I envy you seeing our West, and especially Yellowstone (and the Bison) for the first time. I have lived here for the majority of my life - and truly, seeing a bison is a spiritual encounter for me. Welcome to our club.
I had to drive from the Nebraska Panhandle to Denver Airport last Sunday afternoon, along the highway I refer to the ballistic missile silo route (the area is peppered with them) and saw a herd of animals on the east side of the highway just before leaving Nebraska and was delighted to discover they were buffalo. It is a blessing I feel a greater connection to them than I do all my devices.
I am grateful to you for assisting me in learning how to describe what I am feeling. Mostly, welcome to America.
Resident of the NE panhandle, here! Cool that Paul brings us together. It's often the case that someone from another land can reveal what's right in front of our eyes with fresh perspective.
One of the last times I was in the States, quite a while ago, my little family and I were walking around one of those boardwalks in Yellowstone that keep unwitting tourists from wanting to go up to the hot pools and stick their fingers in to see how hot the water is. And at one point, around ten feet away from us and the boardwalk, there was a bison, alone, standing there.
I did not really feel grateful, or awe inspired, or anything like that. I felt very very nervous. My husband and I parleyed to decide whether to go calmly past the bison without looking at him, or backtrack at the cost of much time, and we decided to go ahead. (That bison's eyes looked really mean, while we're at it. I definitely did not want to cuddle (with) him.)
Regularly French tourists get gored by bison in Yellowstone, maybe because they think that they are in a theme park in Yellowstone, or because it has been such a long time in France since Man has felt that He was at risk from a wild animal, but who knows ? maybe this is changing...
My first bison encounter outside of a history book took place in Yellowstone. I was in an SUV and a herd was crossing the road in front of and mixed in with the cars, and one old bull walked right next to my door - we made eye contact, which was humbling due to his sheer volume. As he passed, I realized I had to look UP to keep eye contact with him. I was awestruck, and continue to be to this day even when I see them at a distance. I admit they look cuddly, but no thank you!
Being nervous around a bison is a healthy and sane response. During my travels around the West, I had a few wild animal encounters- bison, rattlesnakes, bears.
In each case, I felt “awe” in the original, religious sense; wonder mixed with fear, a recognition that I was in the presence of something powerful and dangerous, and that I’d better show the proper respect. I think part of the reason our society is losing its mind is that many people never experience this feeling anymore.
It is fascinating for a European from a tamed landscape, like me, to be in somewhere like Yellowstone and to know he is not now top of the food chain. I have felt this before in wild places. It is our original state, and it is like re-remembering.
My son bought a book in the park called 'Death in Yellowstone', which features the many ways people have died in the park, many of them involving being stupid around animals. One tells of how a woman put her baby on top of a bison for a 'ride', with predictable results. Sometimes it's useful to remain realistic about humanity's general level of intelligence ...
Yesterday I got to thinking about John Muir's book "A summer in the Sierra Nevada", and about an incident where Muir, true empiricist that he was, decided to test what he had heard about black bears not being confrontational, and, alone, followed the trail of one just so that he could come upon it by surprise to see what would happen... And Muir discovered that that bear was so surprised (and angry...) at being surprised that it chased him for quite some time, maybe even treeing him the way a moose treed my beloved, long dead father so long ago. (There's something to be said for keeping fit if you think that you could be treed by a moose, or a bear.)
I laughed myself silly thinking about Muir's experiment there. Maybe he was silly at doing it, but at least he was not cowering before the very IDEA of a bear...
After all, if people have different reactions, why shouldn't bears ? or bison ?
I was very happy that that bison was not confrontational the day we decided to go past him, though. But I was definitely not looking for a confrontation with him that day either.
And sometimes I wonder if all the creation does not have a form of choice before sin : sin, as in being a hawk and waiting for roadkill to arrive for dinner. Turning into a scavenger, where you were once a hunter. Sinner hawks, even if we show them the way, maybe, and make it easier for them. I hope that some of those hawks out there are not sinners, and not just because the opportunity is not given to them to indulge in sin.
Already signed up for news from the Wagon Box. Would love to get out that way next summer. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and travels. Bison and mountains look like a good answer to the spiritual crisis.
Yes, I couldn’t agree more. Hard for me to engage publicly because basically every argument on every topic ends with a polite rephrasing of “y’all need Jesus.” It’s become my carthago delenda est… but once you see it (the spiritual aspect of the crisis) you can’t unsee it, so here I am
I hope you do get to spend some time in the SLC area - to be specific, in the sublime mountains less than an hour from downtown. Perfect place to go unmachining, even if you need a machine to get you there…
Very good. Yes, most of the time you need a machine to get yourself up to the places where you want to escape from the machine. In the French Alps, too.
Enjoyed the Leonard Cohen reference. One of my other favorite Cohen lines, of late:
"As He died to make me holy, let us die to make things cheap."
Good time of year to visit Yellowstone, you hit it right. I'm two hours or so from there; things are starting to look beautiful, with all the snow. I cut up a buffalo a number of years ago; what an animal. I'm not generally prone to outrage, but as I cut off the hump and the rest of the 500+ pounds of boneless we ended up with, it was pretty hard not to be, thinking about the era of the buffalo slaughter.
I appreciated and empathized with your feeling of absurdity, writing what you are writing but also being cognizant of how and where you are writing it.
For me, the feeling is quite potent. Having come to see the world largely as you have, I now struggle with what to actually do. This change in perception was rapid, and radical. In three years, I went from being an unabashed tech enthusiast, all in on scientific and technological progress, to where I am now. It's disorienting, to say the least, and leaves me with a feeling of whiplash.
It's also like being reborn. I don't mean that in some grand poetic or mystical sense. My meaning is much more down to earth: everything is new, vibrant, wondrous, terrifying, overwhelming, and much too big. Oh, I don't mean that I'm despairing; the hope we have in Christ is a good check on that tendency. Rather, it's more of a realization that not only do I not know how to live outside the Machine, I struggle even to moderate its influence slightly. Outside of the Machine, right now, I may as well be an infant in all their weakness and helplessness. It's daunting to realize that well into your adult life, you don't actually know how to care for yourself or others because of how dependent you are on Machine systems.
After the winter, I plan on starting a small raised-bed garden in my small suburban backyard to try and grow at least a few vegetables for myself. I've never done this before, and I'll have to figure out what to do with them if I manage to successfully harvest any. Though I'm hoping this will be a small first step to doing more and finding better ways of living, I recognize it's not enough, and even if I were to manage to live as your friend Mark detailed in his latest book (which will likely never happen) it still won't feel like enough. I guess there's nothing for it but, as you said, to simply do the best we can and I guess I will trust God with what's lacking.
Without wishing to state the obvious (but I will anyway!), anything you can do in this direction can only make things better, so don't worry about quantifying "enough". Just be thankful to God for all victories, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem.
I like to think of it as part of the process of "taking off the old self and putting on the new" (Ephesians 4:22-24), a passage I come back to frequently as a fellow recent convert to Christianity.
I'm so glad you were able to spend time in a part of the U.S. where you could experience those wide open spaces and patches of wildness. I used to think I would be content to move to the eastern seaboard, or pretty much anywhere, but the older I get, the more I pray that I can at least stay in the western part of the country (but east of Seattle and Portland!) until I die. I grew up here, and the drama of our landscape combined with the quantity of land, that in some places stretches out like the sea, is soothing to me.
Thanks for your second letter from America. God bless you.
Although I like it out west, my plan is to move to north central Pennsylvania when I retire, near the Allegheny National Forest. Lots of peaceful small towns up that way, not exactly prosperous, but getting along somewhat comfortably. Definitely a slower pace, and at least a couple hours from any sizable cities.
"...what it would mean to begin rebuilding a sacred culture in the ruins of the world the Machine has made..."
Perhaps the most profound question that we can tackle. Indeed, it didn't take long for us to tire of Eden--in my estimation, likely a day or so--and it is likely that, even if we could re-recreate that state of bliss, we would tire of it as quickly.
Reading this from the West African nation of Liberia tonight and it all feels so different from when I read posts such as these from my home in Colorado. Really, really different.
If the machine is here it is fully glitched, or, I’m witnessing life at its a$$ end. Almost half the population is food insecure, pollution, poverty, and the echoes of eradicated Ebola are still very much present and talk of a war that ended 20 years ago is still heard as candidates hold parties and close roads in advance of a runoff presidential election that will take place in 6 days.
I spent the day with children who walk 2 hours each way to school and frequently only have 1 meal a day, which is why they come to school at all. Before the food came they’d go to work. 5 years old, breadwinner. A school full of reformed malnourished baby workers. Parents that now come together to fundraise from the community to build cinder block storage with foraged roofs for rice and beans, for their kids without tools. Volunteer teachers, paid by parents, because the corrupt government assigns almost no budget for education. Food prices here match the west but wages are nowhere near the same, nor is employment.
And we complain.
Anyway,
I read this passage and felt strange. Ashamed. Privileged. Spoiled. Angry? Inauthentic? Empty? Seeing the sign of things that might come? I’m not sure, it all just feels like the transmission is glitching and I no longer know how to translate commentary from those who live in the global north / west, while billions starve, suffer genocide, and live out their lives in our waste and filth. Our arrogance comes to mind. Plastic is everywhere. No infrastructure. Trash and garbage and naked children all amongst it watched over by rotting buildings that once housed snipers.
Hope remains in small places here. I just have to wonder what right do I, do you, do any of us have to judge the machine anymore when we’re all pretty much fully cooked in the North? I really mean it. Baked to our gills. We are bathing daily in the privilege of our developed, functioning cultures, paved roads, education, clean water access and laws. We are also watching the control coming for us drop by drop and it scares us. But we have street lights, doctors, tools, and medicine. Oh, and literacy, books, seeds, and machines for spinning fabric from plants and wool.
Is this all due to the machine? I’m still trying to understand and I think I need help. I’ve read all of Paul’s commentary, btw. I’ve tried others. It’s all just really feeling superficial and petty all of a sudden.
My partner and I came from poverty, neglect, violence, and abuse and give grace together every day for the calm safety and stability of our lives. We’re not numb, we are so so grateful. We love our clean, safe home. We love that we have work and each other. We hold hands and give grace every single day, often I wonder, because we live with the ptsd of stolen childhoods and cruelty and maybe we give grace so evil will not come back and claim us. We know what it is to actually suffer, and viciously. We know in large part it’s due to the machine. We still give grace.
Thank you for this heartbreaking and important account. I can imagine if I were standing and peering out from the place from where you are, much else beside base survival and minimal order would look petty as well. You’re right that many of us suckling from the Machine know very little of what it’s like to live in constant chaos, and that our critiques ought to be cognizant of the ways in which true hell exists right now, for many who are often ignored. I have a helluva hard time sometimes living, yet the grocery store is still down the street. Your words challenge me to think harder about what being an actual Christian ought to mean. I’m pretty sure Christ would be there washing those kids’ feet.
I hear you. I have spent time in similar places, though never lived in them - or come from them, more to the point. You're right in what you say here. And yet the control and the destruction is also real, and the misery at one end is the product of the privilege at the other. And the Machine wrecks and ravages simpler and more 'sustainable' life paths all the time. And something bad is building, because the thing can't last. All of this is true at the same time.
But I can understand why this kind of writing seems weird and inappropriate from where you are. Comfort can easily be taken for granted, by me and others. How long it will last is another question.
From my vantage point, I am not sure for how much longer we are going to have this comfort. We are living on knowledge that has been acquired during previous centuries, but our capacity to think is diminishing. Our educational systems are falling apart. How comfortable can you be, or better yet, remain, in this state of affairs ?
My story is not a from rags to riches one at all, but I share the desire to feel... grateful for what I have, and for what is basically given to me, without being earned.
But I will say that a child who walks 2 hours a day to go to school the way my 97 year old French mother in law did when she was little, has maybe a better appreciation for it than a child who does not.
The "poor" child is rich... with his desire to get ahead ? his ambition ?
The "rich" child is.... poor ? in a way ?
For many years now, I have questioned the way that Western civilization seems to automatically assume that people of other cultures have nothing to teach us about living. I think that is a mistake, and a mistake for us to be evangelizing for our way of organizing the world everywhere. But I see little evidence that we question our assumptions at all. Even now, with all this talk about colonisation.
This is where I’ve faced a similar rub in Paul’s writing, having spent time in the rural Himalayas of Nepal. The Machine is far, far from there, but in the village I was in, alcoholism (the result of no medical care and trauma from the 2015 earthquake--people were self-medicating to kill pain and memories) and appalling domestic violence against women and children ran rampant--indeed, endemic--in the community. The weak being crushed by the strong. To use a video gaming metaphor, it was like The Machine wasn’t The Big Bad, just one of the instruments of the Prince of Darkness--if you believe that sort of thing, as I do--and people can be persuaded to do great evil in the name of pain and suffering. That was the only way to make sense of it, for me. “Don’t forget about us,” said a woman my age, a member from the “Untouchables” in their caste system, who talked to me about all the friends she had lost from preventable deaths during childbirth.
Of course, these things - corruption, alcoholism, domestic violence - exist everywhere, and have precious little to do with 'the Machine' as I'm writing about it. We might argue indeed that liberalism and or the Western attitude to individuals, women and minorities - which is pretty unique - has helped most to highlight or tackle such problems. This is one reason so many people want to move to the West.
I think it is safe to say that my writing may be useful to some people living in the West, in the belly of the beast. We made this thing and we are living with the consequences as they unfold. We are not the only ones who have to. But I can't write for Nepal or Liberia. The world is very particular, and each place has its challenges.
While I certainly sympathize with the Libya and Nepal distance-from-machine feeling,
The fact it is a westerner feeling and recognizing it always makes me suspicious.
I just mean we- I- tend to “look in” on other as we want to say less developed societies, and see something in a way that always seems to suggest I have perspective on this other, that it does not have on me.
How do I put this?
Only the West has learned to critique from within? Even this is a western culturally bound value?
It depends I think also on what the machine truly is.
Here I would again recommend “The Unintended Reformation”, to go deeper and farther back in the cogs than we might imagine.
Then the global village and all that-
Eg a Kenyan friend recently visiting from his work in the prison system back home told me how he forgot his watch while visiting some inmates in a top security prison.
An inmate there who trusted him discretely pulled my friend to a dark corner of his cell, and proceeded to pull an iPhone 9 out of his sock to show my friend the time.
He literally was taken from a village mud hut home, to this prison.
I guess I would describe that mountain community as a more or less Machine-less existence, one with strong roots, deep cultural practices and community networks, and tied so closely to the land--but it was not idyllic in the least. Even if we do somehow eradicate The Machine in the West, we’d still have to face these problems, they are at the foundation.
Who believe in idylls? Not me. I do think that idealising traditional cultures is an extremely Western thing to do. These are the problems of being human.
Nonetheless, we have eliminated all these things here in Machine world and now we are sinking.
It’s just the sense that I get from some of the writings here, that there is an idyllic world out there, that these people know better than us. And it wasn’t my experience on that mountain.
My experience has been that many traditional societies do know better than us about a great many things. There are of course other things that we know better about, primarily material ones. But in pursuing those things we have eliminated those deep community networks, our connection to the past, our spiritual practices and the other aspects of life that actually offer human meaning. Maybe it's always a trade-off. But the problems we face in the West now are of a different order.
I honestly have nothing helpful to add via solutions or perspective.
But there is something "common" to "old world problems"- traditional societies.
Their sins are all alike in a certain sense.
It has to do with some of the core "disruption" that came with the Christ event...
Regarding women, children, the weak, the victim, brute force... then the broad categories of idolatry, witchcraft... and many other like ailments of what seems everywhere to me... kind of an "eternal problem" that humanity by its native animal habits seems to have everywhere untouched by, well for me, it's the Western world (A world in itself, trying to become the only and whole world).
And these problems, the Western World purports to solve, appears to do so effectively too.
The Machine affects those places, even if its presence seems distant. The documentaries, "Schooling the World" and "Ancient Futures" show how rural, sustainable communities become eroded by the influence of the globalist machine.
How can the machine be far from Nepal when in 2001 you could find empty Coca Cola cans on high mountain passes of Afghanistan in the middle of winter ?...The people who are in power in these far away countries, haven't they been educated in our educational systems, at our universities, for example ? Aren't they... an international elite, in a way, that thinks the way we do, at least superficially ? And if they are no longer educated in Western universities, aren't we exporting our culture all over the planet over the Internet, for better, but also for worse ?
And I believe that domestic violence is very much related to the machine, because the machine is about destroying the differences between the sexes and the generations so that we can all be equalized... workers in the anthill ? An ant is not a mammal. There are no ant persons. Being a person means being subjected to... birth, sex, and death, and all of that is messy, unclean, and dangerous.
When you discredit a man's power, legitimacy and authority, and the possibility for him to use that power to protect his vulnerable ? family, then what is he supposed to do with his power ?
Anybody who has read the Hebrew Bible knows how much power emanates from the weak, and how dangerous it is to mess with that, too. I repeat that so regularly on this site that sometimes I wonder if anybody understands me.
I am sorry if you thought that I was being impatient with you, because I am not impatient with you at all. There must have been a misunderstanding between us.
My interest in reading Paul's thoughts on 'the Machine' is that it helps me see one of the faces of our fallen nature, one that has been intensively institutionalized and built up in the modern West. But I believe it's a huge mistake to view it (the Machine, not Paul's writings!) as the source of evil. It's just one face/expression.
There are a great many other institutionalized examples throughout history - Aztec ritual sacrifice, anyone? - and then ever more residing within my own heart, and every human heart. The most important work, I believe, is confronting evil within my own heart and psyche, and turning to God for inner purification. I've yet to meet a human being who doesn't need that work far more than cultural critique. Yet, understanding the wider, collective delusion of the Machine is a useful awareness practice - it helps me to understand how sin/delusion/evil can play out in my culture, in ways I might not otherwise recognize because I'm swimming in it.
If one is living in an imperial sacrifice zone, the "functioning" Machine world of the contemporary West must appear enticing indeed by comparison. Wealth and resources have been strip-mined from much of the world to feed the beast that is techno-capitalist modernity for hundreds of years now.
Sacrifice zones, however, are hardly limited to far-flung colonial outposts any longer. Take a look at contemporary San Francisco, which is home to both the most elite of the Machine elite, and streets full of tents, drug addicts, and horrific squalor to match any in the world (https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/video-reveals-terrifying-reality-of-san-frans-drug-ravaged-streets/ar-AA1jwees). Elon Musk, "the richest man in the world", works at Twitter/X headquarters in downtown SF while right outside the door are scenes of the most abject human squalor, desperation, and privation.
I'd recommend Morris Berman's “Tribal Consciousness and Enlightenment Tradition” essay, which he recently posted in full at his blog (http://morrisberman.blogspot.com). You might also refer to the work of someone like Iain McGilchrist with his "master/emissary" theory. Whichever is more true, something obviously went very wrong with the way many humans thought about the world. And that way of incorrectly thinking had an unfortunate lethal virality to it. Now we are all living and dying and suffering in the ever-expanding ruin of those original total fucking idiots.
Try to convince a figure like Elon Musk, or Bill Gates, or Ray Kurzweil, or Steven Pinker, or any one of legions of technocrats that their understanding of life is perverse and destructive and ultimately suicidal and they will dismissively brush your arguments and evidence aside as self-evidently wrongheaded. And then they will redouble efforts to destroy more life. Someone once called them "robopaths" and I think that about captures it.
I feel your passion here and appreciate your response, thank you. One difference with the SFO analog is medicine - the people living in squalor in the US can still be tended to if necessary, social services can still help them, fresh water can still find its way to them. We have street nurses, doctors, and clinics, though I know they’re starting to strain. Here, there is no option but to be evacuated to another country for help. No bandages, no anesthesia, no medicine even if there is a doctor around. All I’m saying is - yes - there are many living in very challenging conditions in the US - and - at least they have access to emergency medicine if needed. This is one of countless examples...
You should understand that when I see bandages, and syringes, and anaesthesia delivery paraphernalia, I see medical waste littering the oceans. I reject the entirety of modernity, not just the pieces of it I don't find useful in any particular moment. Yes, I like having water coming out of the tap, but if I could trade it—along with dishwashers, smartphones, automobiles, streaming video services, TVs and on and on and on across the entirety of industrial modernity—for the restoration of a pristine biosphere, I'd make that deal in a heartbeat. Note that NO ONE would have access to emergency medicine if "needed" in such a scenario, apart from perhaps that which could be provided by a tribal shaman.
You didn't need water coming out of a tap when you could drink from any local stream or river.
I'm a radical, and see the root of the problem as this Faustian bargain where we trade away more and more and more of the living world in a futile attempt to protect ourselves from it. The reason the kids around you are starving on one meal a day is because other people who wanted things like modern medical conveniences, cars, TVs, shopping malls, and all the rest, destroyed their lands and communities long ago. You live in the ruins created by people making the demands you yourself are now making.
I'm so glad to hear you had a good visit to the U.S. Despite the frequent turmoil, there's much to be thankful for here. A quick question if you see this--I've been enjoying your FPR talks online, and I'm hoping you can give me the source for your quote from Fr. Sibley, the one about "What we will not preserve, we cannot share." I've looked all over but can't find books or blogs by the man. Would love to read more if he's publishing. Thank you!
I cannot even begin to do anything without first acknowledging and laughing at my own absurdity.
I’ve realized that while I agree with you, “we are living through a spiritual crisis”, it is very difficult for me to be a spiritual person. I feel spiritual things sometimes, but that is not the same.
Still, I’ve made a point of regularly behaving in a way that puts me at least partly outside the machine. Not the majority of the time, not even close, but I think fairly consistently.
More random thoughts:
Flying is a strange experience. After a long break from flying, from 2018 to 2022, I flew again last year and found I had become a much more nervous flyer. (However I am very awesome at packing.) Still, there is something about taking off and landing specifically that i in always find very moving. I think being born and/or dying must feel something like taking off in an airplane. You are switching states, it is fast, overwhelming, absolutely not in your control, and kind of terrifying but in an exciting way.
I'm an extreme white-knuckle flyer. So much so I've flown just once in over 30 years, and that flight was necessary to get me the hell out of America and to Europe. Even then it took a knockout dose of anti-anxiety meds to get me through. Basically, I'm both claustrophobic and suffer vertigo (meaning: take me to a high place and I will want to jump, which is very bad when one is 30,000 feet in the air). Thus, flying in an airplane is for me just about the worst experience possible. I deeply envy people who can hop on planes as easily as catching a bus, though I think you are all completely nuts.
This past summer my family and I spent 10 days at the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon. We took a helicopter ride at the Grand Canyon; as the theme song from "2001: A Space Odyssey" coursed through our headphones, we crested the lip of the the canyon. And I've never been so awed by the majesty of nature, the power of it.
Similar reaction when we came through the long tunnel at Zion and emerged with the huge cliffs looming before us; I nearly drove off the road. I live in Florida - the Everglades are awe-inspiring in their own right but the scenery of the western U.S. demonstrates just how small we are as individuals.
And that's the trick of the Machine; to make us think that we are more than these wonders; that we are in fact the wonder. To be captured by the Machine is to believe human desire somehow trumps all. Politically, that's increasingly true. But the forces that made these canyons, that eroded the ravines; the huge herd of bison fording the stream could care less; they endure. We don't.
If we want to see the future, look back, into Scripture. God’s word is very clear about mankind’s past mistakes and the bleak future of this present time.
There is hope for the future but not until Christ returns to establish God’s kingdom here in the new earth.
The question every person needs to address is; do we accept or reject Christ.
Paul it was a pleasure to meet you and your lovely family! I can't help but point out that our little shindig might have infected you with some optimism. "We might as well do it with cheer," yes! I really hope to stay in touch. The Renaissance of living well amongst the doom is coming and we are going to usher it in! I just know it.
It was great to meet you too. I remain a pessimist - the other word for which is 'realist' ;-) But I am also hopeful in some strange and light way. It was my conversion that did that. I am still working out what it means. Here's to more gatherings.
I envy you seeing our West, and especially Yellowstone (and the Bison) for the first time. I have lived here for the majority of my life - and truly, seeing a bison is a spiritual encounter for me. Welcome to our club.
I had to drive from the Nebraska Panhandle to Denver Airport last Sunday afternoon, along the highway I refer to the ballistic missile silo route (the area is peppered with them) and saw a herd of animals on the east side of the highway just before leaving Nebraska and was delighted to discover they were buffalo. It is a blessing I feel a greater connection to them than I do all my devices.
I am grateful to you for assisting me in learning how to describe what I am feeling. Mostly, welcome to America.
Resident of the NE panhandle, here! Cool that Paul brings us together. It's often the case that someone from another land can reveal what's right in front of our eyes with fresh perspective.
One of the last times I was in the States, quite a while ago, my little family and I were walking around one of those boardwalks in Yellowstone that keep unwitting tourists from wanting to go up to the hot pools and stick their fingers in to see how hot the water is. And at one point, around ten feet away from us and the boardwalk, there was a bison, alone, standing there.
I did not really feel grateful, or awe inspired, or anything like that. I felt very very nervous. My husband and I parleyed to decide whether to go calmly past the bison without looking at him, or backtrack at the cost of much time, and we decided to go ahead. (That bison's eyes looked really mean, while we're at it. I definitely did not want to cuddle (with) him.)
Regularly French tourists get gored by bison in Yellowstone, maybe because they think that they are in a theme park in Yellowstone, or because it has been such a long time in France since Man has felt that He was at risk from a wild animal, but who knows ? maybe this is changing...
My first bison encounter outside of a history book took place in Yellowstone. I was in an SUV and a herd was crossing the road in front of and mixed in with the cars, and one old bull walked right next to my door - we made eye contact, which was humbling due to his sheer volume. As he passed, I realized I had to look UP to keep eye contact with him. I was awestruck, and continue to be to this day even when I see them at a distance. I admit they look cuddly, but no thank you!
Being nervous around a bison is a healthy and sane response. During my travels around the West, I had a few wild animal encounters- bison, rattlesnakes, bears.
In each case, I felt “awe” in the original, religious sense; wonder mixed with fear, a recognition that I was in the presence of something powerful and dangerous, and that I’d better show the proper respect. I think part of the reason our society is losing its mind is that many people never experience this feeling anymore.
I totally agree with you about this.
This kind of "awe" is what I think we were supposed to feel about our relationship with God/the gods. It keeps us in our place.
It is fascinating for a European from a tamed landscape, like me, to be in somewhere like Yellowstone and to know he is not now top of the food chain. I have felt this before in wild places. It is our original state, and it is like re-remembering.
My son bought a book in the park called 'Death in Yellowstone', which features the many ways people have died in the park, many of them involving being stupid around animals. One tells of how a woman put her baby on top of a bison for a 'ride', with predictable results. Sometimes it's useful to remain realistic about humanity's general level of intelligence ...
So, here goes for the devil's advocate...
Yesterday I got to thinking about John Muir's book "A summer in the Sierra Nevada", and about an incident where Muir, true empiricist that he was, decided to test what he had heard about black bears not being confrontational, and, alone, followed the trail of one just so that he could come upon it by surprise to see what would happen... And Muir discovered that that bear was so surprised (and angry...) at being surprised that it chased him for quite some time, maybe even treeing him the way a moose treed my beloved, long dead father so long ago. (There's something to be said for keeping fit if you think that you could be treed by a moose, or a bear.)
I laughed myself silly thinking about Muir's experiment there. Maybe he was silly at doing it, but at least he was not cowering before the very IDEA of a bear...
After all, if people have different reactions, why shouldn't bears ? or bison ?
I was very happy that that bison was not confrontational the day we decided to go past him, though. But I was definitely not looking for a confrontation with him that day either.
And sometimes I wonder if all the creation does not have a form of choice before sin : sin, as in being a hawk and waiting for roadkill to arrive for dinner. Turning into a scavenger, where you were once a hunter. Sinner hawks, even if we show them the way, maybe, and make it easier for them. I hope that some of those hawks out there are not sinners, and not just because the opportunity is not given to them to indulge in sin.
Already signed up for news from the Wagon Box. Would love to get out that way next summer. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and travels. Bison and mountains look like a good answer to the spiritual crisis.
Signed up to WB - me too!!
This essay was brilliant in my opinion, all about living in the machine being surrounded by the machine being driven by the machine.
Yet one line that you said sent chills up and down my spine because it basically says it all to me.
"All of them - us- in search of the key to remaining human"
Yes Yes Yes.
I am convinced that's where we are heading and I'm convinced that's where we will end up, hopefully.
“ I can’t see any other picture now.”
Yes, I couldn’t agree more. Hard for me to engage publicly because basically every argument on every topic ends with a polite rephrasing of “y’all need Jesus.” It’s become my carthago delenda est… but once you see it (the spiritual aspect of the crisis) you can’t unsee it, so here I am
(See for instance here:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/01/if-alex-berenson-writes-about-the-baby-bust-will-people-start-taking-it-seriously/)
I hope you do get to spend some time in the SLC area - to be specific, in the sublime mountains less than an hour from downtown. Perfect place to go unmachining, even if you need a machine to get you there…
Very good. Yes, most of the time you need a machine to get yourself up to the places where you want to escape from the machine. In the French Alps, too.
Enjoyed the Leonard Cohen reference. One of my other favorite Cohen lines, of late:
"As He died to make me holy, let us die to make things cheap."
Good time of year to visit Yellowstone, you hit it right. I'm two hours or so from there; things are starting to look beautiful, with all the snow. I cut up a buffalo a number of years ago; what an animal. I'm not generally prone to outrage, but as I cut off the hump and the rest of the 500+ pounds of boneless we ended up with, it was pretty hard not to be, thinking about the era of the buffalo slaughter.
Aaron
That Cohen line reminds me of another one, I forget by whom:
"Freedom's just another word for lots of things to buy."
My favourite:
There’s a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in.
The word "cheap" is terrible. It even sounds... cheap. A bulldozer.
I appreciated and empathized with your feeling of absurdity, writing what you are writing but also being cognizant of how and where you are writing it.
For me, the feeling is quite potent. Having come to see the world largely as you have, I now struggle with what to actually do. This change in perception was rapid, and radical. In three years, I went from being an unabashed tech enthusiast, all in on scientific and technological progress, to where I am now. It's disorienting, to say the least, and leaves me with a feeling of whiplash.
It's also like being reborn. I don't mean that in some grand poetic or mystical sense. My meaning is much more down to earth: everything is new, vibrant, wondrous, terrifying, overwhelming, and much too big. Oh, I don't mean that I'm despairing; the hope we have in Christ is a good check on that tendency. Rather, it's more of a realization that not only do I not know how to live outside the Machine, I struggle even to moderate its influence slightly. Outside of the Machine, right now, I may as well be an infant in all their weakness and helplessness. It's daunting to realize that well into your adult life, you don't actually know how to care for yourself or others because of how dependent you are on Machine systems.
After the winter, I plan on starting a small raised-bed garden in my small suburban backyard to try and grow at least a few vegetables for myself. I've never done this before, and I'll have to figure out what to do with them if I manage to successfully harvest any. Though I'm hoping this will be a small first step to doing more and finding better ways of living, I recognize it's not enough, and even if I were to manage to live as your friend Mark detailed in his latest book (which will likely never happen) it still won't feel like enough. I guess there's nothing for it but, as you said, to simply do the best we can and I guess I will trust God with what's lacking.
Without wishing to state the obvious (but I will anyway!), anything you can do in this direction can only make things better, so don't worry about quantifying "enough". Just be thankful to God for all victories, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem.
I like to think of it as part of the process of "taking off the old self and putting on the new" (Ephesians 4:22-24), a passage I come back to frequently as a fellow recent convert to Christianity.
I'm so glad you were able to spend time in a part of the U.S. where you could experience those wide open spaces and patches of wildness. I used to think I would be content to move to the eastern seaboard, or pretty much anywhere, but the older I get, the more I pray that I can at least stay in the western part of the country (but east of Seattle and Portland!) until I die. I grew up here, and the drama of our landscape combined with the quantity of land, that in some places stretches out like the sea, is soothing to me.
Thanks for your second letter from America. God bless you.
Although I like it out west, my plan is to move to north central Pennsylvania when I retire, near the Allegheny National Forest. Lots of peaceful small towns up that way, not exactly prosperous, but getting along somewhat comfortably. Definitely a slower pace, and at least a couple hours from any sizable cities.
"...what it would mean to begin rebuilding a sacred culture in the ruins of the world the Machine has made..."
Perhaps the most profound question that we can tackle. Indeed, it didn't take long for us to tire of Eden--in my estimation, likely a day or so--and it is likely that, even if we could re-recreate that state of bliss, we would tire of it as quickly.
Eggs. Over easy!
Reading this from the West African nation of Liberia tonight and it all feels so different from when I read posts such as these from my home in Colorado. Really, really different.
If the machine is here it is fully glitched, or, I’m witnessing life at its a$$ end. Almost half the population is food insecure, pollution, poverty, and the echoes of eradicated Ebola are still very much present and talk of a war that ended 20 years ago is still heard as candidates hold parties and close roads in advance of a runoff presidential election that will take place in 6 days.
I spent the day with children who walk 2 hours each way to school and frequently only have 1 meal a day, which is why they come to school at all. Before the food came they’d go to work. 5 years old, breadwinner. A school full of reformed malnourished baby workers. Parents that now come together to fundraise from the community to build cinder block storage with foraged roofs for rice and beans, for their kids without tools. Volunteer teachers, paid by parents, because the corrupt government assigns almost no budget for education. Food prices here match the west but wages are nowhere near the same, nor is employment.
And we complain.
Anyway,
I read this passage and felt strange. Ashamed. Privileged. Spoiled. Angry? Inauthentic? Empty? Seeing the sign of things that might come? I’m not sure, it all just feels like the transmission is glitching and I no longer know how to translate commentary from those who live in the global north / west, while billions starve, suffer genocide, and live out their lives in our waste and filth. Our arrogance comes to mind. Plastic is everywhere. No infrastructure. Trash and garbage and naked children all amongst it watched over by rotting buildings that once housed snipers.
Hope remains in small places here. I just have to wonder what right do I, do you, do any of us have to judge the machine anymore when we’re all pretty much fully cooked in the North? I really mean it. Baked to our gills. We are bathing daily in the privilege of our developed, functioning cultures, paved roads, education, clean water access and laws. We are also watching the control coming for us drop by drop and it scares us. But we have street lights, doctors, tools, and medicine. Oh, and literacy, books, seeds, and machines for spinning fabric from plants and wool.
Is this all due to the machine? I’m still trying to understand and I think I need help. I’ve read all of Paul’s commentary, btw. I’ve tried others. It’s all just really feeling superficial and petty all of a sudden.
My partner and I came from poverty, neglect, violence, and abuse and give grace together every day for the calm safety and stability of our lives. We’re not numb, we are so so grateful. We love our clean, safe home. We love that we have work and each other. We hold hands and give grace every single day, often I wonder, because we live with the ptsd of stolen childhoods and cruelty and maybe we give grace so evil will not come back and claim us. We know what it is to actually suffer, and viciously. We know in large part it’s due to the machine. We still give grace.
Thank you for this heartbreaking and important account. I can imagine if I were standing and peering out from the place from where you are, much else beside base survival and minimal order would look petty as well. You’re right that many of us suckling from the Machine know very little of what it’s like to live in constant chaos, and that our critiques ought to be cognizant of the ways in which true hell exists right now, for many who are often ignored. I have a helluva hard time sometimes living, yet the grocery store is still down the street. Your words challenge me to think harder about what being an actual Christian ought to mean. I’m pretty sure Christ would be there washing those kids’ feet.
I hear you. I have spent time in similar places, though never lived in them - or come from them, more to the point. You're right in what you say here. And yet the control and the destruction is also real, and the misery at one end is the product of the privilege at the other. And the Machine wrecks and ravages simpler and more 'sustainable' life paths all the time. And something bad is building, because the thing can't last. All of this is true at the same time.
But I can understand why this kind of writing seems weird and inappropriate from where you are. Comfort can easily be taken for granted, by me and others. How long it will last is another question.
From my vantage point, I am not sure for how much longer we are going to have this comfort. We are living on knowledge that has been acquired during previous centuries, but our capacity to think is diminishing. Our educational systems are falling apart. How comfortable can you be, or better yet, remain, in this state of affairs ?
My story is not a from rags to riches one at all, but I share the desire to feel... grateful for what I have, and for what is basically given to me, without being earned.
But I will say that a child who walks 2 hours a day to go to school the way my 97 year old French mother in law did when she was little, has maybe a better appreciation for it than a child who does not.
The "poor" child is rich... with his desire to get ahead ? his ambition ?
The "rich" child is.... poor ? in a way ?
For many years now, I have questioned the way that Western civilization seems to automatically assume that people of other cultures have nothing to teach us about living. I think that is a mistake, and a mistake for us to be evangelizing for our way of organizing the world everywhere. But I see little evidence that we question our assumptions at all. Even now, with all this talk about colonisation.
This is where I’ve faced a similar rub in Paul’s writing, having spent time in the rural Himalayas of Nepal. The Machine is far, far from there, but in the village I was in, alcoholism (the result of no medical care and trauma from the 2015 earthquake--people were self-medicating to kill pain and memories) and appalling domestic violence against women and children ran rampant--indeed, endemic--in the community. The weak being crushed by the strong. To use a video gaming metaphor, it was like The Machine wasn’t The Big Bad, just one of the instruments of the Prince of Darkness--if you believe that sort of thing, as I do--and people can be persuaded to do great evil in the name of pain and suffering. That was the only way to make sense of it, for me. “Don’t forget about us,” said a woman my age, a member from the “Untouchables” in their caste system, who talked to me about all the friends she had lost from preventable deaths during childbirth.
Of course, these things - corruption, alcoholism, domestic violence - exist everywhere, and have precious little to do with 'the Machine' as I'm writing about it. We might argue indeed that liberalism and or the Western attitude to individuals, women and minorities - which is pretty unique - has helped most to highlight or tackle such problems. This is one reason so many people want to move to the West.
I think it is safe to say that my writing may be useful to some people living in the West, in the belly of the beast. We made this thing and we are living with the consequences as they unfold. We are not the only ones who have to. But I can't write for Nepal or Liberia. The world is very particular, and each place has its challenges.
While I certainly sympathize with the Libya and Nepal distance-from-machine feeling,
The fact it is a westerner feeling and recognizing it always makes me suspicious.
I just mean we- I- tend to “look in” on other as we want to say less developed societies, and see something in a way that always seems to suggest I have perspective on this other, that it does not have on me.
How do I put this?
Only the West has learned to critique from within? Even this is a western culturally bound value?
It depends I think also on what the machine truly is.
Here I would again recommend “The Unintended Reformation”, to go deeper and farther back in the cogs than we might imagine.
Then the global village and all that-
Eg a Kenyan friend recently visiting from his work in the prison system back home told me how he forgot his watch while visiting some inmates in a top security prison.
An inmate there who trusted him discretely pulled my friend to a dark corner of his cell, and proceeded to pull an iPhone 9 out of his sock to show my friend the time.
He literally was taken from a village mud hut home, to this prison.
And yet…
There it is.
I guess I would describe that mountain community as a more or less Machine-less existence, one with strong roots, deep cultural practices and community networks, and tied so closely to the land--but it was not idyllic in the least. Even if we do somehow eradicate The Machine in the West, we’d still have to face these problems, they are at the foundation.
Who believe in idylls? Not me. I do think that idealising traditional cultures is an extremely Western thing to do. These are the problems of being human.
Nonetheless, we have eliminated all these things here in Machine world and now we are sinking.
It’s just the sense that I get from some of the writings here, that there is an idyllic world out there, that these people know better than us. And it wasn’t my experience on that mountain.
My experience has been that many traditional societies do know better than us about a great many things. There are of course other things that we know better about, primarily material ones. But in pursuing those things we have eliminated those deep community networks, our connection to the past, our spiritual practices and the other aspects of life that actually offer human meaning. Maybe it's always a trade-off. But the problems we face in the West now are of a different order.
Dear Sarah;
I think you have really hit on something in this.
I honestly have nothing helpful to add via solutions or perspective.
But there is something "common" to "old world problems"- traditional societies.
Their sins are all alike in a certain sense.
It has to do with some of the core "disruption" that came with the Christ event...
Regarding women, children, the weak, the victim, brute force... then the broad categories of idolatry, witchcraft... and many other like ailments of what seems everywhere to me... kind of an "eternal problem" that humanity by its native animal habits seems to have everywhere untouched by, well for me, it's the Western world (A world in itself, trying to become the only and whole world).
And these problems, the Western World purports to solve, appears to do so effectively too.
That's it, all I have to say on it just now.
The Machine affects those places, even if its presence seems distant. The documentaries, "Schooling the World" and "Ancient Futures" show how rural, sustainable communities become eroded by the influence of the globalist machine.
I can only tell you my experience, it’s whether you believe me or not if you will accept it.
How can the machine be far from Nepal when in 2001 you could find empty Coca Cola cans on high mountain passes of Afghanistan in the middle of winter ?...The people who are in power in these far away countries, haven't they been educated in our educational systems, at our universities, for example ? Aren't they... an international elite, in a way, that thinks the way we do, at least superficially ? And if they are no longer educated in Western universities, aren't we exporting our culture all over the planet over the Internet, for better, but also for worse ?
And I believe that domestic violence is very much related to the machine, because the machine is about destroying the differences between the sexes and the generations so that we can all be equalized... workers in the anthill ? An ant is not a mammal. There are no ant persons. Being a person means being subjected to... birth, sex, and death, and all of that is messy, unclean, and dangerous.
When you discredit a man's power, legitimacy and authority, and the possibility for him to use that power to protect his vulnerable ? family, then what is he supposed to do with his power ?
Anybody who has read the Hebrew Bible knows how much power emanates from the weak, and how dangerous it is to mess with that, too. I repeat that so regularly on this site that sometimes I wonder if anybody understands me.
I can only tell you my experience, it’s whether you believe me or not if you will accept it.
I am sorry if you thought that I was being impatient with you, because I am not impatient with you at all. There must have been a misunderstanding between us.
My interest in reading Paul's thoughts on 'the Machine' is that it helps me see one of the faces of our fallen nature, one that has been intensively institutionalized and built up in the modern West. But I believe it's a huge mistake to view it (the Machine, not Paul's writings!) as the source of evil. It's just one face/expression.
There are a great many other institutionalized examples throughout history - Aztec ritual sacrifice, anyone? - and then ever more residing within my own heart, and every human heart. The most important work, I believe, is confronting evil within my own heart and psyche, and turning to God for inner purification. I've yet to meet a human being who doesn't need that work far more than cultural critique. Yet, understanding the wider, collective delusion of the Machine is a useful awareness practice - it helps me to understand how sin/delusion/evil can play out in my culture, in ways I might not otherwise recognize because I'm swimming in it.
I would suggest you read my earlier reply, we are on the same page here.
No suggestion that we weren't - your comment just stirred some thoughts. Thank you for that!
If one is living in an imperial sacrifice zone, the "functioning" Machine world of the contemporary West must appear enticing indeed by comparison. Wealth and resources have been strip-mined from much of the world to feed the beast that is techno-capitalist modernity for hundreds of years now.
Sacrifice zones, however, are hardly limited to far-flung colonial outposts any longer. Take a look at contemporary San Francisco, which is home to both the most elite of the Machine elite, and streets full of tents, drug addicts, and horrific squalor to match any in the world (https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/video-reveals-terrifying-reality-of-san-frans-drug-ravaged-streets/ar-AA1jwees). Elon Musk, "the richest man in the world", works at Twitter/X headquarters in downtown SF while right outside the door are scenes of the most abject human squalor, desperation, and privation.
I'd recommend Morris Berman's “Tribal Consciousness and Enlightenment Tradition” essay, which he recently posted in full at his blog (http://morrisberman.blogspot.com). You might also refer to the work of someone like Iain McGilchrist with his "master/emissary" theory. Whichever is more true, something obviously went very wrong with the way many humans thought about the world. And that way of incorrectly thinking had an unfortunate lethal virality to it. Now we are all living and dying and suffering in the ever-expanding ruin of those original total fucking idiots.
Try to convince a figure like Elon Musk, or Bill Gates, or Ray Kurzweil, or Steven Pinker, or any one of legions of technocrats that their understanding of life is perverse and destructive and ultimately suicidal and they will dismissively brush your arguments and evidence aside as self-evidently wrongheaded. And then they will redouble efforts to destroy more life. Someone once called them "robopaths" and I think that about captures it.
I feel your passion here and appreciate your response, thank you. One difference with the SFO analog is medicine - the people living in squalor in the US can still be tended to if necessary, social services can still help them, fresh water can still find its way to them. We have street nurses, doctors, and clinics, though I know they’re starting to strain. Here, there is no option but to be evacuated to another country for help. No bandages, no anesthesia, no medicine even if there is a doctor around. All I’m saying is - yes - there are many living in very challenging conditions in the US - and - at least they have access to emergency medicine if needed. This is one of countless examples...
You should understand that when I see bandages, and syringes, and anaesthesia delivery paraphernalia, I see medical waste littering the oceans. I reject the entirety of modernity, not just the pieces of it I don't find useful in any particular moment. Yes, I like having water coming out of the tap, but if I could trade it—along with dishwashers, smartphones, automobiles, streaming video services, TVs and on and on and on across the entirety of industrial modernity—for the restoration of a pristine biosphere, I'd make that deal in a heartbeat. Note that NO ONE would have access to emergency medicine if "needed" in such a scenario, apart from perhaps that which could be provided by a tribal shaman.
You didn't need water coming out of a tap when you could drink from any local stream or river.
I'm a radical, and see the root of the problem as this Faustian bargain where we trade away more and more and more of the living world in a futile attempt to protect ourselves from it. The reason the kids around you are starving on one meal a day is because other people who wanted things like modern medical conveniences, cars, TVs, shopping malls, and all the rest, destroyed their lands and communities long ago. You live in the ruins created by people making the demands you yourself are now making.
I'm so glad to hear you had a good visit to the U.S. Despite the frequent turmoil, there's much to be thankful for here. A quick question if you see this--I've been enjoying your FPR talks online, and I'm hoping you can give me the source for your quote from Fr. Sibley, the one about "What we will not preserve, we cannot share." I've looked all over but can't find books or blogs by the man. Would love to read more if he's publishing. Thank you!
Our daughter always says, "eggs easy over."
I cannot even begin to do anything without first acknowledging and laughing at my own absurdity.
I’ve realized that while I agree with you, “we are living through a spiritual crisis”, it is very difficult for me to be a spiritual person. I feel spiritual things sometimes, but that is not the same.
Still, I’ve made a point of regularly behaving in a way that puts me at least partly outside the machine. Not the majority of the time, not even close, but I think fairly consistently.
More random thoughts:
Flying is a strange experience. After a long break from flying, from 2018 to 2022, I flew again last year and found I had become a much more nervous flyer. (However I am very awesome at packing.) Still, there is something about taking off and landing specifically that i in always find very moving. I think being born and/or dying must feel something like taking off in an airplane. You are switching states, it is fast, overwhelming, absolutely not in your control, and kind of terrifying but in an exciting way.
I'm an extreme white-knuckle flyer. So much so I've flown just once in over 30 years, and that flight was necessary to get me the hell out of America and to Europe. Even then it took a knockout dose of anti-anxiety meds to get me through. Basically, I'm both claustrophobic and suffer vertigo (meaning: take me to a high place and I will want to jump, which is very bad when one is 30,000 feet in the air). Thus, flying in an airplane is for me just about the worst experience possible. I deeply envy people who can hop on planes as easily as catching a bus, though I think you are all completely nuts.
This past summer my family and I spent 10 days at the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon. We took a helicopter ride at the Grand Canyon; as the theme song from "2001: A Space Odyssey" coursed through our headphones, we crested the lip of the the canyon. And I've never been so awed by the majesty of nature, the power of it.
Similar reaction when we came through the long tunnel at Zion and emerged with the huge cliffs looming before us; I nearly drove off the road. I live in Florida - the Everglades are awe-inspiring in their own right but the scenery of the western U.S. demonstrates just how small we are as individuals.
And that's the trick of the Machine; to make us think that we are more than these wonders; that we are in fact the wonder. To be captured by the Machine is to believe human desire somehow trumps all. Politically, that's increasingly true. But the forces that made these canyons, that eroded the ravines; the huge herd of bison fording the stream could care less; they endure. We don't.
If we want to see the future, look back, into Scripture. God’s word is very clear about mankind’s past mistakes and the bleak future of this present time.
There is hope for the future but not until Christ returns to establish God’s kingdom here in the new earth.
The question every person needs to address is; do we accept or reject Christ.
Paul it was a pleasure to meet you and your lovely family! I can't help but point out that our little shindig might have infected you with some optimism. "We might as well do it with cheer," yes! I really hope to stay in touch. The Renaissance of living well amongst the doom is coming and we are going to usher it in! I just know it.
You are still too much of an "optimist". ;)
Impossible! ;)
It was great to meet you too. I remain a pessimist - the other word for which is 'realist' ;-) But I am also hopeful in some strange and light way. It was my conversion that did that. I am still working out what it means. Here's to more gatherings.