. As a moral imperative, I think Chris put it nicely: ‘the right choice is always to save, regardless of the circumstances … because human lives are ends in themselves’.
Hi Andrew, I think you have a great understanding of what I’m trying to express in those first two paragraphs. Very well said!
I wonder how much we actually disagree. You seem to say that “the idea that [abstract] neurological inquiry should be able to settle questions about [particular] moral choices looks like a category error to me.“ I’d agree with that. Natural law can give us some very broad guidelines of moral behavior (i.e. don’t kill, steal, lie, or rape) and the virtues can give us broad aspects of our psychology to monitor (our will, intellect, passions), but the process of acting virtuously in a particular moment is not something that will be immediately obvious. Rather, it requires careful knowledge of the circumstances, history, individuals involved, interior intentions, etc. Indeed, the deep specificity of ethics is why “wisdom” (aka “prudence”) is considered one of the four cardinal virtues. In this way, it’s true that “each moment has its own truth”; however, these truths are all a specification of the eternal Truth, which must be continually mediated into time and history.
Does that answer your objection, or is there a deeper disagreement you are getting at?
Thanks Sean. We do find agreement in much dicussed here, but I think there is a point at which we part company – to be honest I’m not entirely sure where it lies yet, but it would be interesting to tease out! I’ve found natural law very useful to think with, and clarifying in many ways.
The four cardinal virutes appear to be useful characterisations of the kinds of habits of mind that would enable humans to live more happily together in the world, so no disagreement there. However, I think the uncertainty around acting virtuously in the moment that you describe raises questions about the nature of human ‘goods’ and their relationship to an ultimate Good. Clearly we might disagree on what consitutes virtuous behaviour in a given situation, on what ‘good’ is being furthered, while agreeing ultimately on the ‘very broad guidelines of moral behaviour’ derived from our natural capacities. As I see it, there would be no independent final arbiter in such a situation, and the corollary to that, I think, is that each of us must stand as the final arbiter of our own virtue, even as we must recognise that it has implications for others.
I think this also has implications for how far we can claim to know anything about the moral structure of the Universe beyond a certain ‘event horizon’ defined by the reach of our empirical experience (both material and immaterial). This casts back to an earlier discussion between us in which you characterised my position as a sceptical one – I’m not sure whether I would claim such a position or not at the moment. Essentially, while the articulation of shared concepts is a crucial part of our nature, and allows us to think about transcendental or speculative things, I don’t see that we can claim to know about the latter with any certainty (at least, without the addition of divine revelation). Inductive reasoning, from the particular to the general, can never escape the realm of probability into that of certainty.
So while we can talk of the totality of the Universe as a unitary thing (the ‘eternal Truth’?) I don’t think it can form the basis for for what we claim to know about our own virtue or the ‘goods’ to which it is directed, at least beyond the ‘predominant principle’ I mentioned in my earlier comment (your ‘very general guidelines’). It also leads me to question the idea of a nested hierarchy of being – from my perspective, such a structure is a speculative entity, and might be set alongside others, none of which can ultimately be demonstrated to explain our capacity for natural reason.
In the final analysis, I think this affects the degree to which we think natural law arguments should inform the societies that we create. I think such arguments offer great encouragement to a society in which all are treated as if they matter and such treatment is understood according to the notion of virtue (I’d anticipate no disagreement from you on this), but I also see such a society as one in which each person is the final arbiter of their own virtue, excepting only that virtue must accord everyone equal dignity if it is to mean anything at all. Our senses of the importance of hierarchy in society would thus, I think, differ; as a result, I think we would also differ on the extent to which it would be considered right to seek to control the behaviour of others in certain situations (I’m here thinking of your points on the necessity of gatekeepers).
Again, thanks for providing the opportunity for this discussion. I find it both important and fascinating.
In comparison with the four cardinal virtues, the four boundless qualities (loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity) seem better aligned with teachings like “love thy neighbor”, and could be guidelines for getting closer to the “perfect love” which Sean mentioned in an earlier comment.
I was replying to Andrew who wrote, “The four cardinal virutes appear to be useful characterisations of the kinds of habits of mind that would enable humans to live more happily together in the world, so no disagreement there.”
Thanks Steve, I wasn’t aware of these, but I see what you mean. Important, I think, that both the virtues and the qualities are concerned with according others the dignity that we would allot to ourselves.
Andrew, thanks for this great reply and my very sincere apologies for not giving it the time it deserves. With the hope that to be “better late and little than never and none,” I’ll reply briefly:
I do think the core of our disagreement hinges on whether knowledge is possible. You say “inductive reasoning, from the particular to the general, can never escape the realm of probability into that of certainty.” Here, I disagree. If certainty is impossible, then how do you account for the phenomenological fact of intellectual certainty? How do you account for the mutual comprehensibility of language? Above all, how do you account for the universal certainty that the principle of non-contradiction is true?
In the classical theory of knowledge, we slowly gain knowledge through inductive reasoning based on empirical observation or through human tradition, guiding us through the observations and reasonings of those who have gone before us. Thus, a child of age 10, through many experiences of rain has genuine /knowledge/ of what rain is (even if they don’t know modern meteorology) and is communicating about a real, commonly known truth when they talk to others about rain. Likewise, a young adult of age 20, through instruction in logic and mathematics, can have genuine knowledge of these sciences and can solve equations to get the correct (“true”) answer.
This can be extended further to the “Chain of Being” metaphysics which I suggest. Contrary to your suggestion, many philosophers /have/ demonstrated proofs for concepts such as the Unmoved Mover, which are ultimately rooted in our commonly-accessible knowledge about the reality we share. So the “independent final arbiter” of our intellectual and moral opinions is not ourselves (even if we have to take responsibility for our choices), but ultimately Reality itself.
However, to throw in a good word for the skeptics, they are getting at another reality: humanity is fallen/corrupted/lacking its full capacity for intellectual and moral action, which means we often get things terribly wrong (which often leads to us doing horrible things to each other and ourselves). Knowledge is hard, especially about those grand metaphysical and moral questions which matter most. That’s why a genuine commitment to philosophic study and virtuous life (exemplified by men like Socrates, who put his skin in the game) is required for the search for Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
(And, of course, we are blessed to have some of the burdens mercifully lightened for us–in the Person of Jesus Christ, Who came to teach us true doctrine and show us true virtue. As you implied, the certainty of divine revelation makes all earthly certainties pale in comparison. Though as I pointed out the in the “Fides et Ratio” quote elsewhere on this page, Faith does /not/ cancel out or ignore Reason, but builds upon it)
Not saying I won’t necessarily comment further here, but partly due to pressure of other commitments and partly because I want to think about classical political philosophy some more, I’m not going to respond specifically just now to the thought-provoking positions and questions laid out by Sean, Ruben and Andrew. But I hope to come back to them, and to the points raised by other commenters, when I return to the classical politics theme in due course. Thanks!
This is a great introduction to the broad idea of classical philosophy: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/11/join-ur-platonist-alliance.html
Though Feser, who could stand to be more post-colonial among other things, doesn’t make a nod to the non-western philosophic traditions in this article, I believe it comes up in MacIntyre at a few points.
Thanks Sean. It’s an interesting read. As I said above, I intend to come back to this.
One thing that bugged me slightly in the comments, though, is somebody’s suggestion of defining the Platonists vs the naturalists as the ‘good guys vs the bad guys’. Most of us have a tendency to think like this, including me, but I think it should be resisted. Every political philosophy can be pushed in troubling directions, but I think most people most of the time have good faith reasons for thinking as they do.
I’m currently reading and enjoying Deneen’s ‘Why Liberalism Failed’. So far, I’ve liked the way he’s characterized liberal positions with which he disagrees but in a reasonably sympathetic way that gives people their due in understanding why they came to these positions.
Yes, agreed. I think the naturalist/materialists are “bad philosophers”, but not “bad guys,” the situation is so much more complex. The local anarchists are sure to have deep metaphysical disagreements with me, but they show up to protest pipelines and feed the homeless. And like you said, it’s easy to push Platonism in an evil direction—there’s a long history of using the tropes of classical philosophy (hierarchy, order, etc) to uphold tyrannical, reactionary governments.
The only thing, in my view, which distinguishes good from evil is virtue, which encompasses our habits in /every/ part of life, and so renders us all complex characters, hopefully in the process of repenting and improving. Moreover, you can’t truly assess a person’s virtue without knowing their interior intentions and thoughts, which is impossible; thus the advice, “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” (Matthew 7:1-2)
Does this discussion have any practical application to a resource constrained small farm future ?
For example: Community A and B share the same river for irrigation. There is a drought. Community A uses up all the available water. B gets none and faces crop failure.
Does the above conversation provide tools to resolve that conflict ?
For resolving it? Maybe.
For avoiding the conflict in the first place? Probably.
Are the people in Community A acting virtuously, loving their neighbours as themselves, if they use up all the water, causing crop failure for Community B? And how do the respective communities respond prudently?
Certainly! Justice is the one the four cardinal virtues. Classical political philosophy provides the framework of the “common good” which both communities share and /ought/ to uphold. If all those involved share and practice these beliefs, even imperfectly, it will lead to their mutual flourishing.
I feel like I’m a bit late to the conversation but still wanted to put words to page, if only to clear my own thoughts about this supremely interesting discussion ( thanks to all, it was highly enlightening from all sides)
It seems to me that the distinction between the “intentional” and “evolutionary” camps is largely like trying to argue which half of the whole is the correct half. Each step in an evolutionary process has intentionality to it, this whole discussion is a perfect example of the process in action. Each persons ideas are evolving within the debate as they are challenged, but each person is also choosing their arguments intentionally.
Just like a farmer does not leave their field to seed and “let evolution sort it out” they also do not meticulously tend each sprout and guide each ones every moment. They allow evolution to take place, then choose what seeds they believe are best, and sow those anew. It seems a cyclical process, one in which neither position is ever the end of the road.
This leads directly into the other conversation of the 5 positions, which, while I agree with Sean on his argument for the duality vs the 5, i disagree with his assessment (and Chris’s original idea) that sacred traditions can be divined down to christianity and then all others pushed to one side.
It seems that a polytheistic lens as it pertains to culture might be valuable to hold onto in this argument. If we are recognizing that we are on a decline as a global society then we are likely in agreement that indigeneity and “culture as it relates to the land” will be ascendant in the whatever societies comeout the other side. Belief in the sacred and the tenents of morality that associate with it will likely follow in kind, and on this I would argue that (as Reuben notes) there is good that can come from belief that is fixed to place. The land is both below our feet and above our heads in terms of heirarchy, and I don’t believe that the monotheistic framing of the debate so far can aquiesce to that.
A polytheistic lens can also solve an additional concern in regards to the search for moral truth. You remove the issue of moral absolutism if you allow for multiple truths in tension with one another. It also limits the issue of supremacy narratives, something that christianity and other monotheistic traditions struggle with.
And of course polytheistic belief has it’s own struggles (folkist racism, colonial practice, among others) but I feel like it walks a valuable path that I haven’t read much through this conversation yet.
Zachary, thanks for the comment. Regarding polytheism, it was largely discounted by even the Greco-Roman pagans of the philosophical tradition, who tried to reframe “Zeus” as a metaphor for the “Source and Fountainhead of all that is.” Polytheism fails to answer a lot of fundamental questions about metaphysics and ontology—for example, even the modern theory of the Big Bang points to a singular Source of Creation.
Regarding relativism (which does go naturally with polytheism, as you point out: “You remove the issue of moral absolutism if you allow for multiple truths in tension with one another.”), I tried to address that point in my comment above:
https://chrissmaje.com/?p=2016#comment-253387
“ But if truth is /only/ “emergent”, how is that not reducing everything to the bottom-up? I think that hesitancy or skepticism about objective Truth inevitably falls into materialism and political Machiavellianism–I’m not accusing you personally of intentionally advancing that, but I think that’s the logical conclusion.”
And yet polytheism endures in great numbers…
I think a lot of people are simply trying to make sense of very simple stuff—why do people die, why does the sun rise, how should I treat my neighbour. Whether or not your gods accord with ontology and the Big Bang is just not that urgent compared with keeping the house brownies happy so the bread will rise.
Yes, you’re right about that. While I see humans as capable of (and finding their fulfillment in) contemplating the truth and living out perfect virtue, not everyone chooses the love of wisdom and virtue. After all, Socrates was killed for asking too many questions about ontology and the gods.
I’m not sure it was largely discounted by them, certainly by some, and some went even further towards a position of atheism. I think the larger point many of the Roman philosphers made was that it was secondary if divinity was one actor or many, so long that it existed in some respect.
Personally I land on (or at least near) polytheism because I believe it answers moral questions from a stronger position than monotheistic traditions, it avoids the problem of evil and divine hiddeness, as well as entirely diregarding “outsider to faith” arguments. In fact polytheism is strengthened by multiplicitous experiences, human experience of mutiple gods and theistic systems points towards polytheism, while it is an argument against monotheism.
In terms of truth as an emergent property, that is my fault for poor communication. I did not mean to say that truth is derived because there are multiple truths, rather that you can have objective morality without reduction to a single objective.
I can believe that Tyr and Odin have different objectively appropriate morals for a situation, and the tension between those truths can act as “bumpers for morality, preventing excessing that can happen in single point moral systems that allow for more drift.
Regardless of our disagreements, I can appreciate your conviction to your faith, and I’d like to thank you for the writing that spurred this conversation, it was challenging in the best sort of way.
Thanks Zachary for the reply.
Regarding human experiences of many gods, I do actually agree that these experiences are real! However, as has been long pointed out by Christians, just because a spiritual being is claiming to be a god or displaying its power, doesn’t mean that we should trust it. Just as there if conflict between humans, there is clearly conflict between the angels (indeed, most pagans acknowledge both historical and present “theomachy”), which leaves us still needing to discern which spirits and angels are good or evil, and whether any are truly deserving of worship or obedience.
Regarding ethics, are you saying that Tyr and Odin both have a set of ethics, and that we need to discern the situations about whose ethics are best to follow in that moment? If so, who is the god that discerns between each situation what is best? Surely there must be one.
Why not simply worship and obey the Source of such Wisdom as the true, singular, ethical guide?
Thanks for the new comments, and good to hear your voice here Zachary!
As I said above, I think I’m going to leave the larger questions raised here for a future time – but thanks for all the contributions.
To Greg’s question I’d also say that yes the above conversation does potentially help to provide some tools. Community A might say ‘screw you, you wanna make something of it?’ or they might say ‘hey, we’re building a surplus that will permit technological developments so in the future there’ll be more to go around for everyone’. But neither are good answers in a resource-constrained future. If Community A and B were long-established self-reliant agrarian communities, they’d probably have figured out some kind of arrangement, even if grudging, over time, though they’d need to keep working on it. But now we’re facing the need to create such communities anew pretty quickly with existing mainstream political traditions ill-fitted to the task. Hence, while this discussion doesn’t magically resolve such practical questions in itself, for me the point of it is that it’s working on establishing traditions that will help
I’m not in any way intellectual and the arguments have been stretching my limited abilities to understand. I think Sean is saying there is a unassailable truth that virtue exists and it can be (mostly) found in the Catholic tradition, and that we need to agree on this to go forward. Joe is saying well if that’s true then let evolution sort it out, and Andrew’s saying yes but we still have to choose to do it. There seems to be a kit bag of stuff, that we can have – or not have – and Steve L put some more good things in, and there is question over who made the kit bag (or didn’t)!
Chris likes the sound of unassailable truth (who doesn’t?) but he’s also an Englishman residing in the west country with unassailably indigenous scepticism to government and religion. I think he’s asking for useful ways to bind and hold community under pressure, so we can learn to embody them in our daily lives, and there is a feeling that first principles might help with that.
I am in awe of Sean and Andrew’s (and Chris’)grasp of these concepts and it seems like they are getting somewhere, but some are getting left behind – there seems to be a lack of ground despite all the talk of foundations, a lack of perspectives (Zacharys’ polytheism?) that can be drawn in through the process.
I have said that the first principle of our family is Party! Now as frivolous as that may sound, we must all know that creating and attending a great party is an act of service which ultimately expresses all the things in that kit bag, the virtues, the goods. We find in indeginous cultures, like Chris’, the active pursuit of food, drink, song, dance, music and rhythm to induce states of altered consciousness – (I’m sure enjoyed by Ruben whose wifes lovely book is essential to this pursuit) – which can help bind community and is used in times of stress to promote mutual understanding and good will. This can, for example, be used to heal trauma when we don’t have time to hear everyone’s problems.
There is the old (Marxist?) saw that you cannot dismantle the masters house with the masters tools that lurks around the edges of all these arguments, for me. I would much rather rub along with people, meet them where they are at (as I am sure Sean does) which is place making again. Foundations are for civilisations and I’m with Junkaporta on this – they all fail. Perhaps Sean, Andrew, we can have a wheel, or four wheels as the foundation of our house because it looks like we gonna be on the move? I’d love to hear about a philosophy that rolls.
Or to put it another way, how do we distribute truth and virtue?
What is the process of coming to truth and virtue, (that does not involve the remnants of fallen empires and can be experienced and embodied by the human land anima)?
Thanks for the new comments. I’m going to be mostly offline for a few days, but I’ll try to pick up on some of the comments here briefly when I’m back at the desk … and then again when I turn to politics.
A podcast that is related to this topic
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/40-mary-evelyn-tucker
I agree that episode is super relevant to this discussion, this is a good pod cast altogether Greg, I’d also recommend the one with Simon Minchaux and Jamie Wheal.
Hi and apologies for being late to this party. I have really enjoyed reading Chris and Sean’s posts here and all the discussion back and forth. I am a fan of the Small Farm Future book and a practitioner of the idea as well as a Christian (Quaker). This topic does not seem irrelevant to our urgent times and practical problems to me at all, but of deepest importance. I am glad to read that Chris is learning more in order to re-visit it in the future and look forward to it.
I thought I would mention Paul Kingsnorth and his substack writing project The Abbey of Misrule. It seems to me the discussion over there is often about these same questions; the readers include Buddhists, atheists, Christians, and others. Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed has been part of the discussion often. I am not really as educated and scholarly as most of you but I’m just as concerned about the ‘what and why’ of a small farm future “whether we like it or not” as Chris wisely says.
I am linking one of the earlier essays about Eden and Macintyre, not sure if it is one of the public posts or subscriber only, but worth a try.
https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-dream-of-the-rood
-Clara
Thanks Clara. It’s a good essay! Appreciate you sending it my way.