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Posted on March 16, 2024 | 46 Comments
I published this article at Front Porch Republic to sign off from engaging directly with ecomodernists and ecomodernism around food, energy and ecological futures, the theme of my 2023 book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. The article draws on Naomi Klein’s fascinating book Doppelganger to try to make sense of some of the debates around my book and the weird emergent political world we seem to be entering. It also defines ecomodernism and explains why I find it problematic.
The responses I’ve had to Saying NO… have been mostly positive and appreciative (thanks!), but with some negatives too – inevitably so, especially for a somewhat disputatious book. Few of the negative responses seem to have seriously engaged with the book’s core energetic, ecological and political arguments. Not many have been all that polite either. Honourable exception to Mike Daw on both fronts, though Mike’s response wasn’t really negative.
Anyway, I think I’ve now achieved about as much as I can around the book, and there’s little to be gained by further dwelling on it. Ideally, I’d still like to wrest some plausible energy figures for manufactured food from its proponents. That’s proved a bridge too far to date, but I will continue to press for it.
Also, the personal aggro that’s come my way has prompted me to think a bit about good faith and bad faith engagement in public culture, and some of the grey areas at their margins. That’s what I’m going to write about in this essay, before circling back to the question of modernism and what comes after it – hopefully something that’s both more pro-human and more pro-nature. Since that’s what I hope to focus on in future writing, maybe this essay can work as a bridge.
In a section of my essay discussing Klein’s thoughts about shadowlands, I wrote:
Modern life rests on many shadowlands that we find ways not to see–destroyed ecosystems, exploited labour, colonial genocides, land expropriations of the past and present, ghost acres, climate change and the ‘storms of our grandchildren,’ ecological holocausts like the Canadian tar sands, social holocausts like the destruction of indigenous people’s lifeways.
A commenter on social media told me they’d stopped reading my essay, with its two references to ‘holocausts’, at this point, castigating me for disrespecting the victims of the Holocaust, and … well, just generally castigating me.
Castigation is the name of the game on that particular platform, so I probably shouldn’t make an issue of this. But it raises interesting questions, so I think I will. I’ll say more in a moment about holocausts, but first I want to discuss the nature of the communicative acts in this exchange.
Goodness knows, few of us these days are short of words barrelling towards us clamouring for our attention, so it’s entirely legitimate for anybody to stop reading anything they no longer wish to read without having to give a reason. It’s slightly odder to write to an author explaining why you lost interest in them, because it suggests that somehow you are still interested in them. Maybe contacting them could be an opening to a discussion that could reignite the interest. But if you contact them in a public forum to tell them about your lack of interest in them, this usually has the form of a status claim – essentially, you’re putting the author down in front of other people and telling them (i.e. both the author and the other people) that the author’s words should be given no credence.
Quite a bit of this kind of thing has come my way in relation to Saying NO… – more than for anything I’ve previously written – which I find interesting. While I want to talk about manufactured food and warn that it’s a poor policy option as a mass food solution at this point in history, others say things of the form “don’t listen to Smaje’s views on the food system – he disrespects the Holocaust!” In my opinion, this is bad faith argumentation.
If I try my best to give such arguments their due – and I’m gritting my teeth here – I suppose I’d say that you can sometimes press the logic of something tangential that someone’s said to reveal a troubling aspect that does bear somehow on the issue at hand. Arguably, I’ve done that myself in relation to ecomodernist arguments about the efficiency of microbial food production, which I’ve suggested involve a logic of enclosure. My opponents might protest, “that’s not fair – that’s not what I’m saying” – just as I would say of some of the accusations levelled at me. If we can then get into a productive conversation about what we are actually saying and try to get to the root of our disagreement, then we’re back in the realm of good faith dialogue.
I’ve found that step into real dialogue hard in debating ecomodernists, and I’m tired of the bad faith, overheated moral outrage and caricaturing.
But where dialogue stops, conflict starts. It doesn’t really matter in relation to an argument with another individual person, and maybe one lesson I could draw from this is to opt for the usually wise course of understatement rather than overstatement in relation to incidental parts of an argument, to avoid alienating potential readers. However, at the individual level I suspect it’s impossible to so purify one’s language that it becomes impossible to offend those who are looking to take offence. And, as I’ll argue in the next section, there are bigger and more consequential structural conflicts in society bubbling up within the dividing lines of my little social media spat. As I see it, ecomodernist positions in this conflict thrive by insisting on understatements of the problems associated with modernism itself which should not be understated.
Let me confront directly the controversy at hand – my use of the term ‘holocaust’ in the passage above. The origins of the word lie in ancient ritual sacrifices where everything (holo) was burnt (caust). Not everyone thinks this is an appropriate term to apply to the Nazi genocide against Jews and others in Europe, but it’s become the standard accepted term, capitalized with the definite article – the Holocaust. The uncapitalized term ‘holocaust’ has a generally accepted wider meaning, of mass destruction and killing (‘nuclear holocaust’ for example).
In respect of those standard usages, I don’t think my antagonist has much of a case against me. But as I thought about my word choice in the light of his critique I had a nagging feeling I’d recently read an analysis of holocausts and the Holocaust that had some bearing on the issue. It took me a long time to remember where I’d read it, but eventually I did. It was … er … Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. This doesn’t say a lot for my powers of recall, but I’m trying my best.
Klein has several interesting things to say about the h word, which I’ll briefly summarise here. For starters, she’s supportive of the word ‘holocausts’ in the plural to refer to various genocides, including the genocide of indigenous people in the Americas by European colonisers. And she’s critical of attempts to reserve the word to the Holocaust alone. One dimension of her critique relates to the politics of Israel and Palestine, all too horrifically evident at the moment, which I won’t pursue here. Another is an important critique of European or western modernity.
Her point in essence is that it suits western self-conceptions to regard the Holocaust as a unique and unprecedented event, inexplicable in the context of general social progress in the west, and therefore not to be compared with anything else. She critiques this quite effectively by quoting none other than Adolf Hitler, who professed his influences from colonial powers like the British in using concentration camps, from the Jim Crow laws of the USA, from genocides against indigenous peoples and of the Lebensraum-style ideologies associated with settler colonialism and the American frontier.
Hitler emerges from Klein’s analysis not as “the civilized, democratic west’s evil “other” but its shadow, its doppelganger” representing an exterminatory mindset at the core of European thought (p.268). She quotes Sven Lindqvist: “Auschwitz was the modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination had long since rested” (p.271), and she quotes contemporary Black intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois and Aimé Césaire who argued that the main distinguishing feature of the Holocaust was that it took techniques long practiced by Europeans against non-European peoples and applied them on home turf.
No doubt these views are debatable. My main point is that there is a debate to be had about them, which renders suspect attempts to belittle the use of plural ‘holocausts’ as morally compromised. Frankly, it doesn’t sit well with me if settler-descended residents of Turtle Island make an issue of the supposed disrespect involved in referring to its colonial genocides as holocausts. Nor, as I argued in my doppelganger essay, does it sit well with me when critics of organic farming or agrarian localism make an issue of the Blut und Boden associations with far-right ideology that characterized some of their early twentieth century pioneers without noting the pervasive biopolitics of ‘racial improvement’, ‘social hygiene’ and what have you across the entire political spectrum at that time, including among socialists and proponents of urbanism.
A kind of mass, organised violence against people and nature shadows the entire European modernist ideology. It burst forth in the Holocaust, and in other holocausts. It’s one reason I’m not persuaded that technical upgrades like renewable energy or microbial manufactured food are going to make much difference in themselves to the outcome of the modernist project, because they don’t challenge – and easily compound – its generative violence. A deeper cultural renewal is necessary.
(Incidentally, this theme took me back to Zygmunt Bauman’s classic Modernity and the Holocaust where he argued: “To understand how that astounding moral blindness was possible, it is helpful to think … how it is possible that the ‘fall in commodity prices’ may be universally welcomed as good news while ‘starvation of African children’ is equally universally, and sincerely, lamented”. This has some bearing on my previous post).
Another aspect of modernist violence is its recourse to quantification and bureaucracy. The creation of unambiguous “them’s the rules” binaries, all the counting, measuring and record-keeping, the Nuremberg Laws – exactly how Jewish do you have to be before you’re expelled from citizenship and safety? – are a kind of doppelganger of the scientific method and ‘scientific management’ nestling at the heart of the modern centralised state’s sovereign power to decide what’s what. We’d do well to remember this whenever we make the case for wider, finer or more discriminatory quantitative precision as a social practice.
When I mentioned to a family member the drift of my thinking closer to Christianity in relation to my increasing interest in cultural traditions and the sacred, she suggested that if I really wanted to get back to the root I should embrace the Judaism of the great-great-great grandfather from whom my surname derives.
A throwaway remark, but it struck me as interesting how easy it is to slip into the notion of a deep authenticity associated with Jewishness (which anti-Semitic thought readily inverts into alienness, degeneration and all the rest). My turn toward Christianity, such as it is, isn’t about family, but wider culture, and in any case my Christian great-great-great grandfathers are no more nor less authentic than my Jewish one.
I think there are some tremendously difficult balances to strike in the changing world that’s upon us. The need for authenticity against the inevitable cosplaying instituted across all walks of life by capitalist modernism, without dangerously elevating the true and pure against the hybrid and mixed. The need for new cultures of local food and place in an era of mass displacement. The need for new orientations to the sacred to overcome the profane violence of capitalist value-extraction, yet without instituting their own forms of sacred violence. The need for new traditions whose constraints liberate people rather than yoking them to the repressive ideals of a dominant social group. And so on.
This is something I want to turn to in future writing. For now, I’ll just reiterate that a part of that project involves attending to the sacred – a point I also remarked in Saying NO… to the predictable scorn of my (eco)modernist antagonists. In due course, I’ll want to specify what attending to the sacred means in more detail, although to a considerable degree it remains unspecifiable, and definitely unquantifiable. Because some things just aren’t quantifiable, while others certainly are (did I mention that I’d still like those bacterial protein energy figures from the ecomodernists?)
I’ve been told that the name of generations further back than my great-great-great grandfather, Shmaya Smaaje-halevi, suggests that my ancestors were Levites and possibly temple attendants. I kind of like that as a metaphor. Attending to the sacred. But hopefully not gatekeeping it too much, nor taking it upon myself to determine who’s barred from entry. This is the formidable challenge of our times – to create limits and localism while not creating arbitrary rules of social exclusion.
It’s not hard to see how new versions of Nazism may arise in the future in the context of the developing meta-crisis. Centralised states directed by ultra-nationalist, nativist parties oriented against enemies from within and without, allying with farmers and landowners large and small, and scornful of fastidious and highfaluting ‘metropolitan’ opinion. I don’t think the best safeguard against that future is endlessly dismissing farmers, ruralism and localism while promoting clean energy and ‘clean food’ technofixes that are clearly not going to buy us out of trouble. Nor to imply that the Holocaust was a unique aberration whose signature themes can’t still be read in modernism’s ongoing script.
New reading currently:
Keith Johnstone Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre.
Tania Murray Li. Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier.
Andrew Dana Hudson. Our Shared Storm.
Gabor Maté. Scattered Minds: the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder.
Patrick Joyce. Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World.
A weirdly eclectic mix you might think. But no … all laser-focused on my next emerging project!
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Fun fact number one: I nearly converted to orthodox Judaism, in my 20s. (Long story, and I’m dearly grateful for the time that I spent practising and observing, but… it was not, ultimately, the right path for me.)
Fun fact number two: in halachic Judaism, Jewishness is a matter of matrilineal descent. So your great-great-great grandmother might be of more pertinence here than your great-great-great grandfather. But Jewishness is also very much about contextualisation within a wider culture; I think it is probably as difficult to practice Judaism alone without reference to a Jewish community as it is to practice Christianity alone without reference to a Christian community.
…my ancestors were Levites and possibly temple attendants. I kind of like that as a metaphor. Attending to the sacred. But hopefully not gatekeeping it too much, nor taking it upon myself to determine who’s barred from entry.
I like this very much.
PS Gabor Maté is excellent, I think, though it’s a while since I read Scattered Minds. I seem to recall agreeing with some, but not all, of his reasoning regarding ADHD and associated diagnoses; but I don’t currently remember the details, just that his perspective was very helpful.
Kudos to you for not being intimidated by the unreasonable faux-moral shaming and smearing attempts of bad-faith critics. When examined like this in the daylight of reason, their attacks backfire and discredit only themselves.
It wasn’t faux shaming, I live in the US where making Holocaust comparisons (e.g. they cropped up during the pandemic, they crop up in the climate discourse), is understood by the people that suffered it to undermine its distinctive status, are often inappropriate comparisons to highlight the “dangers” of a particular political, social, economic policy or behavior that whoever is making the comparison disagrees with, for their own agenda.
In the end its just about respect.
You seem to be confusing the word “holocaust” with “the Holocaust”, which has a different definition. Chris Smaje used the word “holocaust” in accordance with the Cambridge Dictionary definition, linked below.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/holocaust
Rupert,
Smaje didn’t make a big fuss, as I might have done, to draw careful attention (in his post) to the distinction between lower case “holocaust” and upper case “Holocaust”. He didn’t, in my view, out of respect to the reading skills of his readership.
I’d have brought more attention to the distinction, and made it far more clear, because my life experience has revealed to me that the average person is not very attentive to nuance and subtlety.
While the difference between an upper case and a lower case h, in this context, is freaking enormous in terms of the meaning of the words used, it’s easy to overlook the subtle way of marking this distinction with something as subtle as presenting the word with a capital or non-capitalized letter — a single freaking letter. But these are not the same word, nevertheless. The Holocaust was a unique historical event in the middle of the twentieth century, roughly. It involved the mass murder of Jews by Nazis. But there is no THE holocaust, in the lower case spelling of the word. There have been many. Some of the victims of a holocaust — lower case — were among my own ancestors — who were native American. They knew nothing of Nazis nor Jews.
This post shimmers with heartful, skillful intelligence and is an inspiration to me. Thanks! Truly brilliant and sincere.
About “the sacred”.
Christianity, at its best, is cool. So is Buddhism at its best. But these are just “brands,” in my view. Spirituality and the sacred really don’t require brands. Compassion and care and love…, treating beings with love and kindness…., don’t require competing brands. What they do require is communities which support and nurture these approaches to being in this world.
My two cents.
“Few of the negative responses seem to have seriously engaged with the book’s core energ…”
Wouldn’t it more accurate to say ‘None of the … ‘?
I stopped reading immediately!
The second you failed to condemn!
And also excoriate!
The horrific actions of Hamas!
Aha! Delighted to see you’re reading Keith Johnstone! (What an eclectic chap you are)
As understated and good humoured as ever, you always have a chuckle and a smile with your good natured and clear exposition. That is anathema to so called serious discussion on the Internet, which is hysterical clutching of pearls or sh#tposting.
The idea that po faced solemnity is the height of respect is one of the problems with religion – which it will have to get over. I notice Gabor in your reading list, a great proponent of the need for people to look at their own trauma, find healing and resist foisting it onto the world and making it ‘other peoples ‘ problem. This is one of the keys to breaking the cycles of judgement and violence, and revealing a healing sacred.
We will have to be the truly bravest generations, braver than soldiers and missionaries and pilgrims and keyboard warriors, it is a truly daunting task to live in empathy to all. This is why a good festival helps, great food, lovely drinks, music, dancing and GOOD jokes.
My grandfather was an orphan so we did no where he was from, my other grandfather was a POW from being in the rear guard from the British retreat at Dunkirk, was marched across Europe to the camps, came back with no teeth and half a stomach! He was rubbing shoulders at the rubber factory with all the camp attendees. I think a good look at modernism as the underlying operating system – the seamlessness of businesses and corporations throughout this social tumult is way more pertinent to our collective trauma than anything else.
I have Indian (subcontinent) and Irish hereditaries, and alot can be made of that! Language is part of our technology of care, but it cannot start there, you must have a feeling and GIVE trust. Your writing is full of understatement and gentle care, it is mean spirited and mealy mouthed to concoct offense from it.
It is odd what gets to pass as “authentic” or “roots” these days.
I’m interested in the book, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World. Any thoughts as of yet?
Pssst, Brian! You get a bigger chunk to read on the co dot uk version of amazon – it’s so engrossing I’ve just ordered it (via Libristo.hu, which is probably also owned by Bezos).
Thanks for the comments – some brief replies:
@Rupert: I appreciate you venturing onto my blog and explaining yourself with more respectful language than you used towards me on Twitter. I don’t have much to add to what I said in the post above. For the reasons explained by me and others like Steve here, I don’t consider my use of the word ‘holocaust’ disrespectful. I do consider your dismissal of the idea of holocausts in North America potentially disrespectful.
@James: thanks – regarding religions, your point about the different ‘brands’ has always pretty much been how I’ve thought about them, which makes and probably will always make it difficult for me to embrace one. I agree with your points about compassion, care and love. But there is also the point Kathryn makes about practice as part of a community being important – or to generalise further, a cultural tradition. And there is the more philosophical issue raised here previously by Sean Domencic about transcendence or intendedness in the universe that I want to give more consideration.
@Greg: yes, that probably would be more accurate. The only pushback of substance has been along the lines that renewable energy will soon be too cheap to meter. But I don’t think there’s much substance to that.
@Kathryn: thanks, interesting! I’m out of my lane here, but as I understand it the Levites are unusual within Judaism in reckoning descent patrilineally – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levite. Even so, I think it would be a stretch for me to embrace Judaism on genealogical grounds.
@Joel: also thanks … nice points there. I particularly like this: “the need for people to look at their own trauma, find healing and resist foisting it onto the world and making it ‘other peoples ‘ problem. This is one of the keys to breaking the cycles of judgement and violence, and revealing a healing sacred.” Also on the need for good jokes. Though, speaking of paternal descent as we were, I also embrace the solemn paternal duty to tell bad ones.
@Ruben: and, talking of jokes, thanks for this. The way this works is that with my free content I condemn only those I wish to condemn without fear or favour. Whereas paid subscribers to my Substack get a complimentary condemnatory epistle targeting whoever they wish me to condemn.
Finally, regarding the readings, glad to hear the positive feedback about Gabor Maté. I’m finding it informative so far. Also, thanks Martin. It’s often the case that somebody can summarise the essence of an academic discipline, or a part of it, effectively and with a great economy of words from outside the discipline. To understand the sociology of status and hierarchy (and also its healing, per Joel), to that end I’d recommend Keith Johnstone’s ‘Impro’ and Dr Seuss’s ‘The Sneetches’. Brian, I’m enjoying Joyce’s ‘Remembering Peasants’ so far, but I’m not in far enough to venture an opinion. I’ll probably review it here when I’ve (eventually) finished it.
“@James: thanks – regarding religions, your point about the different ‘brands’ has always pretty much been how I’ve thought about them, which makes and probably will always make it difficult for me to embrace one. I agree with your points about compassion, care and love. But there is also the point Kathryn makes about practice as part of a community being important – or to generalise further, a cultural tradition. And there is the more philosophical issue raised here previously by Sean Domencic about transcendence or intendedness in the universe that I want to give more consideration.”
I’m certainly in favor of practice as part of a community being important. It’s also a great risk, as entering into a religious community tends usually to constrain us in all kinds of ways which, it seems to me, tends more to be rooted in belief than in faith–which can be argued well to be two very different things. This is partly why I choose mysticism as a solution to the conundrum. Mysticism, in almost if not all of its many traditions, doesn’t lean on belief much. Nor is it mostly about what we think about the sacred. It’s much more a deeply felt experience of “faith”, mysticism is, as it seems to me.
Actually, I think you’re a natural mystic. Maybe you just don’t know it yet? You’re obvious commitment to kindness, love, care, compassion, truth…, is, well, obvious. And it’s an expression of precisely the kind of faith I’m speaking to here. But its difficult for us thinking types, you and I. Let’s be honest. We want our reasoning and our reasons, and what we are ultimately left with is the utter necessity of non-conceptual faith. That’s our practice, I think, you and I, and the many like us… More and more of us each day, really.
Correction, your not you’re. Sorry.
“@Ruben: and, talking of jokes, thanks for this. The way this works is that with my free content I condemn only those I wish to condemn without fear or favour. Whereas paid subscribers to my Substack get a complimentary condemnatory epistle targeting whoever they wish me to condemn.”
Would this be one per month, year or lifetime. I have to watch my budget. 😉
Chris
My understanding is that whether a particular Jew is a Levite (or a Cohen, or for that matter a member of any of the other twelve tribes) is indeed patrilineal, but whether they are Jewish is dependent on the mother (and the mother only). But Judaism is not a monolith by any means, and I’m sure there are differences in definition from one community to another. (In general, though, becoming Jewish if your immediate parent was not Jewish and you did not grow up within a Jewish community does require some kind of formal conversion process, usually mediated by the community through a representative such as a rabbi or panel of rabbis.)
I think the Divine Sacred Mystery is indeed the same everywhere and eternally; one way to think of it is as a very bright sunrise, too bright to look at without being blinded but too beautiful to be able to look away… so you pick up a piece of beach glass and look through that. The glass allows you to glimpse something of the Sacred but is also, necessarily, something that will introduce distortions. And it’s very easy to fall into gazing at the glass rather than through it, even in religious traditions that would class such activity as idolatry.
My return to Christianity in my late 20s/early 30s was very much a process of dropping a piece of glass that I had thought was better than the more familiar one I grew up with, scrabbling around for something else to use, and realising that the beach glass of the community in which I was raised, or at least one adjacent to/in communion with it, was the one I knew best how to hold without cutting myself. It isn’t perfect but none of them are and at least holding this one I can attempt to compensate for some of the imperfections; to know that there are things which will not be clear to me.
A less metaphorical and more secular telling of the same story: when the community of my childhood turned out not to be safe for me, I looked for another (one that did not proselytise and which roughly matched some of my monotheist beliefs), and I thought I had found it in Judaism but proved unable to maintain an enduring connection to the community I had learned with. When I was finally starting to deal with the trauma of my childhood years and learn to form more secure attachments, it happened to be some Christians who picked me up and put me back together and steadied me until I could find my feet again; and that made it much easier for me to turn my natural inclination to contemplation of the Divine toward a Christian model, and to inhabit Christian practice.
A more directly dramatic telling of the same story: I was undecided and then literally heard a voice telling me what to do. This has occasionally been repeated — not with a lot of detail, I don’t receive instructions on what to wear or what to make for supper — but my experience of the world includes dreams and visions from time to time. Sometimes in the midst of an overwhelming sense of the presence of the Divine, the direction I should go is made extremely clear; so it was with my return to Christianity. I can intellectualise these experiences as obviously the intended result of so much psychological programming, but … I cannot honestly say I entirely understand them, or that I really believe they are anything other than a nudge from God/the Universe/Divine Love/whateveryouwannacallit. At some point, given a pre-existing belief in God, the simplest explanation is that God is bossing me around a bit.
All of these narratives are true; different facets of the same piece of cut stained glass, warped and weathered by two thousand years of use.
I don’t think narratives on all of these levels are necessary for every member of every religion. The process that drew me toward Judaism was every bit as valid as that which drew me toward Christianity; the reasoned consideration of what to do next is every bit as valid as waking from a dream with a sense of direction and purpose. I will say that being part of a community of practice with an established contemplative tradition and moral framework has been important in the process of integrating my more mystical experiences into everyday life, despite reserve and understatement (almost to the level of caricature) being the norm within that community.
Nevertheless, I do think that not all the pieces of glass are the same, either through time or compared to one another. It’s possible, I think, to judge a religion based on how well it aligns with those places where the Divine law is written on our hearts — does this religion champion compassion, kindness, truth, justice? When this happens within a faith it often leads to reformations of one sort or another; one of the sadnesses of modernity is that some of the people who in other times might have called Christianity to account now simply stamp the dust off their sandals and walk away. (In fairness, Christian hierarchy has not always been kind to prophets, reformers and mystics, and I want to affirm here that the freedom to walk away from an abusive community is a fundamentally good thing. Also in fairness, not all prophets, reformers and mystics have always acted in good faith.) For people with high moral standards starting from the position of “away” I can understand how all religions might appear equally flawed and ridiculous. But for all the similarities between the teachings of, say, Jesus and Buddha, one of them was crucified relatively young by an occupying military power, and the other died of old age. That does mean something. I probably don’t understand Buddhism well enough to have a reasonable conversation about exactly what.
It’s certainly possible for me as a Christian to work together with anyone of any faith who believes, more or less, in the worth and dignity of all creation, including but not limited to humanity. I also don’t believe that one must be Christian to attain salvation — there are some who would label me a universalist heretic over this, but some kind of universalism is, I think, the only coherent conclusion of the assertion that God is loving. On the whole, though, I try not to get too bogged down in what happens after I die; there’s no proof either way, and there’s so much work to do in the meantime.
But I am very wary of the idea that all faiths are essentially the same. There are some pretty strong competing truth claims that I think don’t merit such lumping.
…the other ten tribes. There are twelve total, not twelve in addition to kohanim and leviim.
“I can intellectualise these experiences as obviously the intended result of so much psychological programming…”
And perhaps, one can intellectualise the basic ‘rational’ assumptions upon which the first intellectualisation was constructed, as also the result of so much psychological programming?
To some extent, perhaps! At the end of the day, I exist in a material world and have to find meaning where I can.
Chris, If you had been fluent in Swedish I would have sent you our (me and my wife Ann-Helen) latest book the Living. In that we also discuss the need to consider some things sacred, with or without “religion”. My wife is Christian and I am not, but we still agree on this.
You can argue for eternity if it is “right” to make a hydro power station in that river and you can use economic arguments and arguments based on science etc. But in the end I believe it is only by declaring the river sacred/holy/tabou that it will be left running free. Modernism (eco-m or not) will always prioritize dams and mines.
Unfortunately, there is a kind of “indigenous appropriation” of sacredness of nature, which of course has been useful as a shield for them, even if not particularly effective, but it also in some way reinforced that the rest of us local population has nothing sacred.
I don’t remember if you already have discussed Robin Wall Kimmerer, she has something to say aboyt sacredness and also Norman Wirzba?
I have more faith in the sacred approach for protecting nature than the “rights of nature”.
In the end, there are also things in human society that should be sacred.
It has been my experience that “nature” (plants, animals, rivers, mountains, the atmosphere, rocks and minerals, space and time…) reveal their / its / Her sacredness to us without any regard (or, rather, dependence upon) to religious traditions, philosophies born of analysis and careful thinking, etc. Just being intimate with “nature” teaches us that rivers are sacred and don’t want to be dammed or damned.
Kia ora Chris
May I humbly suggest that your life and thinking would go better if you give up the SMM (Sado-Masochistic Media) and concentrate on your own reading and writing in greater depth. This would create benefit for the ‘company of friends’ who read your blog regularly and make supportive and insightful comments on it, and provide additional research and information – and hence also benefit for you. Life is too short to get into unresolvable arguments with strangers who have their own unknowable reasons for getting hung up on this word or that one.
Such people are unlikely to be interested in the many ways in which different cultures and religions and societies over the past millennia have defined and do define what is ‘sacred’, and the ways in which these have influenced/do influence/might influence food production and consumption for the better. This may be because defining what is sacred is a collective endeavour, involving real life contact with humans and other beings (especially other beings), whereas posting on the SMM is none of these things.
Your reading list looks very interesting. I’d also be interested in what others are reading that is contributing to their insightful comments. Here’s my most recent list (books read/reading in the past month):
Guillaume Pitron (2023) The Dark Cloud: how the digital world is costing the earth
Charles Foster (2021) Being A Human
Vincent Bevins (2023) If We Burn: the mass protest decade and the missing revolution
Tyson Yunkaporta (2023) Right Story, Wrong Story: adventures in indigenous thinking
Pico Iyer (2023) The Half-Known Life; in search of Paradise
Andrew Marantz (2019) Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
Looking forward to finding out what else is worthwhile out there!
The writing that grabbed me most, most recently, were the essays I stumbled upon by Agnes Callard, in an online magazine called The Point.
Her selection can be found here: https://thepointmag.com/author/acallard/
I’d argue there’s something for everyone there. I particularly enjoy reading essays, so I should maybe read the Maté book mentioned here (I quite enjoyed his co-authored ‘Hold on to your kids’ book, which isn’t about keeping goats, and Bruce on here put me on to Maté, so thanks, Bruce).
I’m coming to the end of Eating on the Wild Side, in which I’ve found useful pointers for future veg sowings and food prep, and this has also made me want to read the book you reviewed on here, Christine, about ultra-processed foodstuffs, so thanks for piquing my interest.
Briefly, back to Callard, here’s a snippet from an essay John might be interested in, titled The End Is Coming, written during the thick of the pandemic I’d guess (and if you are partial to philosophy and psychology, I also find Adam Phillips an interesting thinker). Callard:
“We may not have arrived at the end, but we have certainly arrived at the thought of it. Medical, environmental, political, economic and military problems seem to have joined forces to remind us that the story of humanity is, at some point, going to draw to a close. That’s a very painful thought to have. It also raises a serious philosophical problem.
“The philosopher Samuel Scheffler illustrates the problem with reference to the “infertility scenario” in the movie Children of Men. In the film, people have stopped being able to get pregnant, and the knowledge that there is no future for humanity has produced a world filled with equal parts catastrophe and indifference. We witness suffering on a massive scale, terrorism, genocidal racism—and none of it seems to really matter to anyone.”
Christine, yes no doubt I should moderate my social media habit. After all I did say in my ‘Doppelganger’ piece that I wished to define myself less by positions with which I disagreed in the future. On the other hand, I’ve learned a lot from Twitter, and hopefully the post above builds something moderately useful out of a typically unpleasant Twitter exchange. Perhaps the trick is to use it more for listening than for speaking. Interesting reading list!
Gunnar, thanks for those interesting thoughts on the sacred. Much to ponder, and I hope to look at this more directly soon. Shame I can’t read Swedish!
James, thanks also – I found your thoughts on mysticism very informative. Regarding nature sacredness, something like totemic thinking seems commonplace among peoples whose lives are lived close to the land – touched on early in the Joyce book. Again, I hope to look at this.
Dad jokes, classic, lol!
I studied applied drama at Goldsmiths as an MA many moons ago, and I was really excited by those experimental theatre practitioners, mixing the social ‘everyday reality’ and using drama as a form of embodied therapy. The Brazilians, Paulo Friere, August Boal and New York performance crew Richard Scheckner, whose book The Future of Ritual, I read once and could be relevant!
Also, Sarah Stein Lubrano on Planet Critical in a pod cast about Cognitive Dissonance is doing some interesting research that is basically ‘only through doing can we change our minds’, that no end of cerebral language based facts, however well arranged, will move entrenched positions. Its interesting, there are new(ish) theories emerging, where asking questions and listening is employed, which reminded me of one of your previous posts!
Ha!
Yes, as I have said before, more or less, I am much less likely to take a person’s intellectual argument seriously if they can’t find the balance point to easily pick up the other end of a sheet of plywood we are carrying.
Which I guess puts me in agreement with Christine about social media. Not easy to find out if your respondent has a clue about the physical world via the modem.
I’m happy Chris that you value faith and the more-than-human. I haven’t done any survey, but it seems to me that just about all historical small farm cultures organized themselves around some tradition of faith.
But the trouble I have with religion is not the doctrine, and certainly not the faith (if any), but the organization, and how that organization tends to concentrate power – then all those human problems.
I don’t have a solution for this. What I do is stay away from organized religion, and get my community-of-faith needs (somewhat) met in smaller, disorganized groups.
Good luck!
Chris:
“Regarding nature sacredness, something like totemic thinking seems commonplace among peoples whose lives are lived close to the land….”
I grew up with creeks and rivers near the center of my life (Bay Area California, then Southwestern Oregon). In Oregon, especially, I immersed myself into flowing surface water as really the core of my own being. I was immersed in it, and it in me. Salmon, steelhead, trout, crawdads, the whole shebang… and also osprey, kingfisher, river otters…. These were inside me and I was inside them. It’s still true of who I am, but I no longer live directly on the creek or river, and so it’s mostly a memory which remains what and who I am. That some folks would have made salmon into a “totem” is as sensible to me as anything, but I grew up without extended family (much), munch less clan, nor village. I was born at the near height of the industrial age, and have spent my entire life living in a “culture” which had been largely abstracted from the living world around and within us.
And yet, I have rivers and creeks running in my blood as a core feature of my sense of self. I am a watery creature. Perhaps I am a river otter?
Thanks for further comments & references, and thanks for sharing your story Kathryn. I like your beach glass metaphor. Also the idea of other communities as alternatives when families fail (and I think communities in the plural, metaphorizing kinship, rather than the state).
I think it’s possible to emphasize the way that all people/communities/cultures/religions are basically similar and also the way that they’re fundamentally different, depending on the optic. One thing that interests me is the political institutions that emerge out of specific religious & cultural frameworks and endure in changed forms even with the eclipse of the originating framework, creating specific possibilities for change or renewal. Agree with Eric’s reservations about organised religion, but religion still organises even apparently secular or individualistic thinking…
Anyway, more on this in due course no doubt
For complicated reasons I go to a church about six miles away. Usually I cycle, but sometimes I take public transport.
Our services start on Sunday at 9am.
The best train journey — the one from the nearest station to my house, with a nice walk through the park at the other end — starts at 9.03am. There are alternative routes involving either bus and tube, or tube and tube, but they take a lot longer, because the buses and tube trains also run less frequently on a Sunday.
I sometimes feel like Christian hegemony is making me late for church….
There is something about aesthetics here when it comes to religion and politics, something about the look and feel of thing – both our own aesthetic judgement of it, and how what we perceive makes us feel, and how we think others will judge us and feel about us.
As the actual political and even religious structures break down in the heat of events, we are left with these aesthetics – a sort of seemingly superficial thing that is dictating our perception. Sorry got a bit abstract there.
https://conservativefiringline.com/engineered-famine-marxist-oregon-starts-shutting-down-small-farms-to-protect-the-people-video/
A little new anti farmer legislation , this would close you down Chris …
I was thinking about the sacred and am wondering if any religion or sacred tradition started in an urban setting ? Is there something about dealing with the real world in a fundamental way feeds those ideas and feelings ?
My sense (maybe influenced by David Graeber) is that the big world religions – Christianity, Islam, Buddhism – were built initially in some sense as urban religions that appealed to merchants and traders, albeit grounded in older foundations of the sacred. The pioneering rural sociologist Robert Redfield coined the terms ‘great tradition’ and ‘little tradition’ to capture the more abstract and perhaps monotheistic inclinations of urban elites vis-a-vis the more locally grounded and polytheistic inclinations of ordinary farming folks. That whole tension between local saints, shrines and cults versus the attempts of religious and political leaders to coopt or root out the little tradition in the name of religious purity (and political centralisation) that has animated a lot of religious history. But no doubt other commenters here may have more religiously-informed takes.
I think within Christianity there has been a tension between the local and the central from the very beginning. There are passages in the New Testament about things like whether non-Jews who convert to Christianity also have to keep kosher, and the differences in practice between one place and another. But cities certainly existed already; one of the other tensions evident in the New Testament is that Jesus of Nazareth was from a small northern town and the religious practice there was different from that in Jerusalem where the Temple was. However, Jewish monotheism at the time was not the only practice in Roman-occupied Judaea, which had also had Babylonian, Seleucid and Hellenistic influences over the previous handful of centuries. Certainly the occupying Roman forces would have practiced a strongly polytheistic religion.
Another thing to consider is that in the modern West we think of religion as quite a bit more individually-oriented than it was before, say, the Reformation. But Roman polytheism (as one example) was both something of a domestic practice — there would be household shrines and similar, not just the public ones — and also absolutely considered a matter of social order and propriety, such that incorrect performance of various rituals was seen as something that would endanger the state by angering the gods. Jews had an exemption from the polytheism but my understanding is that they were also expected to perform their own rituals correctly in order to safeguard the power of the Roman state. Correct piety was a civic duty.
I guess it’s also worth pointing out that while Jerusalem was definitely considered a city, the population was around three thousand people — quite a bit smaller than what we think of as urban these days. And while there were certainly carpenters and soldiers and merchants and tax collectors, there were also fishermen, shepherds and farmers.
I feel like the closest thing we have to a truly modern urban-originating religion is probably something like loyalty to football teams, or possibly the way we had half a century of nearly everyone following the same television shows or radio programs; but those aren’t strictly urban phenomena, but rather late modern phenomena facilitated by communications technology.
Well, certainly what we call “civilization,” as Derrick Jensen defines it, has been an urban affair from the start to the present. https://derrickjensen.org/endgame/civilization/
And so it’s quite unsurprising, and quite apt, that any discussion of what urbanization has been, and what its’ consequences have been, should turn to the topic of “centralization”… and the emergence and eventual hegemony of what is simply called “the state”.
I speak of “the state” as an anti-statist… who knows that the state has hegemony everywhere.
@Chris
This podcast and the follow on one is an interesting look at the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus. When he is first mentioned in historical records etc. And the politics of the region around that time.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Bk81Qb2n4RvBKg1ZsTXpo?si=LAxQmA4EQN-Qj7Oq1cFtIw
On religion and the sacred in general…….
I guess that it is all a way of trying to explain death.
Having seen the cadavers of close relatives, there is something quite profound and mysterious about death.
Something has definitely “left” the body.
But, to where has it gone?
Once we became conscious/sentient beings, aware of the “self” and our own mortality, then these questions of life and death become central to our understanding of the world and our place in it.
Once the human imagination is let loose on these unanswerable questions, there is no limit to the amount of stories we tell ourselves to deal with grief.
Regarding organised religions, I’m kinda with you on this one Chris.
To have real power over someone, you have to control what they think.
Christianity was originally a form of resistance to Roman rule.
That’s why Christians were hunted down and killed.
To Christians, their “True Lord” didn’t live in Rome. He was in a place that was beyond the reach of Rome. (Or that’s what they thought. Augustus had other ideas)
Correction. Constantine.
The religious imagination really does run riot:
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2024/03/personal-jesus-christianity-heresy?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Fascinating – thanks Simon
I think this is what I meant by the values of whatever religion being overwhelmed by events, that what ever the preferred aesthetics, the overwhelming aesthetic is industrial capitalism, mass production and 5 continent supply chains, accepted, unequivocally by all.
Any truly sacred position will oppose this aesthetic by its embodied nature. My understanding is that the roots of the major religions are certainly a rejection of this world view but the rebellion has been seamlessly coopted for some time now. I think this is why we seek out older and indigenous forms of wisdom, (the little traditions?), to look for clues. Is there a sacred that will value a hyper local domestic system of production that works within the limits of its bio region?
I’m presently sometimes reading ‘the war against the commons’ and at one point the church were in full opposition to the enclosers and ‘engrossers’ as sinful – but they were as vociferous of the rebellions against enclosure as ‘ungodly’ ‘usurpers’- that only the god given king could make the kind of demands and changes they sought. These were ‘the commonwealth men’, protestant thinkers seeking to hold back the roots of the capitalist disruption of Englands feudal structures, the most famous of which, Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cramner, were promptly burnt at the stake as soon as ‘the catholics’ took power.
There were some pretty woowy comments coming up on the other site you posted on recently. I don’t know how you create a robust vessel for the sacred that doesn’t become a substitute for healthy psychological development and that resists centralised patriarchal authority and violence. I think an emphasis on the practical ways of living well within the earth’s limits, centred around a celebration of the seasonal flows, and a valuing of resisting religious structures for practical skills and good humour, would be a good place to start for something to emerge. The land base seems to be a key component of any practical spirituality.
I’m into Jesus, he was up for a party and I am especially fond of the time he went into the temple and smashed up the money lenders business! Perhaps living as rather than worshiping?
Thanks Joel – thought-provoking remarks, as ever. Which other site are you referring to – Resilience, or Front Porch Republic?
Front Porch Republic. Its an interesting insight to hear a fully politically conservative and evangelical christian perspective and I can see why the essay should be there. That all nuance was crushed with just the mention of Marxism makes for a view that things can quickly slide into some old ruts.
Yes indeed – the world is full of socialists who think conservatives are the embodiment of wrongheadedness or worse, and vice versa. It’s hard to avoid those ruts! I hope to write a bit about this presently.