I am about to go away until early next week, and I won't be on't Internet during that time, so I can't engage with any further comments here for now. But keep them coming, and I'll look forward to digging in next week. Thanks to you all.
Paul, I haven't read much Monbiot in a while, but it's interesting to see his about-face regarding ecomodernism and the 'datafication' and hyper-rationalization of nature/society. I recall two articles Monbiot wrote in 2015 when he was squarely on your side...
In this article (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2015/sep/24/meet-the-ecomodernists-ignorant-of-history-and-paradoxically-old-fashioned) he accuses the people in favour of solving environmental problems through science and technology of being wrong on their assumptions about farming and urbanisation. (He quotes from Dark Mountain and lauds Chris Smaje to make his case.) Monbiot writes: "There is no attempt in the [Ecomodernist] manifesto to interrogate the concept of modernisation, to determine what it means and what it doesn’t, to examine its problems as well as the benefits it delivers. Instead there appears to be a crude and unexplored assumption that people working in the formal, urban economy are modern, while those on the outside are not."
And in another article (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/16/pope-encyclical-value-of-living-world) he flatly rejects the 'datafication' of nature, instead reminding us that our relationship to the natural world is about love, not just goods and services. He writes: "The reality is that we care [about nature] because we love. Nature appealed to our hearts, when we were children, long before it appealed to our heads, let alone our pockets. Yet we seem to believe we can persuade people to change their lives through the cold, mechanical power of reason, supported by statistics."
Further: "Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect."
I hadn't put my finger on quite why I had begun to disagree with George Monbiot so much. From being inspired by much of his writing a few years back, much of what he says now leaves me cold. Whilst this is probably partly down to my own journey and evolving view of the world, it has coincided precisely with the period you've noted here.
I like Monbiot and have got half way through Regenesis and much of it I found fascinating. The statistics about land use and animal farming are frankly terrifying. It seems that having laid the ground for a massive shift in faming practices he them takes the wrong fork in the road. I think i got stuck in the book as I could not bring myself to go down that road
I've read all the essays on here, and I'm pretty sure Paul has been clear that there's no voluntary return to "premodern" life at any meaningful scale. I can't figure why people assign to critiques of modernity the motivation to go back to a thousand years ago. Very few people actually argue that, if not because they wouldn't prefer it, because it's obviously not going to happen. The stronger argument in favor of "premodern" life is: we're headed there whether we want it or not. That argument rests on sticking your finger in the wind and feeling out the trends: industrial civilization will destroy itself. No one knows the future, but that ain't a bad bet. So, I don't see a dualism in prognosticating a return to (or revival of) machine-free life. It's presumptuous, yes, but as you say: "the neo-green vision can't solve our environmental crisis," and since we both have an indomitable neo-green vision and an overwhelming environmental crisis, it appears as if the center ain't going to hold. Perhaps you have a different vision for a future in which we keep our electromagnetic things and still live within Earth's limits and somehow cause an orgy of rewilding in decrepit places that reverses the mass extinction? Because I've gone looking for that (not because I think it's ideal, but because it's more realistic), and all I see are phantom spreadsheets and slick-coated "circular cities." I'd love to know if you see something different.
Agreed that there's a dangerous tint to going full-throttle into apocalyptic thinking. Personally, I've been trying to watch that tendency in myself the past year. And agreed that this apocalyptic thinking can actually become hypnotic, even a temperament (or style) that can be imperious (I consider the "collapse aware" phrasing, for instance, on par with the "we're conscious" or "we're awake" crew of new-agers).
I used to want collapse. I was convinced by Derrick Jensen et al that a collapse would be morally preferable than business-as-usual. I no longer hold that position. A collapse at scale terrifies me, and breaks my heart for the kinds of myriad sufferings it would bring forth. So I don't want to see that (though it's hard for me to utter that given the horrible destructions of life on Earth from business-as-usual). And yet, I'd bet it's coming at scale. I'm not preparing for it (I think prepping is futile and often reinforces the worst tendencies of individualism), but I think it's likely.
And yes, that "likely" can't rest on fingers in the wind alone (though flight patterns of birds works!), I was of course being flip. I'm a decade into trying to sort through this stuff with the knowledge I can find available from varieties of cultures and approaches. Still, I get that one must always hold doubt, so I remain persuadable otherwise. My overall point is: it can be equally naive to live as if this machine-world will sort out the existential crises it's brought into existence. So, an honest discourse about what a future might look like that is machine-restrained and closer to what pre-industrial life exhibited is important to consider if we're interested in designing now the kinds of cultures that may last past the storms.
But I'll also lay out my bias: I am one of these "Romantics" who thinks pre-industrial life is better not just for Earth but people. I understand the objections to that. I just disagree with them. I've had some kind of bugging internal sense my whole life that the whole project is "off," and that's the best I can make sense of it at middle-age. I don't think my position is apocalyptic or death-inducing or Pollyanish, though it certainly could be if I didn't take the process of thinking through these things seriously enough. So, maybe that's just my point with critiques of "going back": that a person can arrive honestly and with integrity that "going back" (which I put in quotes because I think these things are circular rather than linear) is attractive and morally preferable (though how that "going back" is achieved may be monstrous and hellish and I don't believe the ends ever justify the means).
If you want my view on 'progress vs apocalypse', you might want to read the (short) Dark Mountain manifesto which I wrote in 2009.
Also, previous essays in this series trace this question quite exhaustively, and also dig into the word 'apocalypse', which does not have the meaning you ascribe it here.
It's true we can get caught in an either/or bind. The modern mind is like that. We are not going to be returning to any particular time in history. Nonetheless, the collapse of this industrial fossil-fuelled mega-culture is already here. The writing is on the wall, and is manifesting already in a changing climate and much more. The whole basis of this essay is a claim that the world's vast human population cannot be fed without destroying remaining ecossystems, and the arguments that ensue about how to deal with that.
If you want to cling to modernity and reject the 'rank susperstitions' of the past you are of course free to do so - but note as you do that this framing (ignorant past, enlightened present) is precisely the kind of dualism you've just been railing against. My take is different. What we might call modernity is essentially a war against reality: against limits, and against nature itself. It is a story we tell ourselves about our own transcendence. Pre-modern societies were, for all their imperfections, at least partly attempts to align themselves with that reality; the reality of nature and of its creator. The past offered up plenty of tyrannies: the present has offered plenty more. That's the human mean.
I don't think our spirit is roaming out into space at all. I think it is focused obsessively on ourselves. Apocalypse - unveiling - is certainly the likely result. I'm not interested in larping the middle ages. But I reject the values of this anticulture.
"WWI and II, the Holocaust, Nagasaki, The Cold War, The Double Helix, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, the Internet, and Globalization!"
These are all products of modernity. The mass horrors as well as the scientific discoveries. We wouldn't have had them, at least not at industrial scale, without modernity. And that we aren't still penned in by rank delusions, if not actual, technical superstitions, is laughable. As for modern dentistry, there is some indication that our teeth are worse now than before, hence all the orthodontic work. Perhaps due to the lack of hard food to chew as toddlers due to soft food and pacifiers, if the latter are even still used. But I won't stake what I am saying on that.
But I will concede that we like, or have at least grown accustomed to a lot that the industrial era has provided for us. Most of us probably wouldn't even be alive without it, so there is that. It has made many of us more comfortable, though I doubt it has enlarged our spirit, probably to the contrary by the look of things.
But all that is beside the point. The question isn't whether we like what industrialism has brought us, but whether it can be sustained. There is good reason to think that it cannot. If so, what next? What we prefer won't matter at all.
If it can be sustained, why even bother with kooks like us? The internet is vast and there are many mansions...
Hi, Chris I agree that traditionalists can sometimes be narrow-minded, idealistic, and moralizing. I saw someone on twitter once say that they should change the DSM to consider anyone who wasn’t spending their life homesteading/rewilding/living a low carbon footprint lifestyle as having narcissistic personality disorder, and I find that kind of attitude to be divisive and unhelpful. Moreover, I agree that we can’t go back in time -- we’ve eaten the apple, so to speak. However, where I disagree is that the articles written here full into that bucket and lack nuance or careful thought. I personally subscribe because I feel they are written with a certain amount of integrity, and a desire to truly understand the roots of the problem, rather than just vent about it. There was some frustration apparent in this most recent essay, but overall I don’t find Paul is someone who claims to have The Answer, let alone it being for us all to go back in time. If that were the case, I’d be just as disenchanted with these writings as I am at everyone else who claims to have a monopoly on what it will take to “save the world.”
You're conflating two different things: protest tactics and political worldviews.
'Fascism' is a worldview, or a system, based on a philosophy, like communism or liberalism. I'd bet a lot of money that if you were to look into the politics of most people involved in Just Stop Oil the great majority would be well to the left. Of course, there are plenty of left wing authoritarian philosophies too, and they've actually done more historical damage than fascism. But again I doub't you'd find much support for them. Look at their demands: they're not calling for a coup; instead, they want to persaude the elected government to act. In that sense, they very much are democrats.
I think what's going on here is a classic case of direct action in a democratic society. It's a tactic as old as Gandhi and as venerable. You may strongly disagree, but while it may be annoying (or inspiring) it is neither fascist nor authoritarian. It's an attempt to use pressure to force change.
I also wonder that. The good news is that I only plan to write one more essay about the symptoms. After that I'm going to start wondering aloud if there is a cure. Or at least, an escape ...
Thank you for this essay and for continuing to stare unflinchingly into the abyss and so eloquently share what you see. Yes, it is depressing, and we would all rather not know, but if we are to be dragged down into it not knowing will have been a temporary consolation and a dishonest one - it is impossible not to see that something new, strange, and horrible is overtaking us.
I feel as if I raised my family in Arcadia long, long, ago instead of suburbia in the 80’s and 90’s. It was so very different, so wholesome, so much more of a piece with everything that went before, our ethnic, working class, immigrant roots. This feels like a very sudden change yet the path must’ve been set long ago, it is inherent the deification of progress and belief in the evolution of the spirit, in direct contradiction to the evidences of original sin which seem incontrovertible. How after the bloodiest century in the history of civilization can so many claim that man has the wisdom to control every detail of life? Where did this wisdom come from? It is irrational and dangerous when viewed from a historical or philosophical perspective but our elites have conveniently gutted those disciplines just in time to roll out their new regime.
I am looking forward to seeing your ideas for resisting being assimilated. I am glad that I am not younger, at 61 I will not be starting over, but I have six grandchildren under ten whom I would like to think have some chance at living as human beings rather than serfs of the new world order.
It seems the Machine's greatest trick was to create the 'Machine Greens', rolling them out as useful idiots to do its bidding. It would be truly comical if it wasn't so dangerous.
Good article. I spent most of my life on the far left: communist, anarchist, green neo-pagan, etc. In the end, a few years ago I could no longer recognize the lefties I grew up with. The Green Left used to look to Schumacher, Zerzan, and Fredy Perlman. Now they look up to Bill Gates. The 180 degree about face to Machineophilic environmentalism and politics, combined with the woke revolution, has completely turned me off of that side of the political spectrum. Of course, the conventional Right is just as disgusting as always, but those who are being labelled fascists I find quite simpatico. The life and work of Pentti Linkola is a shining beacon to our debased times. Lately, I have often been called an ecofascist. I do not identify with this term, since, as we all know, fascism was a Machine-ideology, but I take it as a sign that I am going in the right direction. Sometimes if a world gone mad can't find the words to applaud those still right in their heads, the people fighting for truth, beauty, and goodness, have to receive their nourishment and encouragement through the hatred of the robotic masses. At any rate, we need to transcend the left-right divide and think only of the Divine, which we are all part of, and which also penetrates every cell, every atom in the realm of manifestation. As Lawrence wrote:
"Now above all is the time for the minorities of men,
those who are neither bourgeois nor bolshevist, but true to life,
to gather and fortify themselves, in every class, in every country, in every
race.
Instead of which, the minorities that still see the gleams of life
submit abjectly to the blind mechanical traffic-streams of those
horrors
the stone-blind bourgeois, and the stone-blind bolshevist;
Same. Five years ago I considered myself a left progressive eco-feminist. Things are 180 degrees different now. I walk in upside-down world. Covid and the summer of 2020 changed everything. Most of the environmental movement had been absorbed into the Machine, but I hadn't noticed.
If you are no longer a feminist, what do you want the role of women to be? Are we to return to the status of chattel, ignorant, powerless, voiceless and consigned to lives of brutal, boring shit work until we die?
Pray, which of the many thrilling careers available in the current world seem to you not to be “brutal, boring shit work”?
Having been an academic, a cubicle worker and manager, and also a person who stays home with my children, I can attest that the work of literally cleaning shit is far more edifying than the soul-sucking grind offered in the guise of “feminist liberation.” Whatever it may have begun as, feminism has become another ideology absorbed into the Revolutions of modernity, codified into technological solutions for messy human problems.
You were able to make that decision but what to deny all other women that choice. Also, simply getting paid elevates drudgery in an office above housework. At least the employee has some agency in her own life. Housewives have NONE.
Your comment presupposes that getting paid is an ultimate good, and that those types of work that are for money are automatically more worthwhile than those for which you are not paid. Money is necessary, but it is not the ultimate goal or good in my life.
I never claimed to deny anyone a choice; just because I found the grind of people paying me money to spend years of my life trying to afford laundry detergent and bigger cars wasn’t for me, doesn’t mean I am making my choices a prescription for everyone else. The life of a housewife is hard, and it can be drudgery. But so was sitting in traffic for hours a day, being on call, never knowing if I could take a weekend off. Yet somehow that drudgery is inherently more worthy because some faceless bureaucrat deposits money in my account? That was not my lived experience, but if yours is different I am glad that you have found a work life that makes you happy.
Money isn’t the ultimate good, but I also think it’s the most tangible way to show value. ‘You get what you pay for,’ as they say. Lots of my job tasks were distilled tedium, and I hated traffic with the heat of a million supernovas, but the money I made gave me freedom to do things I really enjoyed without groveling to my husband or passively waiting for someone to notice and give me what they thought I needed — and they were almost always wrong.
Traditionalists too often discount the importance of exercising one’s own agency, since very few traditionalists in my experience have been denied agency. You note that you made the decision to leave the paid workforce yourself. Imagine having someone force you out. My position is that each person deserves agency in their own lives as much as possible. Anything else is tyranny.
Also check out these videos from McGilchrist, based on the themes of his latest book, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. In general, this book is a phenomenal touchstone for working out our understanding of the deeper ontological, spiritual-religious roots of the situation. He starts with the brain science, moves through physics and philosophy and lands the two volume work in an exploration of the sacred.
I feel the need to explain - as briefly as I can - why, even just five years ago, I would have been infuriated by this argument. In fact, I would have been infuriated with myself for even paying it any attention. Others, like me but more sure of themselves would not be commenting here now.
Basically it comes down to the (correct) statement that "we have no five point plan of our own." It would mystify me when someone - usually with a humanities or social science degree - would observe somebody else - usually with a natural science degree - embracing some new technological or technocratic development and assume that, because they embraced it, it meant they approved of it. It doesn't follow at all. I can quote some peer-reviewed articles if needed!
As far as I can see, it's a deeply held foundational belief of social scientists that human history is about choice. That it didn't have to be this way, that we can always choose otherwise. Natural scientists grow up in a wider culture that believes this but in a professional culture that is, at best, agnostic. And it's hard to believe.
For an old school conservationist (which is not the same thing as an environmentalist, of course) I think it is very difficult to get away from the belief that the 'problem' is simply humans. Not any force within human history or culture but all of us. We don't generally want to say that or think that but not saying it and not thinking it often feels like a form of denialism, rightly or wrongly.
So people who are coming more from the social science or political side want to know why we are colluding with the enemy. We always have been. Give us another option.
I'm not sure the division into humanities people and science people is quite right. Plenty of those who are pushing the neo-green agenda, including some I am critiquing here and plenty more I have known, have no scientific background. Many humanities graduate types also enthusiastically support the tech agenda also. Read the ecomodernist manifesto, and indeed the kind of work that Monbiot has been doing for years, and you don't see 'science', but politics. It's always presented in a high moral tone, as if (and sometimes this is baldly stated) a rejection of the arguments brings with it a responsibility for mass death.
But I think you're saying something interesting and important. And I agree. It's one of the things I said in Dark Ecology, which I linked to above. The neo-greens were largely right about how the old green agenda won't fly in a world like this one. Thus, we have no five-point plan. And apart from 'I wouldn't start from here', there is no obvious alternative.
Except one, of course: embrace less. Do it on a global scale, politically. Live within our means. See the world as sacred. We know how to do this. We could do it. We have done it. But the fact is that we won't. I know this, and so do the Machine Greens. But I am unable to go where they want to take me. Many, as I say, are well-intentioned. But is that argument enough to embrace technologies which will remake the entire world at the genetic level? Rebuild all of creation in their image? No: and in fact, good intentions very often take us to hell.
For me, I end up always at the same question: where is the red line? I worry that these people don't have one, and never will. But I have to draw mine. I would rather stop here and take the consequences. The reality is, in my view, that we do not have the capability to 'manage the world' in anything like the way these people want us to, and every time we have tried we have built a tyranny. I don't want to join in building the next one.
We are all in many ways--too many ways products of the machine. The War of competing ideologies is an inescapable aspect of which "operating system" runs the show. The war of ideologies is necessarily top down and elitist.
I think we need to start at the opposite end. A practice of purging ourselves of our acquired machine ideologies and assumptions. And a beginning of restoring ourselves--as possible--to a more natural state of human existence. It is all still there within us. There needs to be a 12-step group for giving up the machine. That might sound like parody, but I am completely serious. We are addicted to this whether we want to admit that or not.
Also, contemplative traditions around the world and for thousands of years have developed practices for dismantling the human will to power and healing delusions. Delusions of grandeur and self-godhood among them. This is a place that we need to put our focus. Small local contemplative groups. What could be called micro-sketes. Nobody has to agree on all that much other than to get together and sit in silence. And then have an ongoing conversation about it and our current situation. And maybe a nice potluck dinner...
“There needs to be a 12-step group for giving up the machine. That might sound like parody, but I am completely serious. We are addicted to this whether we want to admit that or not.”
I was reflecting on this lately as well. It’s hard to give up an addiction halfway, or even ten percent. If you’re an alcoholic, you don’t want to think, “Well, I haven’t had any whiskey for three weeks, so a little sip won’t hurt”. If we really are in something like addiction or (perhaps a better word) “dependence”, then a full break is the only way out.
The thing is, I’m not sure how realistic this is for most people. Our lives are so bound up with new and emerging technologies that pulling out of the system would require a new place for us “to go”, where we can live and function as individuals, families, communities.
A more likely scenario, I suspect (and fear), is that the Machine project will go horribly wrong at some point, and the addiction will be broken for us, suddenly and painfully.
I like the idea of 12 step groups for giving up the machine. I don’t believe we should not contemplate giving up an addiction halfway. Going cold turkey is not practical nor feasible, and damn hard. Whatever much we can give up is one step won in the fight. And as we grow more aware and stronger in our mutual comfort and support, we could give up more. At the very least, a 12 step group for giving up the machine will bring the problem to the forefront and allow people to acknowledge it, recognise it and talk about it.
If one isn’t going cold turkey, but attempting to be gradual, then apart from a lot of self-discipline and conviction I think it helps to have people who one is accountable to (e.g., spouses, family, friends) and who share the same commitment.
This sounds like something Augustine said about dealing with gluttony vs lust. One can abstain from sex entirely and so deal with the sexual passion, but not so with food. My very shabby paraphrase. But the idea that there are some sins we have to deal with but cannot do so in a black or white way seems relevant.
I think you are right. As far as I can tell much of what motivates an alcoholic to stick with AA is that if he doesn't it will likely mean his own death. This is, I think, also why there is seemingly an intense core community of 12-steppers, as well as a cultural exceptional ability to find camaraderie between otherwise culturally and politically antagonistic people. There is a need, and it is dire.
Though I agree that a 12-step for machine civilization is unlikely to take hold on a large scale, that doesn't mean that those who are motivated can't join with others to try it. Who knows? It might provide an opportunity for a different kind of sobriety and for a degree and intensity of community that is nearly impossible to find otherwise. It would only take small groups to start.
And rather than having to figure out "how it could be done" abstractly and in advance--which is an impossible task, I think, and indicative of a kind of ideological, technological mode of thinking--it would be worked out concretely between actual, living individuals face to face in an actual, lived situation. The latter is far more tractable than the former.
“it would be worked out concretely between actual, living individuals face to face in an actual, lived situation…”
Yes, and I think that the small groups that will probably succeed and thrive in the long run are those who already live within local reach of each other, no more than walking distance or a short ride, and where there is enough diversity of profession and skills to support an ordinary community. Living near an Amish settlement probably wouldn’t hurt either!
Peter, I've found the spot you describe (I think, I hope).... near the Amish, near sawmills, blacksmiths, horse-powered farms, near other Christian homeschoolers.
This link is to a story about one of the neighboring farms:
The analogy is a good one. The modern medical model of addiction places the blame on substances and their addictive qualities, or on genetics. But addiction is, in fact, a method of self-soothing. You can be addicted to anything, because it is about your feelings and not about the Thing. You can stop being an alcoholic and become addicted to sugar, or shopping, or or or. But the danger with the Machine is much the same, because both are an issue of worldview. Addicts do not possess the tools to handle the world in a way that feels safe to them. The world feels fundamentally dangerous and they can only cope with the limited tools they have. To unlearn your own feelings—a lifetime of relating to the world in a certain way—that’s a big ask. To try to live every day aware of the Machine worldview and trying to see all the ways we have internalized those ways of seeing, feeling, and being, would certainly be easier with a group of similarly aware people. Though I suppose that is sort of what is going on here!
Thanks for replying and for not taking offence! And I'll reply just to this for now or I'll never reply. I just went and re-read Dark Ecology and it still gave me a shudder even though I knew the twist was coming.
Apologies. If I find myself saying 'let me explain why I used to be angry about this thing but am not angry any more,' I must remember to be careful. I'm not as grown-up as I think I am. Even if that's not who I am any more I'm still resentful at feeling misunderstood. And to a large extent it is still who I am. To a large extent I can't exactly help it.
George Monbiot did the same undergraduate degree that I did, more or less. And the fact is, that when you say that in his writing, or in the ecomodernist manifesto, 'you don't see science, you see politics,' I think you might not be asking the right question. Or not the one I want you to ask anyway. Yes it's politics but it's the kind of politics scientists in particular are likely to have and... not necessarily because we want to.
So I think a difference between where I am coming from and where you are coming from is that you worry that they don't have a red line whereas I worry that I don't. Because I can't see boundaries and lines as anything other than artificial. If I wanted a rule to define a machine I'd say that it depends, for its existence, on lines having been drawn. I can't see anything as sacred in the sense of being untouchable, of being other. I read in a Karen Armstrong book recently that the Hebrew word translated 'Holy' in the Old Testament actually has connotations of being other or apart. I find it very hard to believe in that kind of sacredness. Of believing that there is something that it is literally impossible to damage or that cannot be damaged without terrible unavoidable consequences. I don't say that I know there is no such thing as the sacred, that I know there are no lines that should never be crossed, only that I find it hard to believe in them and I am pretty sure this is because of the way I was taught.
I don't know enough about Stewart Brand to guess what he really meant with "we are as gods and we'd better get good at it." When I heard it I thought "yes! This guy understands and is presumably as horrified as I am." I was surprised when people responded with 'what arrogance.' I had thought the statement was made in fear.
The question of lines and boundaries might be the key. Again, I can see precisely what you mean. And again I've written about this before, somewhere or other, in that same published essay collection. I believe in lines. But I can also see that there is no 'scientific' basis to do so, and neither is there any realistic likelihood of a human race with our level of power and technological know-how ever respecting them, or agreeing on them. It takes a shared sense of the sacred, I think, to respect those lines. That's what my last essay was about.
So in one sense I understand the 'neo-green' prospectus, if it is, in Smaje's words, 'rescue ecomodernism.' But I still have two problems. One is that when I listen to the rhetoric put out by Brand, Kareiva, Monbiot etc, it doesn't strike the note you're striking here. I don't hear, 'look at all this power we have, let's be realistic, we need to take these regrettable measures to save x, y or z.' I could understand that, and sympathise if not agree. Instead, I hear something more like 'this is the future, it's inevitable, it's benificent and we should have no time for the Romantics and Luddites who think otherwise.' Perhaps that's just tone: most of the people pushing this stuff tend to be aggressive men who like winning (though not Brand, who strikes me as more thoughtful.) But I think it's more.
This is why I said in the essay that the gulf was unbridgeable. I think it probably is. I keep coming back to this. I don't really see what to do about it.
One final thought: you say you can't see boundaries as anything but 'artificial', and I know what you mean. But I'm guessing that by 'artificial' you mean human-made rather than naturally-occurring. But by this measure, every part of human culture is 'artificial.' And all of that involves boundaries. So while a scientist might not see boundaries, I would suggest that this may be because a sicentist does not see culture. But culture is the stuff we do. Which is you why you need artists.
In the enormous figure 2 it notes that people with a biological educational background are more likely to favour 'science-led ecocentrism' and so are people from Oceania, N America and Europe (in decreasing order). However these people *aren't* more likely to favour 'conservation through capitalism', not even the North Americans. What makes you most likely to favour *that* is being 'very senior.'
This is a survey of conservation professionals. And investigates correlation, not causation. A drawback of the survey is that it divides people based on the kinds of things which people say in print, which is not all the things they say, still less all the things they think.
Anyway there definitely are people who believe that 'it's the future, it's inevitable it's beneficent, and we should have no time for those who think otherwise.' But, of those are 4 propositions, I never personally believed proposition 3 (though my parents strongly did and do) and I've now rejected 4 (obviously!) but 1 and 2 I still have a lot of trouble with. And while I'm prepared to listen to the 'Romantics and Luddites' I don't think I'm able to join them honestly and entirely. So if the gulf is unbridgeable then, well, I'm in it. I don't really see what to do about it either but I think there's a lot of us in that position. It's just not a position that you necessarily want to advertise...
I've just come back from some time away to this comment and was struck with a thought.
The 'scientific' position you are speaking of/defending makes perfect rational sense, but it its logic is followed it will lead to a rationalised control system which will be constructed according to the logic of the left brain, in an attempt to 'save the world'. It will not in any case save the world, and neither will it be able to offer a value system to explain why we would even want to do so.
Meanwhile, my more 'romantic' position is able to see the big holes in this approach, and to offer a more 'right brain' explanation of what lfe's meaning might be and why we might reject the above approach. But by definition, my worldview is unable to offer a big system solution, because it sees big systems as a manifestation of the problem that way of seeing has created.
This means that neither of us can 'solve the problem' the world finds itself in. This in turn leads to the conclusion that we're framing the whole question wrong. There's no 'solution.' There's not even a question. There's just a circumstance. And maybe our clever human brains are simply not up to even comprehending its fullness.
Thank you. Yes I very much agree with all that! I hope I haven't misrepresented myself. I don't have a position, though I do have a lot of questions. "There's not even a question" is the only part of what you just said that I want to disagree with... and that might just indicate an addiction to questions.
Anyway, choices are necessary, whatever scale you're working at, and it seems that allegiances are also necessary. I just wanted to point out ways that those allegiances might not be as comfortable, secure or predictable as they appear.
For a bit of context, I have found myself unable to do anything except the "rational choice" even when that choice felt like it was a violation. I wrote a piece for Dark Mountain about it (https://dark-mountain.net/beast-dreaming/).
Also, despite being trained as a scientist, the idea that science - as part of modernity - is somehow demonic has been with me since childhood. Although it has also never been my 'official position' since childhood. I just wrote something about that on my substack though I'm disturbed by what I wrote. ....and anyway there's reasons I didn't call that substack "roads, horizons and vision." :-)
There's something else, though, which is that an aversion to defending lines goes pretty deep for me. I hadn't been thinking about that when I first commented...
And when they 'accidentally' blow up an aid worker filling water jugs first they demand that it was a terrorist and the kids were collateral damage and then when the big lie stops working they lose their bleeding hearts and ask who gives a damn about aid workers and kids in far flung places. Eventually the mask always slips to expose the bankrupt ugliness hidden underneath and yet 99 out of 100 people will refuse to look. The sheep don't concern themselves with why the Shepheard protects the flock from wolves and merrily go bleating to the shepherd sharpening his knife.
From Wendell Berry's newest book: "Hope is hard to measure, and I am unsure how much hope is offered by this book. But the first step toward hope is to withhold approval from 'solutions' that are hopeless. I can do that."
By the way, Chris Smaje, a very smart commentator on all of this, calls the kind of proposal I'm critiquing here 'rescue ecomodernism'. He explains here his objections to it, which I basically concur with.
A long time ago I read something that Oppenheim(er ? ; I forget the name) wrote about the period he spent in New Mexico putting together the first atomic bomb. We should say that Oppenheim had a choice about what he was doing. He was offered what most hard core physicists dream of : an ideal laboratory setting, limitless money, resources, to work on that bomb. It is fair to say that Oppenheim can be perhaps... forgiven for his idealistic (but objective) scientific work, motivated by very good intentions, of course, because he knew not what he was doing. (Echos with the words of Jesus on the cross.) I would not like to have been in his shoes for all the money and prestige in the world, and I think that he probably lived out the rest of his days with nightly nightmares.
What is true for Oppenheim is true for other good intentioned scientists, social or not, who know not what they are doing. I can forgive them for not knowing what they are doing, because who can know what he or she is doing, but I cannot forgive them for their crass ignorance and arrogance in their attitudes.
Over the years, I think that I understand that at very high echelons of scientific competence, the hard core physicists have dispensed with the illusion ? of scientific objectivity, but the general public, and our politicians have not.
It is a little bit like observing the differences in competency ? between Saint Thomas of Aquinas and the neighborhood woman who teaches catechism... Maybe a lot, and not just a little bit.
Brilliant essay even if I'm left depressed beyond words, living in a Scotland where the government of Greens and the SNP peddle puberty blockers to nine year olds. The rebellion of a few SNP members of the Scottish Parliament last week is the one ray of hope and was at least a partial answer to a prayer. All I feel able to do is keep on with the prayers, pay with cash, and turn off location services on my phone as much as possible. Pretty pathetic, I know..
Well, yes, wisdom over information every time as far as I am concerned. Thing is these 4th Fantasies can't happen, can't scale. Digital and electricity are indivisible. Electricity needs energy to exist and the hungrier the machine the harder it is to mobilise the Ancient Sunlight. Industrial civilisation is well into overshoot.
Since the end of the paleolithic, agri-food and human craft (civilisation) had to make do with the limits of annual sunlight, which is where humanity is headed again.
Much information will be lost on the way.
I rather approve of back of envelope calculation, and it is these numbers that stare the 4th Wonks in the face - hence the fantasy. Try Philipe Bihouix French engineer and his translator, rational in both the modern and traitional sense, nous and ratio, who see the approach of the inevitable. https://techtelegraph.co.uk/a-review-of-the-age-of-low-tech-by-philippe-bihouix-2/
I am rather in favour of literacy and libraries and public health, and what I call sufficiencies. These identify with urbanisation and modernity, but are valuable at every scale. Lots of good skills and works of hand can favour wisdom. Save what we can and hope for mercy.
BTW, thanks for heads-up for Jeremy Naydler' In the Shadow of the Machine. I am getting there.
Thanks. for the link. FWIW there was a brief sketch' analysis in 2019 of the resources going to be needed in the UK in order to electrify just the UK car and light van fleet over the timetable then proposed. The authors it turned out were a bunch of geologists with interests in the global mining industries. It got a one day mention in the press, just a press release summary, and was never seen again. I was lucky to get a copy of the original and a few friends archived it on a little-used web-site. https://ecosophic-isles.org/2021/09/06/the-resource-challenges-of-the-net-zero-transition-update/
I am not sanguine about what will actually happen, and importantly, given the hard limits involved, which places will unravel, and when. The 'machine' is an insane beast.
Its nice in UK sometimes to look back on some of our old 'solutions', e.g. small village churches, local festivities. We even had Holy Wells like those in Ireland. People are still interested. It was far from Utopia but there were ways of getting by that lasted surprisingly well.
I was reading a bit of Chris Smaje's blog, A Small Farm Future, and linked in the comments one of your essays that was very relevant to the questions he was discussing. Coming from an atheistic, rationalist, perspective and working through where we are and how we need to change has brought the discussion to some very religious/spiritual topics. His responses to Monbiot were fantastic.
Thanks, Clara ; I read the whole exchange, and it was brilliant. I agree with ALMOST everything...Very thought-provoking.
One point that I find very important when discussing the "fall" in Genesis : I believe that the initial.. evil that comes into the world comes through rivalry between man and woman. Man and woman are already out of synch when the "fall" happens. That does not mean to say that we should all go around holding hands and looking at each other deep in the eyes all the time, but our discord has deep implications in the state of our natural world.
And of course, there is the prickly problem of obeying : whom to obey, when, etc. This one does not go away...
I've never heard that before. What led you to notice the rivalry or "out of synch" relationship? It sounds plausible. Although that would change the story into a different one, where the man an woman were out of synch first and then rebelled against God... seems to me like things flow down from that primary relation between man and God. Perhaps both are simultaneous?
Tonight we read Luke 10, 17-27, with the following "commandment" to love God, and your "neighbor" as yourself. To me it follows that love of God cannot be separated from love of your neighbor ; they are conjugated. But for many years now, I have felt that the "natural" ? relationship between man and woman is sacred, and that this comes from the Jewish AND Christian Bible. There is a story that when the rabbis were putting together the biblical canon, some objected that the Song of Songs was inappropriate, and Akiba ? (one of the most respected rabbis) said that you could put aside most of the Bible and the commandments, but NOT the Song of Songs. He said that it was central. So... it stayed. Man and woman are condemned to be at permanent tension with each other, but they are entwined too. Out of synch is probably inevitable ; man and woman are naturally out of synch with each other as the rabbis also noticed. They have a hypothesis that the serpent got hold of Eve after the first couple had first made love. Adam naturally fell asleep afterwards and was not around to warn Eve of the danger. Eve... was still up, and still thinking/musing about what had happened to her... (This is not my fantasy ; the rabbis have spent almost an eternity musing about what "went wrong".) As for the rivalry, the serpent itself is a rather vivid reminder of the big difference between a man and a woman : that "it" tempted Eve is.. logical.
Interesting. I wonder why Adam would have taken Eve’s word, though, if this were true? She acquiesces to the Serpent, and Adam acquiesces to her. It seems to me that they both believe because they want to believe. It is only after the Fall, when God asks Adam why he disobeyed, that Adam abdicates his responsibility, blaming Eve—and even God—for his choice (“this woman YOU gave me”). If the imbalance was fundamental before the Fall, wouldn’t Adam have been more critical of following Eve’s suggestion?
God doesn't ask Adam why he disobeyed, he simply asks "Where art thou ?"
Maybe because Adam is not in the same place after eating of the tree/fruit of the knowledge of good and evil ? In this perspective, God does not punish Adam for disobeying by barring him from the garden, because Adam is no longer IN the garden, really. That is clear from the fact that he speaks of being naked in shame and guilt, possibly. And not being in the garden means that he is faced with the consequences of his act, from which God cannot shield him. After all, man was created free... in the Judeo-Christian creation story, at any rate.
In the above commentary, I said that man and woman were "out of synch", and I meant that they live in different worlds, from a certain point of view. They are not symmetrical. This has become clearer to me in growing older. But we live in a culture that is very keen on emphasizing the ways in which we are the same. Even a culture that wants us to be the same. Can you trust somebody who you feel to be different ? Can you trust his/her word ? Why not, as long as you remember that there are differences that separate us, and separate our interests, too. I think that it is very difficult in our world to understand what difference is, and how it manifests itself. It will not allow itself to be explained and ironed out the way we would like.
In this incident, some rabbinic commentary is very tolerant of Eve's disobeying, because the rabbis say that Eve did not receive from God's mouth the commandment not to eat. The commandment was given directly to Adam, and indirectly to Eve. That makes a big difference, too.
Musing about this while writing, I think that this creation story gives a big place to Eve as an INDIRECT recipient of God's action, in a certain way. Maybe this indirectness has to do with what somebody says on Paul's most recent salon about the difference between curves and STRAIGHT direct lines ?
Personally I like art forms where both are present...
It would be hard to say at this point in history if the “out of synch” you see* was true before the Fall. I don’t know that they saw any differences until their eyes were opened. If we are to believe that the prelapsarian Eden was True and Good, I should think we must assume that that rift opens when their unity with God was severed as they are the fruit. Period to that, they lived in harmony with God and Creation.
*Objectively, I believe you are right about men and women being out of sync today—there is much to be said about how men and women view and treat each other.
God did ask Adam why he disobeyed:
9 Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?”
10 So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”
11 And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?”
12 Then the man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.”
Further, the Lord did not make a division between the roles of men and women until this point in Genesis:
16 To the woman He said:
“I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception;
In pain you shall bring forth children;
Your desire shall be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.”
As textual evidence goes, we don’t have a whole lot to go by, but this is certainly the point where woman moves from companion to subordinate. They were in the garden up to this point, and finally God bars them because if they ate the fruit of one tree, he cannot allow them to stay and eat the fruit which gives eternal life.
You are right about the context of the rabbinic commentary—Adam was given that command before Eve was created. He certainly should have known better; we know he did tell her about it because she argues with the Serpent about eating the fruit because it is forbidden.
I agree that life is very difficult when we cannot make room for difference. It seems a shame that it is so hard to enjoy differences on their own merits, as evidence of the variety of Creation. It seems to me to be a feature of the Machine—we are so much easier to deal with when we are so many Scantron forms rather than handwritten sheets.
This text has been a determining force in our collective desire to return to the garden we have made (factum not genitum) as a product, while evincing God from it, in my opinion, and what we call "the machine" is a civilisation that has reacted to this text... since Descartes in "Le Discours sur la Méthode", or even before, by trying to create a world that is a perversion of this creation story, as in turning it upside down, to escape from living in a fallen world.
Personally I am not unhappy living in a fallen world, and I have no desire to return to the garden... through salvation by Christ or through futile and barbaric human attempts to create an unfallen world.
This text appears to justify the idea that death and sexual desire arise because the world is fallen, and I will not accept that. That does not mean that I condone all forms of sexual liberty, but the idea that death, and sexuality are the result of a fallen world does not attract me whatsoever. Unfortunately there seems to be a universal human tendancy to destroy our sexuality... in favor of the machine... and as for immortality... what a hell it would be...
I am so very glad you are writing these essays Paul. It's like an island of sanity for me in this crazy time.
I went to the VERGE conference in Silicon Valley in 2019 to drum up business for my regenerative agriculture startup. It was my wake up call that "green" has gone mainstream, and as you say, it is not any version of green that I can identify with. It's Machine Green to the core.
Let's celebrate the fact that so many companies now have a Chief Sustainability Officer! Universities are rushing to offer degrees in this area. Now we can finally make some progress! Our institutions will save us! Oh, wait...
Chesterton once wrote in a commentary on Peter Pan that "there is an advantage in root...and the name of it is fruit".
"Love, God, Place, Culture" as Paul points out are actually what make life worth living, and can only be fruits of rootedness, instead of "business models" enabled by the cloud.
I am about to go away until early next week, and I won't be on't Internet during that time, so I can't engage with any further comments here for now. But keep them coming, and I'll look forward to digging in next week. Thanks to you all.
Paul, I haven't read much Monbiot in a while, but it's interesting to see his about-face regarding ecomodernism and the 'datafication' and hyper-rationalization of nature/society. I recall two articles Monbiot wrote in 2015 when he was squarely on your side...
In this article (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2015/sep/24/meet-the-ecomodernists-ignorant-of-history-and-paradoxically-old-fashioned) he accuses the people in favour of solving environmental problems through science and technology of being wrong on their assumptions about farming and urbanisation. (He quotes from Dark Mountain and lauds Chris Smaje to make his case.) Monbiot writes: "There is no attempt in the [Ecomodernist] manifesto to interrogate the concept of modernisation, to determine what it means and what it doesn’t, to examine its problems as well as the benefits it delivers. Instead there appears to be a crude and unexplored assumption that people working in the formal, urban economy are modern, while those on the outside are not."
And in another article (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/16/pope-encyclical-value-of-living-world) he flatly rejects the 'datafication' of nature, instead reminding us that our relationship to the natural world is about love, not just goods and services. He writes: "The reality is that we care [about nature] because we love. Nature appealed to our hearts, when we were children, long before it appealed to our heads, let alone our pockets. Yet we seem to believe we can persuade people to change their lives through the cold, mechanical power of reason, supported by statistics."
Further: "Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect."
'Food' for thought...
I hadn't put my finger on quite why I had begun to disagree with George Monbiot so much. From being inspired by much of his writing a few years back, much of what he says now leaves me cold. Whilst this is probably partly down to my own journey and evolving view of the world, it has coincided precisely with the period you've noted here.
I like Monbiot and have got half way through Regenesis and much of it I found fascinating. The statistics about land use and animal farming are frankly terrifying. It seems that having laid the ground for a massive shift in faming practices he them takes the wrong fork in the road. I think i got stuck in the book as I could not bring myself to go down that road
How DARE you not be online 24/7, Paul. I'm reporting you to...someone. Not sure who quite yet, though.
I've read all the essays on here, and I'm pretty sure Paul has been clear that there's no voluntary return to "premodern" life at any meaningful scale. I can't figure why people assign to critiques of modernity the motivation to go back to a thousand years ago. Very few people actually argue that, if not because they wouldn't prefer it, because it's obviously not going to happen. The stronger argument in favor of "premodern" life is: we're headed there whether we want it or not. That argument rests on sticking your finger in the wind and feeling out the trends: industrial civilization will destroy itself. No one knows the future, but that ain't a bad bet. So, I don't see a dualism in prognosticating a return to (or revival of) machine-free life. It's presumptuous, yes, but as you say: "the neo-green vision can't solve our environmental crisis," and since we both have an indomitable neo-green vision and an overwhelming environmental crisis, it appears as if the center ain't going to hold. Perhaps you have a different vision for a future in which we keep our electromagnetic things and still live within Earth's limits and somehow cause an orgy of rewilding in decrepit places that reverses the mass extinction? Because I've gone looking for that (not because I think it's ideal, but because it's more realistic), and all I see are phantom spreadsheets and slick-coated "circular cities." I'd love to know if you see something different.
Agreed that there's a dangerous tint to going full-throttle into apocalyptic thinking. Personally, I've been trying to watch that tendency in myself the past year. And agreed that this apocalyptic thinking can actually become hypnotic, even a temperament (or style) that can be imperious (I consider the "collapse aware" phrasing, for instance, on par with the "we're conscious" or "we're awake" crew of new-agers).
I used to want collapse. I was convinced by Derrick Jensen et al that a collapse would be morally preferable than business-as-usual. I no longer hold that position. A collapse at scale terrifies me, and breaks my heart for the kinds of myriad sufferings it would bring forth. So I don't want to see that (though it's hard for me to utter that given the horrible destructions of life on Earth from business-as-usual). And yet, I'd bet it's coming at scale. I'm not preparing for it (I think prepping is futile and often reinforces the worst tendencies of individualism), but I think it's likely.
And yes, that "likely" can't rest on fingers in the wind alone (though flight patterns of birds works!), I was of course being flip. I'm a decade into trying to sort through this stuff with the knowledge I can find available from varieties of cultures and approaches. Still, I get that one must always hold doubt, so I remain persuadable otherwise. My overall point is: it can be equally naive to live as if this machine-world will sort out the existential crises it's brought into existence. So, an honest discourse about what a future might look like that is machine-restrained and closer to what pre-industrial life exhibited is important to consider if we're interested in designing now the kinds of cultures that may last past the storms.
But I'll also lay out my bias: I am one of these "Romantics" who thinks pre-industrial life is better not just for Earth but people. I understand the objections to that. I just disagree with them. I've had some kind of bugging internal sense my whole life that the whole project is "off," and that's the best I can make sense of it at middle-age. I don't think my position is apocalyptic or death-inducing or Pollyanish, though it certainly could be if I didn't take the process of thinking through these things seriously enough. So, maybe that's just my point with critiques of "going back": that a person can arrive honestly and with integrity that "going back" (which I put in quotes because I think these things are circular rather than linear) is attractive and morally preferable (though how that "going back" is achieved may be monstrous and hellish and I don't believe the ends ever justify the means).
Thanks for the comments.
If you want my view on 'progress vs apocalypse', you might want to read the (short) Dark Mountain manifesto which I wrote in 2009.
Also, previous essays in this series trace this question quite exhaustively, and also dig into the word 'apocalypse', which does not have the meaning you ascribe it here.
It's true we can get caught in an either/or bind. The modern mind is like that. We are not going to be returning to any particular time in history. Nonetheless, the collapse of this industrial fossil-fuelled mega-culture is already here. The writing is on the wall, and is manifesting already in a changing climate and much more. The whole basis of this essay is a claim that the world's vast human population cannot be fed without destroying remaining ecossystems, and the arguments that ensue about how to deal with that.
If you want to cling to modernity and reject the 'rank susperstitions' of the past you are of course free to do so - but note as you do that this framing (ignorant past, enlightened present) is precisely the kind of dualism you've just been railing against. My take is different. What we might call modernity is essentially a war against reality: against limits, and against nature itself. It is a story we tell ourselves about our own transcendence. Pre-modern societies were, for all their imperfections, at least partly attempts to align themselves with that reality; the reality of nature and of its creator. The past offered up plenty of tyrannies: the present has offered plenty more. That's the human mean.
I don't think our spirit is roaming out into space at all. I think it is focused obsessively on ourselves. Apocalypse - unveiling - is certainly the likely result. I'm not interested in larping the middle ages. But I reject the values of this anticulture.
I don't know...a good medieval larp now and again.
"WWI and II, the Holocaust, Nagasaki, The Cold War, The Double Helix, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, the Internet, and Globalization!"
These are all products of modernity. The mass horrors as well as the scientific discoveries. We wouldn't have had them, at least not at industrial scale, without modernity. And that we aren't still penned in by rank delusions, if not actual, technical superstitions, is laughable. As for modern dentistry, there is some indication that our teeth are worse now than before, hence all the orthodontic work. Perhaps due to the lack of hard food to chew as toddlers due to soft food and pacifiers, if the latter are even still used. But I won't stake what I am saying on that.
But I will concede that we like, or have at least grown accustomed to a lot that the industrial era has provided for us. Most of us probably wouldn't even be alive without it, so there is that. It has made many of us more comfortable, though I doubt it has enlarged our spirit, probably to the contrary by the look of things.
But all that is beside the point. The question isn't whether we like what industrialism has brought us, but whether it can be sustained. There is good reason to think that it cannot. If so, what next? What we prefer won't matter at all.
If it can be sustained, why even bother with kooks like us? The internet is vast and there are many mansions...
Hi, Chris I agree that traditionalists can sometimes be narrow-minded, idealistic, and moralizing. I saw someone on twitter once say that they should change the DSM to consider anyone who wasn’t spending their life homesteading/rewilding/living a low carbon footprint lifestyle as having narcissistic personality disorder, and I find that kind of attitude to be divisive and unhelpful. Moreover, I agree that we can’t go back in time -- we’ve eaten the apple, so to speak. However, where I disagree is that the articles written here full into that bucket and lack nuance or careful thought. I personally subscribe because I feel they are written with a certain amount of integrity, and a desire to truly understand the roots of the problem, rather than just vent about it. There was some frustration apparent in this most recent essay, but overall I don’t find Paul is someone who claims to have The Answer, let alone it being for us all to go back in time. If that were the case, I’d be just as disenchanted with these writings as I am at everyone else who claims to have a monopoly on what it will take to “save the world.”
The audience has a mix of people but I’ve had enough positive interactions on here that I stick around!
You're conflating two different things: protest tactics and political worldviews.
'Fascism' is a worldview, or a system, based on a philosophy, like communism or liberalism. I'd bet a lot of money that if you were to look into the politics of most people involved in Just Stop Oil the great majority would be well to the left. Of course, there are plenty of left wing authoritarian philosophies too, and they've actually done more historical damage than fascism. But again I doub't you'd find much support for them. Look at their demands: they're not calling for a coup; instead, they want to persaude the elected government to act. In that sense, they very much are democrats.
I think what's going on here is a classic case of direct action in a democratic society. It's a tactic as old as Gandhi and as venerable. You may strongly disagree, but while it may be annoying (or inspiring) it is neither fascist nor authoritarian. It's an attempt to use pressure to force change.
I also wonder that. The good news is that I only plan to write one more essay about the symptoms. After that I'm going to start wondering aloud if there is a cure. Or at least, an escape ...
Thank you for this essay and for continuing to stare unflinchingly into the abyss and so eloquently share what you see. Yes, it is depressing, and we would all rather not know, but if we are to be dragged down into it not knowing will have been a temporary consolation and a dishonest one - it is impossible not to see that something new, strange, and horrible is overtaking us.
I feel as if I raised my family in Arcadia long, long, ago instead of suburbia in the 80’s and 90’s. It was so very different, so wholesome, so much more of a piece with everything that went before, our ethnic, working class, immigrant roots. This feels like a very sudden change yet the path must’ve been set long ago, it is inherent the deification of progress and belief in the evolution of the spirit, in direct contradiction to the evidences of original sin which seem incontrovertible. How after the bloodiest century in the history of civilization can so many claim that man has the wisdom to control every detail of life? Where did this wisdom come from? It is irrational and dangerous when viewed from a historical or philosophical perspective but our elites have conveniently gutted those disciplines just in time to roll out their new regime.
I am looking forward to seeing your ideas for resisting being assimilated. I am glad that I am not younger, at 61 I will not be starting over, but I have six grandchildren under ten whom I would like to think have some chance at living as human beings rather than serfs of the new world order.
Agree, Kati B!
It seems the Machine's greatest trick was to create the 'Machine Greens', rolling them out as useful idiots to do its bidding. It would be truly comical if it wasn't so dangerous.
Always recall R.S. Thomas:
What to do? Stay green.
Never mind the machine,
Whose fuel is human souls
Live large, man, and dream small.
And as Thomas made abundantly clear, there is no way we can interact with the Machine without becoming tainted ourselves:
“The body is mine and the soul is mine”
says the machine. “I am at the dark source
where the good is indistinguishable
from evil. I fill my tanks up
and there is war. I empty them
and there is not peace. I am the sound,
not of the world breathing, but
of the catch rather in the world’s breath.”
Is there a contraceptive
for the machine, that we may enjoy
intercourse with it without being overrun
by vocabulary? We go up
into the temple of ourselves
and give thanks that we are not
as the machine is. But it waits
for us outside, knowing that when
we emerge it is into the noise
of its hand beating on the breast’s
iron as Pharisaically as ourselves.
If there is any truth to The Iron Law Of Oligarchy, once they get power, all human systems will eventually be taken over by sociopaths.
This is the lesson from Lord Of The Rings, among others.
Good article. I spent most of my life on the far left: communist, anarchist, green neo-pagan, etc. In the end, a few years ago I could no longer recognize the lefties I grew up with. The Green Left used to look to Schumacher, Zerzan, and Fredy Perlman. Now they look up to Bill Gates. The 180 degree about face to Machineophilic environmentalism and politics, combined with the woke revolution, has completely turned me off of that side of the political spectrum. Of course, the conventional Right is just as disgusting as always, but those who are being labelled fascists I find quite simpatico. The life and work of Pentti Linkola is a shining beacon to our debased times. Lately, I have often been called an ecofascist. I do not identify with this term, since, as we all know, fascism was a Machine-ideology, but I take it as a sign that I am going in the right direction. Sometimes if a world gone mad can't find the words to applaud those still right in their heads, the people fighting for truth, beauty, and goodness, have to receive their nourishment and encouragement through the hatred of the robotic masses. At any rate, we need to transcend the left-right divide and think only of the Divine, which we are all part of, and which also penetrates every cell, every atom in the realm of manifestation. As Lawrence wrote:
"Now above all is the time for the minorities of men,
those who are neither bourgeois nor bolshevist, but true to life,
to gather and fortify themselves, in every class, in every country, in every
race.
Instead of which, the minorities that still see the gleams of life
submit abjectly to the blind mechanical traffic-streams of those
horrors
the stone-blind bourgeois, and the stone-blind bolshevist;
and pander to them."
Same. Five years ago I considered myself a left progressive eco-feminist. Things are 180 degrees different now. I walk in upside-down world. Covid and the summer of 2020 changed everything. Most of the environmental movement had been absorbed into the Machine, but I hadn't noticed.
If you are no longer a feminist, what do you want the role of women to be? Are we to return to the status of chattel, ignorant, powerless, voiceless and consigned to lives of brutal, boring shit work until we die?
Have you read Mary Harrington aka the Reactionary Feminist? I would be curious about your take on what she has to say.
Pray, which of the many thrilling careers available in the current world seem to you not to be “brutal, boring shit work”?
Having been an academic, a cubicle worker and manager, and also a person who stays home with my children, I can attest that the work of literally cleaning shit is far more edifying than the soul-sucking grind offered in the guise of “feminist liberation.” Whatever it may have begun as, feminism has become another ideology absorbed into the Revolutions of modernity, codified into technological solutions for messy human problems.
This is the great bait and switch of modern "liberation". We are told that a life of bbs work is freedom.
You were able to make that decision but what to deny all other women that choice. Also, simply getting paid elevates drudgery in an office above housework. At least the employee has some agency in her own life. Housewives have NONE.
Your comment presupposes that getting paid is an ultimate good, and that those types of work that are for money are automatically more worthwhile than those for which you are not paid. Money is necessary, but it is not the ultimate goal or good in my life.
I never claimed to deny anyone a choice; just because I found the grind of people paying me money to spend years of my life trying to afford laundry detergent and bigger cars wasn’t for me, doesn’t mean I am making my choices a prescription for everyone else. The life of a housewife is hard, and it can be drudgery. But so was sitting in traffic for hours a day, being on call, never knowing if I could take a weekend off. Yet somehow that drudgery is inherently more worthy because some faceless bureaucrat deposits money in my account? That was not my lived experience, but if yours is different I am glad that you have found a work life that makes you happy.
Money isn’t the ultimate good, but I also think it’s the most tangible way to show value. ‘You get what you pay for,’ as they say. Lots of my job tasks were distilled tedium, and I hated traffic with the heat of a million supernovas, but the money I made gave me freedom to do things I really enjoyed without groveling to my husband or passively waiting for someone to notice and give me what they thought I needed — and they were almost always wrong.
Traditionalists too often discount the importance of exercising one’s own agency, since very few traditionalists in my experience have been denied agency. You note that you made the decision to leave the paid workforce yourself. Imagine having someone force you out. My position is that each person deserves agency in their own lives as much as possible. Anything else is tyranny.
And I notice that the author has never given an answer to my question.
I didn’t see your comment appear. It wasn’t an intentional slight. Apologies!
No problem at all! And it took me 2 weeks to see your response, so my apologies as well.
The total reign of quantity over quality.
... or in Peter Wessel Zapffe's words:
"6 times 7 is 42 -- whether it's dirt or daisies"
Iain McGilchrist explores the challenges associated with left-brain dominance in this fascinating RSA animation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI
Also check out these videos from McGilchrist, based on the themes of his latest book, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. In general, this book is a phenomenal touchstone for working out our understanding of the deeper ontological, spiritual-religious roots of the situation. He starts with the brain science, moves through physics and philosophy and lands the two volume work in an exploration of the sacred.
[1 hour] This interview with Mark Vernon is titled The Attack On Life and Understanding, it hits on the way consciousness shifted during COVID: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNB_1ML_MVE&t=354s
[3 minutes] Are extremist and dogmatic positions in our culture a driving force in the collapse of civilization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RfXg7i1ZDM
[53 minutes] Discussion of the coronavirus situation with Mark Tyrell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STij2de52_4&t=100s
Oh thank you so much for writing this!
Always a pleasure, my fellow eco-fascist ;-)
I knew it!
Damn my loose tongue!
I feel the need to explain - as briefly as I can - why, even just five years ago, I would have been infuriated by this argument. In fact, I would have been infuriated with myself for even paying it any attention. Others, like me but more sure of themselves would not be commenting here now.
Basically it comes down to the (correct) statement that "we have no five point plan of our own." It would mystify me when someone - usually with a humanities or social science degree - would observe somebody else - usually with a natural science degree - embracing some new technological or technocratic development and assume that, because they embraced it, it meant they approved of it. It doesn't follow at all. I can quote some peer-reviewed articles if needed!
As far as I can see, it's a deeply held foundational belief of social scientists that human history is about choice. That it didn't have to be this way, that we can always choose otherwise. Natural scientists grow up in a wider culture that believes this but in a professional culture that is, at best, agnostic. And it's hard to believe.
For an old school conservationist (which is not the same thing as an environmentalist, of course) I think it is very difficult to get away from the belief that the 'problem' is simply humans. Not any force within human history or culture but all of us. We don't generally want to say that or think that but not saying it and not thinking it often feels like a form of denialism, rightly or wrongly.
So people who are coming more from the social science or political side want to know why we are colluding with the enemy. We always have been. Give us another option.
Good comment, thank you.
I'm not sure the division into humanities people and science people is quite right. Plenty of those who are pushing the neo-green agenda, including some I am critiquing here and plenty more I have known, have no scientific background. Many humanities graduate types also enthusiastically support the tech agenda also. Read the ecomodernist manifesto, and indeed the kind of work that Monbiot has been doing for years, and you don't see 'science', but politics. It's always presented in a high moral tone, as if (and sometimes this is baldly stated) a rejection of the arguments brings with it a responsibility for mass death.
But I think you're saying something interesting and important. And I agree. It's one of the things I said in Dark Ecology, which I linked to above. The neo-greens were largely right about how the old green agenda won't fly in a world like this one. Thus, we have no five-point plan. And apart from 'I wouldn't start from here', there is no obvious alternative.
Except one, of course: embrace less. Do it on a global scale, politically. Live within our means. See the world as sacred. We know how to do this. We could do it. We have done it. But the fact is that we won't. I know this, and so do the Machine Greens. But I am unable to go where they want to take me. Many, as I say, are well-intentioned. But is that argument enough to embrace technologies which will remake the entire world at the genetic level? Rebuild all of creation in their image? No: and in fact, good intentions very often take us to hell.
For me, I end up always at the same question: where is the red line? I worry that these people don't have one, and never will. But I have to draw mine. I would rather stop here and take the consequences. The reality is, in my view, that we do not have the capability to 'manage the world' in anything like the way these people want us to, and every time we have tried we have built a tyranny. I don't want to join in building the next one.
We are all in many ways--too many ways products of the machine. The War of competing ideologies is an inescapable aspect of which "operating system" runs the show. The war of ideologies is necessarily top down and elitist.
I think we need to start at the opposite end. A practice of purging ourselves of our acquired machine ideologies and assumptions. And a beginning of restoring ourselves--as possible--to a more natural state of human existence. It is all still there within us. There needs to be a 12-step group for giving up the machine. That might sound like parody, but I am completely serious. We are addicted to this whether we want to admit that or not.
Also, contemplative traditions around the world and for thousands of years have developed practices for dismantling the human will to power and healing delusions. Delusions of grandeur and self-godhood among them. This is a place that we need to put our focus. Small local contemplative groups. What could be called micro-sketes. Nobody has to agree on all that much other than to get together and sit in silence. And then have an ongoing conversation about it and our current situation. And maybe a nice potluck dinner...
“There needs to be a 12-step group for giving up the machine. That might sound like parody, but I am completely serious. We are addicted to this whether we want to admit that or not.”
I was reflecting on this lately as well. It’s hard to give up an addiction halfway, or even ten percent. If you’re an alcoholic, you don’t want to think, “Well, I haven’t had any whiskey for three weeks, so a little sip won’t hurt”. If we really are in something like addiction or (perhaps a better word) “dependence”, then a full break is the only way out.
The thing is, I’m not sure how realistic this is for most people. Our lives are so bound up with new and emerging technologies that pulling out of the system would require a new place for us “to go”, where we can live and function as individuals, families, communities.
A more likely scenario, I suspect (and fear), is that the Machine project will go horribly wrong at some point, and the addiction will be broken for us, suddenly and painfully.
I like the idea of 12 step groups for giving up the machine. I don’t believe we should not contemplate giving up an addiction halfway. Going cold turkey is not practical nor feasible, and damn hard. Whatever much we can give up is one step won in the fight. And as we grow more aware and stronger in our mutual comfort and support, we could give up more. At the very least, a 12 step group for giving up the machine will bring the problem to the forefront and allow people to acknowledge it, recognise it and talk about it.
If one isn’t going cold turkey, but attempting to be gradual, then apart from a lot of self-discipline and conviction I think it helps to have people who one is accountable to (e.g., spouses, family, friends) and who share the same commitment.
This sounds like something Augustine said about dealing with gluttony vs lust. One can abstain from sex entirely and so deal with the sexual passion, but not so with food. My very shabby paraphrase. But the idea that there are some sins we have to deal with but cannot do so in a black or white way seems relevant.
I think you are right. As far as I can tell much of what motivates an alcoholic to stick with AA is that if he doesn't it will likely mean his own death. This is, I think, also why there is seemingly an intense core community of 12-steppers, as well as a cultural exceptional ability to find camaraderie between otherwise culturally and politically antagonistic people. There is a need, and it is dire.
Though I agree that a 12-step for machine civilization is unlikely to take hold on a large scale, that doesn't mean that those who are motivated can't join with others to try it. Who knows? It might provide an opportunity for a different kind of sobriety and for a degree and intensity of community that is nearly impossible to find otherwise. It would only take small groups to start.
And rather than having to figure out "how it could be done" abstractly and in advance--which is an impossible task, I think, and indicative of a kind of ideological, technological mode of thinking--it would be worked out concretely between actual, living individuals face to face in an actual, lived situation. The latter is far more tractable than the former.
“it would be worked out concretely between actual, living individuals face to face in an actual, lived situation…”
Yes, and I think that the small groups that will probably succeed and thrive in the long run are those who already live within local reach of each other, no more than walking distance or a short ride, and where there is enough diversity of profession and skills to support an ordinary community. Living near an Amish settlement probably wouldn’t hurt either!
Peter, I've found the spot you describe (I think, I hope).... near the Amish, near sawmills, blacksmiths, horse-powered farms, near other Christian homeschoolers.
This link is to a story about one of the neighboring farms:
https://www.mofga.org/stories/farming/working-together-as-a-family-at-farr-homestead/
The analogy is a good one. The modern medical model of addiction places the blame on substances and their addictive qualities, or on genetics. But addiction is, in fact, a method of self-soothing. You can be addicted to anything, because it is about your feelings and not about the Thing. You can stop being an alcoholic and become addicted to sugar, or shopping, or or or. But the danger with the Machine is much the same, because both are an issue of worldview. Addicts do not possess the tools to handle the world in a way that feels safe to them. The world feels fundamentally dangerous and they can only cope with the limited tools they have. To unlearn your own feelings—a lifetime of relating to the world in a certain way—that’s a big ask. To try to live every day aware of the Machine worldview and trying to see all the ways we have internalized those ways of seeing, feeling, and being, would certainly be easier with a group of similarly aware people. Though I suppose that is sort of what is going on here!
Thanks for replying and for not taking offence! And I'll reply just to this for now or I'll never reply. I just went and re-read Dark Ecology and it still gave me a shudder even though I knew the twist was coming.
Apologies. If I find myself saying 'let me explain why I used to be angry about this thing but am not angry any more,' I must remember to be careful. I'm not as grown-up as I think I am. Even if that's not who I am any more I'm still resentful at feeling misunderstood. And to a large extent it is still who I am. To a large extent I can't exactly help it.
George Monbiot did the same undergraduate degree that I did, more or less. And the fact is, that when you say that in his writing, or in the ecomodernist manifesto, 'you don't see science, you see politics,' I think you might not be asking the right question. Or not the one I want you to ask anyway. Yes it's politics but it's the kind of politics scientists in particular are likely to have and... not necessarily because we want to.
So I think a difference between where I am coming from and where you are coming from is that you worry that they don't have a red line whereas I worry that I don't. Because I can't see boundaries and lines as anything other than artificial. If I wanted a rule to define a machine I'd say that it depends, for its existence, on lines having been drawn. I can't see anything as sacred in the sense of being untouchable, of being other. I read in a Karen Armstrong book recently that the Hebrew word translated 'Holy' in the Old Testament actually has connotations of being other or apart. I find it very hard to believe in that kind of sacredness. Of believing that there is something that it is literally impossible to damage or that cannot be damaged without terrible unavoidable consequences. I don't say that I know there is no such thing as the sacred, that I know there are no lines that should never be crossed, only that I find it hard to believe in them and I am pretty sure this is because of the way I was taught.
I don't know enough about Stewart Brand to guess what he really meant with "we are as gods and we'd better get good at it." When I heard it I thought "yes! This guy understands and is presumably as horrified as I am." I was surprised when people responded with 'what arrogance.' I had thought the statement was made in fear.
Thanks again for commenting.
The question of lines and boundaries might be the key. Again, I can see precisely what you mean. And again I've written about this before, somewhere or other, in that same published essay collection. I believe in lines. But I can also see that there is no 'scientific' basis to do so, and neither is there any realistic likelihood of a human race with our level of power and technological know-how ever respecting them, or agreeing on them. It takes a shared sense of the sacred, I think, to respect those lines. That's what my last essay was about.
So in one sense I understand the 'neo-green' prospectus, if it is, in Smaje's words, 'rescue ecomodernism.' But I still have two problems. One is that when I listen to the rhetoric put out by Brand, Kareiva, Monbiot etc, it doesn't strike the note you're striking here. I don't hear, 'look at all this power we have, let's be realistic, we need to take these regrettable measures to save x, y or z.' I could understand that, and sympathise if not agree. Instead, I hear something more like 'this is the future, it's inevitable, it's benificent and we should have no time for the Romantics and Luddites who think otherwise.' Perhaps that's just tone: most of the people pushing this stuff tend to be aggressive men who like winning (though not Brand, who strikes me as more thoughtful.) But I think it's more.
This is why I said in the essay that the gulf was unbridgeable. I think it probably is. I keep coming back to this. I don't really see what to do about it.
One final thought: you say you can't see boundaries as anything but 'artificial', and I know what you mean. But I'm guessing that by 'artificial' you mean human-made rather than naturally-occurring. But by this measure, every part of human culture is 'artificial.' And all of that involves boundaries. So while a scientist might not see boundaries, I would suggest that this may be because a sicentist does not see culture. But culture is the stuff we do. Which is you why you need artists.
Wow, you're fast!
Was looking up some peer-reviewed articles! Here's one out of Cambridge:
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pan3.10391
In the enormous figure 2 it notes that people with a biological educational background are more likely to favour 'science-led ecocentrism' and so are people from Oceania, N America and Europe (in decreasing order). However these people *aren't* more likely to favour 'conservation through capitalism', not even the North Americans. What makes you most likely to favour *that* is being 'very senior.'
This is a survey of conservation professionals. And investigates correlation, not causation. A drawback of the survey is that it divides people based on the kinds of things which people say in print, which is not all the things they say, still less all the things they think.
Anyway there definitely are people who believe that 'it's the future, it's inevitable it's beneficent, and we should have no time for those who think otherwise.' But, of those are 4 propositions, I never personally believed proposition 3 (though my parents strongly did and do) and I've now rejected 4 (obviously!) but 1 and 2 I still have a lot of trouble with. And while I'm prepared to listen to the 'Romantics and Luddites' I don't think I'm able to join them honestly and entirely. So if the gulf is unbridgeable then, well, I'm in it. I don't really see what to do about it either but I think there's a lot of us in that position. It's just not a position that you necessarily want to advertise...
I've just come back from some time away to this comment and was struck with a thought.
The 'scientific' position you are speaking of/defending makes perfect rational sense, but it its logic is followed it will lead to a rationalised control system which will be constructed according to the logic of the left brain, in an attempt to 'save the world'. It will not in any case save the world, and neither will it be able to offer a value system to explain why we would even want to do so.
Meanwhile, my more 'romantic' position is able to see the big holes in this approach, and to offer a more 'right brain' explanation of what lfe's meaning might be and why we might reject the above approach. But by definition, my worldview is unable to offer a big system solution, because it sees big systems as a manifestation of the problem that way of seeing has created.
This means that neither of us can 'solve the problem' the world finds itself in. This in turn leads to the conclusion that we're framing the whole question wrong. There's no 'solution.' There's not even a question. There's just a circumstance. And maybe our clever human brains are simply not up to even comprehending its fullness.
Thank you. Yes I very much agree with all that! I hope I haven't misrepresented myself. I don't have a position, though I do have a lot of questions. "There's not even a question" is the only part of what you just said that I want to disagree with... and that might just indicate an addiction to questions.
Anyway, choices are necessary, whatever scale you're working at, and it seems that allegiances are also necessary. I just wanted to point out ways that those allegiances might not be as comfortable, secure or predictable as they appear.
For a bit of context, I have found myself unable to do anything except the "rational choice" even when that choice felt like it was a violation. I wrote a piece for Dark Mountain about it (https://dark-mountain.net/beast-dreaming/).
Also, despite being trained as a scientist, the idea that science - as part of modernity - is somehow demonic has been with me since childhood. Although it has also never been my 'official position' since childhood. I just wrote something about that on my substack though I'm disturbed by what I wrote. ....and anyway there's reasons I didn't call that substack "roads, horizons and vision." :-)
There's something else, though, which is that an aversion to defending lines goes pretty deep for me. I hadn't been thinking about that when I first commented...
And when they 'accidentally' blow up an aid worker filling water jugs first they demand that it was a terrorist and the kids were collateral damage and then when the big lie stops working they lose their bleeding hearts and ask who gives a damn about aid workers and kids in far flung places. Eventually the mask always slips to expose the bankrupt ugliness hidden underneath and yet 99 out of 100 people will refuse to look. The sheep don't concern themselves with why the Shepheard protects the flock from wolves and merrily go bleating to the shepherd sharpening his knife.
You're talking about awful things but I don't get what you're saying about them. Who are they?
From Wendell Berry's newest book: "Hope is hard to measure, and I am unsure how much hope is offered by this book. But the first step toward hope is to withhold approval from 'solutions' that are hopeless. I can do that."
Right! But you want to be pretty sure they're hopeless, right?
I believe Berry also said something along the lines of "I have hope. But that doesn't mean I'm optimistic."
By the way, Chris Smaje, a very smart commentator on all of this, calls the kind of proposal I'm critiquing here 'rescue ecomodernism'. He explains here his objections to it, which I basically concur with.
https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/?p=1989
As I said in the piece: ask the wrong questions, get the wrong worldview.
I think the wrong worldview gets you to ask the wrong questions.
Glad you are calling attention to Chris.
A long time ago I read something that Oppenheim(er ? ; I forget the name) wrote about the period he spent in New Mexico putting together the first atomic bomb. We should say that Oppenheim had a choice about what he was doing. He was offered what most hard core physicists dream of : an ideal laboratory setting, limitless money, resources, to work on that bomb. It is fair to say that Oppenheim can be perhaps... forgiven for his idealistic (but objective) scientific work, motivated by very good intentions, of course, because he knew not what he was doing. (Echos with the words of Jesus on the cross.) I would not like to have been in his shoes for all the money and prestige in the world, and I think that he probably lived out the rest of his days with nightly nightmares.
What is true for Oppenheim is true for other good intentioned scientists, social or not, who know not what they are doing. I can forgive them for not knowing what they are doing, because who can know what he or she is doing, but I cannot forgive them for their crass ignorance and arrogance in their attitudes.
Over the years, I think that I understand that at very high echelons of scientific competence, the hard core physicists have dispensed with the illusion ? of scientific objectivity, but the general public, and our politicians have not.
It is a little bit like observing the differences in competency ? between Saint Thomas of Aquinas and the neighborhood woman who teaches catechism... Maybe a lot, and not just a little bit.
Maybe worth noting also that he famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita which is a dialogue between God and a man who questions his role in a war.
Thank you. I will try to remember that.
Brilliant essay even if I'm left depressed beyond words, living in a Scotland where the government of Greens and the SNP peddle puberty blockers to nine year olds. The rebellion of a few SNP members of the Scottish Parliament last week is the one ray of hope and was at least a partial answer to a prayer. All I feel able to do is keep on with the prayers, pay with cash, and turn off location services on my phone as much as possible. Pretty pathetic, I know..
Well, yes, wisdom over information every time as far as I am concerned. Thing is these 4th Fantasies can't happen, can't scale. Digital and electricity are indivisible. Electricity needs energy to exist and the hungrier the machine the harder it is to mobilise the Ancient Sunlight. Industrial civilisation is well into overshoot.
Since the end of the paleolithic, agri-food and human craft (civilisation) had to make do with the limits of annual sunlight, which is where humanity is headed again.
Much information will be lost on the way.
I rather approve of back of envelope calculation, and it is these numbers that stare the 4th Wonks in the face - hence the fantasy. Try Philipe Bihouix French engineer and his translator, rational in both the modern and traitional sense, nous and ratio, who see the approach of the inevitable. https://techtelegraph.co.uk/a-review-of-the-age-of-low-tech-by-philippe-bihouix-2/
I am rather in favour of literacy and libraries and public health, and what I call sufficiencies. These identify with urbanisation and modernity, but are valuable at every scale. Lots of good skills and works of hand can favour wisdom. Save what we can and hope for mercy.
BTW, thanks for heads-up for Jeremy Naydler' In the Shadow of the Machine. I am getting there.
Precisely.
Their plans for a technological dystopia can never happen. There are not enough rare earth metals in existence to make it work.
See the fabulous Prof Michaux's meticulous report.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/23/is-there-enough-metal-to-replace-oil/
The truth is, small scale eco living is the only feasible solution.
Thanks. for the link. FWIW there was a brief sketch' analysis in 2019 of the resources going to be needed in the UK in order to electrify just the UK car and light van fleet over the timetable then proposed. The authors it turned out were a bunch of geologists with interests in the global mining industries. It got a one day mention in the press, just a press release summary, and was never seen again. I was lucky to get a copy of the original and a few friends archived it on a little-used web-site. https://ecosophic-isles.org/2021/09/06/the-resource-challenges-of-the-net-zero-transition-update/
I am not sanguine about what will actually happen, and importantly, given the hard limits involved, which places will unravel, and when. The 'machine' is an insane beast.
Its nice in UK sometimes to look back on some of our old 'solutions', e.g. small village churches, local festivities. We even had Holy Wells like those in Ireland. People are still interested. It was far from Utopia but there were ways of getting by that lasted surprisingly well.
I was reading a bit of Chris Smaje's blog, A Small Farm Future, and linked in the comments one of your essays that was very relevant to the questions he was discussing. Coming from an atheistic, rationalist, perspective and working through where we are and how we need to change has brought the discussion to some very religious/spiritual topics. His responses to Monbiot were fantastic.
This blog post is where the Christian worldview comes in explicitly, From Genesis to Farming, and the next two which are responses:
https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/?p=2003
Thanks, Clara ; I read the whole exchange, and it was brilliant. I agree with ALMOST everything...Very thought-provoking.
One point that I find very important when discussing the "fall" in Genesis : I believe that the initial.. evil that comes into the world comes through rivalry between man and woman. Man and woman are already out of synch when the "fall" happens. That does not mean to say that we should all go around holding hands and looking at each other deep in the eyes all the time, but our discord has deep implications in the state of our natural world.
And of course, there is the prickly problem of obeying : whom to obey, when, etc. This one does not go away...
I've never heard that before. What led you to notice the rivalry or "out of synch" relationship? It sounds plausible. Although that would change the story into a different one, where the man an woman were out of synch first and then rebelled against God... seems to me like things flow down from that primary relation between man and God. Perhaps both are simultaneous?
Clara
Tonight we read Luke 10, 17-27, with the following "commandment" to love God, and your "neighbor" as yourself. To me it follows that love of God cannot be separated from love of your neighbor ; they are conjugated. But for many years now, I have felt that the "natural" ? relationship between man and woman is sacred, and that this comes from the Jewish AND Christian Bible. There is a story that when the rabbis were putting together the biblical canon, some objected that the Song of Songs was inappropriate, and Akiba ? (one of the most respected rabbis) said that you could put aside most of the Bible and the commandments, but NOT the Song of Songs. He said that it was central. So... it stayed. Man and woman are condemned to be at permanent tension with each other, but they are entwined too. Out of synch is probably inevitable ; man and woman are naturally out of synch with each other as the rabbis also noticed. They have a hypothesis that the serpent got hold of Eve after the first couple had first made love. Adam naturally fell asleep afterwards and was not around to warn Eve of the danger. Eve... was still up, and still thinking/musing about what had happened to her... (This is not my fantasy ; the rabbis have spent almost an eternity musing about what "went wrong".) As for the rivalry, the serpent itself is a rather vivid reminder of the big difference between a man and a woman : that "it" tempted Eve is.. logical.
Interesting. I wonder why Adam would have taken Eve’s word, though, if this were true? She acquiesces to the Serpent, and Adam acquiesces to her. It seems to me that they both believe because they want to believe. It is only after the Fall, when God asks Adam why he disobeyed, that Adam abdicates his responsibility, blaming Eve—and even God—for his choice (“this woman YOU gave me”). If the imbalance was fundamental before the Fall, wouldn’t Adam have been more critical of following Eve’s suggestion?
God doesn't ask Adam why he disobeyed, he simply asks "Where art thou ?"
Maybe because Adam is not in the same place after eating of the tree/fruit of the knowledge of good and evil ? In this perspective, God does not punish Adam for disobeying by barring him from the garden, because Adam is no longer IN the garden, really. That is clear from the fact that he speaks of being naked in shame and guilt, possibly. And not being in the garden means that he is faced with the consequences of his act, from which God cannot shield him. After all, man was created free... in the Judeo-Christian creation story, at any rate.
In the above commentary, I said that man and woman were "out of synch", and I meant that they live in different worlds, from a certain point of view. They are not symmetrical. This has become clearer to me in growing older. But we live in a culture that is very keen on emphasizing the ways in which we are the same. Even a culture that wants us to be the same. Can you trust somebody who you feel to be different ? Can you trust his/her word ? Why not, as long as you remember that there are differences that separate us, and separate our interests, too. I think that it is very difficult in our world to understand what difference is, and how it manifests itself. It will not allow itself to be explained and ironed out the way we would like.
In this incident, some rabbinic commentary is very tolerant of Eve's disobeying, because the rabbis say that Eve did not receive from God's mouth the commandment not to eat. The commandment was given directly to Adam, and indirectly to Eve. That makes a big difference, too.
Musing about this while writing, I think that this creation story gives a big place to Eve as an INDIRECT recipient of God's action, in a certain way. Maybe this indirectness has to do with what somebody says on Paul's most recent salon about the difference between curves and STRAIGHT direct lines ?
Personally I like art forms where both are present...
Hmmmmm. A couple of thoughts:
It would be hard to say at this point in history if the “out of synch” you see* was true before the Fall. I don’t know that they saw any differences until their eyes were opened. If we are to believe that the prelapsarian Eden was True and Good, I should think we must assume that that rift opens when their unity with God was severed as they are the fruit. Period to that, they lived in harmony with God and Creation.
*Objectively, I believe you are right about men and women being out of sync today—there is much to be said about how men and women view and treat each other.
God did ask Adam why he disobeyed:
9 Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?”
10 So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”
11 And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?”
12 Then the man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.”
Further, the Lord did not make a division between the roles of men and women until this point in Genesis:
16 To the woman He said:
“I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception;
In pain you shall bring forth children;
Your desire shall be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.”
As textual evidence goes, we don’t have a whole lot to go by, but this is certainly the point where woman moves from companion to subordinate. They were in the garden up to this point, and finally God bars them because if they ate the fruit of one tree, he cannot allow them to stay and eat the fruit which gives eternal life.
You are right about the context of the rabbinic commentary—Adam was given that command before Eve was created. He certainly should have known better; we know he did tell her about it because she argues with the Serpent about eating the fruit because it is forbidden.
I agree that life is very difficult when we cannot make room for difference. It seems a shame that it is so hard to enjoy differences on their own merits, as evidence of the variety of Creation. It seems to me to be a feature of the Machine—we are so much easier to deal with when we are so many Scantron forms rather than handwritten sheets.
This text has been a determining force in our collective desire to return to the garden we have made (factum not genitum) as a product, while evincing God from it, in my opinion, and what we call "the machine" is a civilisation that has reacted to this text... since Descartes in "Le Discours sur la Méthode", or even before, by trying to create a world that is a perversion of this creation story, as in turning it upside down, to escape from living in a fallen world.
Personally I am not unhappy living in a fallen world, and I have no desire to return to the garden... through salvation by Christ or through futile and barbaric human attempts to create an unfallen world.
This text appears to justify the idea that death and sexual desire arise because the world is fallen, and I will not accept that. That does not mean that I condone all forms of sexual liberty, but the idea that death, and sexuality are the result of a fallen world does not attract me whatsoever. Unfortunately there seems to be a universal human tendancy to destroy our sexuality... in favor of the machine... and as for immortality... what a hell it would be...
I am so very glad you are writing these essays Paul. It's like an island of sanity for me in this crazy time.
I went to the VERGE conference in Silicon Valley in 2019 to drum up business for my regenerative agriculture startup. It was my wake up call that "green" has gone mainstream, and as you say, it is not any version of green that I can identify with. It's Machine Green to the core.
Let's celebrate the fact that so many companies now have a Chief Sustainability Officer! Universities are rushing to offer degrees in this area. Now we can finally make some progress! Our institutions will save us! Oh, wait...
Chesterton once wrote in a commentary on Peter Pan that "there is an advantage in root...and the name of it is fruit".
"Love, God, Place, Culture" as Paul points out are actually what make life worth living, and can only be fruits of rootedness, instead of "business models" enabled by the cloud.