I am a suburban-raised, American Gen X'er. My grandparents lived in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. Their life in the 1970s and '80s was a throwback even then. One of the first things I would do upon arriving was to raise up a yell from their front yard to hear it echo in the hills. Once, when walking with my grandfather we came upon a spring bubbling fresh water up from the ground -- it was like magic to me! My grandfather grew corn and hunted deer to eat. Their lives weren't centered around the TV, though mine was. In the late 90s, I visited Ireland a few times. There was still a sense there of a similarly rooted sanity (whatever one might otherwise say about Ireland, and people do, I loved it). These experiences haunt me. Though if I talk about them too enthusiastically now it seems like I am breaking a taboo. That to desire roots and a love of place and a deeper connection to the people around you is akin to incipient Fascism (as noted above). I have lived instead shuttling between the parking lots of the endless shopping mall. Working mindless jobs to pay for it. Most of my friends have moved away looking for something else -- who knows what? Nobody's fault but my own, I guess, that this is how it is. Still, I would rather have been suckled in a creed outworn...
I ran from Western PA as a teenager, after 20 years came back to a hollowed-out version of once what was. There is still a lot of beauty and some tradition, but Pittsburgh is gobbling it up an inch at a time.
There was a computer programmer called Terry Davis. Not a lot of people have heard of him, but Terry suffered with schizophrenia, and he wrote an operating system called TempleOS. It was a technical achievement, and was remarkable because Terry said that God had told him to build it as the third temple, for God himself to live within. What was unique about the system was that it held fast to design principles from the 1980s, when Terry had been a boy, growing up. God had commanded him to stick to those design parameters. When I think about TempleOS, I feel that somewhere inside there was a little boy trapped in a prison of a mind that he couldn't understand and couldn't control, and Temple was the only place that he felt safe.
And that's where I think we all find ourselves now, and have done for a long time. We have this instinct, as humans, to find the things which made us safe in our youth, and reassert them in adulthood, perpetuating tradition and continuing to build something that lasts across generations. But modern culture overwrites tradition in children and replaces it with other things, and so the natural drive to tradition is replaced by grown men fetishising old computers, steam trains, Star Wars, comics, and Pokemon.
In as much as man is made in God's image, the drive to tradition, which is obviously a natural impulse, is a reflection of the nature of God. So in as much as that must be true, it must also be true that the perversion of that instinct into the unnatural channels that we see today are de facto evil.
Perhaps the job of "rewilding" humans is discovering authentic expressions of our instincts. And perhaps they can be found by identifying these aberrant behaviours that we associate with modern life and understanding what they once were, that they can be rebuilt, not just as a regressive return to savagery but in a new and greater form.
I love this and yet it also pings me in several ways. What is, or ever was, home to many African-Americans living in America? You’ve spoken of the ideas being exported from the states so I hope it’s fair to speak from a US pov.
To African-Americans “Home” is something in the future, something that has not yet been achieved. To many Caucasian Americans “Home” is in the past just after World War II when the US had “saved the world” and enjoyed a long period of growth with limited global competition. That period has become synonymous with “the American Dream” for much of white Americans, but it was a blip in history and by definition temporary.
To many white Americans the past is rich and there is so much worthy of preservation and renewal. To Africans who were forced to this country or immigrated the past is mostly something to escape. Political polarization makes it near impossible to present that both of these realities are simultaneously true.
In a culture that cannot admit it has a gun problem due to how the wealth generated by weapon sales can influence politics, how can we possibly negotiate racial cohesion when doing so necessitates acknowledging a need for a mass wealth transfer that will take away from the wealthy?
I've no idea how to answer those questions, I'm afraid. But Weil wrote about America, in The Need For Roots, as the ultimate in uprooted places: formed by uprooting its native inhabitants, and then by peoples imported from all over the world, willingly or otherwise. She saw the US as a global threat for precisely that reason - a land full of restless, forward-surging people with no deep roots to hold them back. She was keen to warn against the danger of Europe becoming 'Americanised' after the war for just that reason.
Too late! Maybe we are all America now. That was certainly the idea, from the Marshall Plan and the UN onwards. But I think I will touch on this a bit more next time. The notion that 'home' is either in the past or in the future though - that sounds spot on, and not just for Americans.
"In a culture that cannot admit it has a gun problem due to how the wealth generated by weapon sales can influence politics, how can we possibly negotiate racial cohesion when doing so necessitates acknowledging a need for a mass wealth transfer that will take away from the wealthy?"
Your diagnosis doesn't go back far enough to the root cause. You're essentially looking for a technical solution, a new law, to keep people safe from those who have lost their mind or soul. You might as well support banning violent video games or violent movies. That would at least goes some way to reducing the unproductive/negative influence and stimulation/inspiration that results in twisted minds/souls. Assuming either could be legislated for and enforced, I'm convinced the latter would have the greater effect. Ultimately though the problem is one of culture/values/relationships and the answer is therefore spiritual and not technical. We can't just remove video games and expect the void to be filled by something positive. Neither can we take away the legal ability to obtain firearms and expect that those who would have committed shootings are now going to do something benevolent (assuming they wouldn't just obtain the firearms illegally in any case). Ultimately its all interlinked with modernity, industrialisation, secularism etc. Looking at shootings in isolation or attempting to remove guns does nothing to address the root cause. It actually prevents you from seeing the interconnectedness of all the cultural phenemona we are witnessing. Whenever you whack a mole in one location and think you've "solved" something, you'll be confounded by another one appearing in another location. You'll be left lurching from one symptom to another, trying to politically and legislatively solve a problem which is spiritual/cultural.
Nikola - just to weigh in here re: violent video games and movies vs. guns as sources of violent behavior. Personally, as someone who lives in Texas and knows what it's like to live around a significant number of people practicing their "open carry" rights - I am team "regulate the guns." I won't go into why - there's research backing my POV - but I won't argue with you about it, as I suspect you and I won't align on it, and that's ok. The videogame point is interesting though - and I thought you might be interested in this. I did some research, played violent games myself, and wrote on this topic back in the early 2000s. I expected due to my own biases to find that "violent games are bad" - personally I had it out for a particular game, "Grand Theft Auto 3." However - that's not what I found. The quick summation of the psychological research on the subject is that violent games and movies, because we experience them as "not reality / a fantasy state" don't affect the behavior of people who have a good grip on what is real vs. not real. In other words, if I choose to kill someone in a fantasy world, and I'm well aware it's a fantasy world, it won't influence how I behave or make choices in the real world. I won't become more violent. Same is true for violent movies. There's one big exception to this: People who can't tell fantasy from reality are vulnerable to having their behavior influenced by violent content. Developmentally, this means children have no business playing violent games bc separation of fantasy from reality doesn't really kick in until....I'm forgetting my Piaget but it's not present from birth. Comes closer to late childhood / early adolescence. Similarly, people with mental health issues that impact their ability to differentiate fantasy from reality also can be influenced. There is another factor that influences the "dangerousness" of games as well - which is simply that they increase targeting skill. If you spend a lot of time playing a realistic shooter games, you will get better at shooting guns. All of this is to say: Violent media needs to be kept well away from children and people with mental health issues. I do think we fail miserably at this as a culture.
The whole debate around gun ownership is more of a US one. I've never owned a gun and don't aspire to owning one. I guess my issue is more about the pet causes that certain groups have and their insistence that their hierarchy of values should be everyone elses hierarchy of values (that their priorities should be everyone's' priorities). It's interesting that those that agitate for gun control on the basis of x number of deaths per year have no issues with exponentially more abortions per year. This is something that came to my mind when reading the Wendell Berry text that Paul linked to, specifically this part:
"Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this “freedom” are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored."
The research on video games sounds interesting. I can't claim to have any familiarity with it. It sounds sensible that children should avoid violent video games whilst they're developing. Personally I am averse to much screen time at all for children, violent or not. As for adults, even if they are according to the research "safer" to play such games, I find it quite a sad indictment of our culture that so many spend so much time playing them. I was quite hooked myself up until my early 20s, at which point I went cold turkey and never looked back.
"It's interesting that those that agitate for gun control on the basis of x number of deaths per year have no issues with exponentially more abortions per year. "
Or the number of traffic deaths. We are so enamoured of the car machine culture that we won't slow down or take the train. There has been a lot of progress in the safety of automobiles but they still cause so many deaths and tragedies. We don't look at the whole culture in relation to our right to drive. If we slowed down every driver many lives would be saved. We allowed so many covid restrictions without whimpers from many people for dubious results and we could have saved so many more people with slower speeds.
As someone who played video games you would probably deem violent as a child, I want to dispel any delusion that they lead to violent behavior. It is entirely of your own imaginings that this occurs, some abstract reasoning that seems good enough on paper. It carries as much validity as worrying that someone who likes watching westerns will go buy a revolver and horse, and start hunting bandits in Wyoming.
Any violent inclinations that I had could probably be attributed more to a father that hit me, than a video game character. Maybe parental abuse is a more worthy cause to rally against?
Even if I grant you your own analysis of yourself, that says nothing about the impact of video games on others. Your argument is based on the assumption that everyone else must be just like you but you don't expand on why this is a reasonable assumption. You simply assure me I am imagining things and I must accept your experience.
“In all the time I have spent with people who live in genuinely rooted cultures - rooted in time, place and spirit - whether that be here in the remnants of rural Ireland, in indigenous communities in Mexico…I have been struck by one fact: people don’t tend to talk much about their ‘identity’ unless it is under threat.”
Perhaps we need to cultivate both our rootedness in time, place and spirit, as well as our “identity”? I mean “identity” not in the narrow or political sense, but as an abiding awareness of why we are cultivating our rootedness.
I am not fond of the term “intentional living”, but I think this is sometimes used to express a balance between these polarities: being embedded in a meaningful pattern of life, and knowing why one has chosen this life. Perhaps another way to say this (thinking of the end of Paul’s essay) is that one needs to be both a Romantic and a Luddite; capable of floating aloft, yet being drawn to things one can tangibly grasp.
Is there a historical precedent for this? I imagine that monasteries, at a certain time, managed this balance, being places where tradition and knowledge (the lofty) and the workaday world (the Luddite) lived in an intermingled manner. In our times, the Benedict Option seems to propose a similar balance: networks of people or communities who concretely structure their familial, educational, and spiritual lives, on the basis of some well-articulated purpose and understanding of reality.
It is not clear to me that achieving this balance is sufficient to escape, or evade, the progress of the Machine. Balances are precarious; they can tip to extremes or just fall apart. And maybe “balance” is the wrong concept? Maybe there are certain ways of life in which a self-aware rootedness inheres more strongly - and strongly enough to jam the teeth of the Machine when it tries to plough through us?
The strange thing in all of this talk of rootedness is that once people were told they were free to go, they did. I did. Apparently, for many, it doesn't take much convincing. It took me a good, long time to realize that it was a mistake. Let alone why it was a mistake. I wonder if you asked most of us whether would give up what the machine offers us, even if we could find something deeper, truer, more meaningful by so doing, would walk away. We are odd beings. So, this is a big question for me, how to create something together that is more joyful, more meaningful, more real? How do we convince each other that there are unimaginable depths to our lives worth everything to pursue when we have lived only on the glittering and banal surface? I don't even know how to begin to answer that.
Absolutely. And I did too (not that my family really deep roots in the first place.) You're right: most, or at least many, people will. This relates a bit to some of what I have written about climate change and eco-destruction in the past: the reality is that people want the things that cause climate change and mass extinction - but they/we don't want the consequences. This is how we get to the point where we hope that 'technology' will dig us out of the hole.
The older I get the more I think that this is about time and age also. As a young man, I wanted to leave and see the world and find myself. As a middle aged man I see the value of what I left. I think that's timeless. I'm struck by the fact that the Amish apparently allow their teenagers out into the big wide world, and that they can then choose whether or not to come back, and supposedly most do - even though those communities are clearly more rigid, less individualist and much less materialist than the outside world. Perhaps that's about building places that people want to come home to. Easier said than done, of course.
Desert Hermit and Paul - I very much ponder these same things, and have been trying to sort them out in my own life. As a child I grew up in the Old South, Louisiana, and at 22 I fled to California - for grad school but more deeply to go have my Big Adventure (which at the time I thought was PERMANENT) - and then after 15 years, at age 37 - I figured out how to get my husband and our toddler back "home" to Louisiana to "put down roots" and reconcile with my childhood culture (with mixed results). 4 years ago, when my husband lost his job, we bounced to Dallas where he could find employment. Anyway, economics aside I agree there is a rhythm to the movement, in terms of age and time of life. I'll add that it's not just middle age - but childbearing that can make the "Oh right, roots are important!" instinct kick in. It's quite visceral. There's another factor at play beyond economics and age/life stages though, and that's searching for a cultural story and community that fits. One of the things that has happened in the United States, and that I think has driven a lot of the geo-political polarization, is that once our society became more mobile in the mid 20th century (with the exception of native peoples, the rest of us were always immigrants - but for several hundred years we were NOT very mobile - so some communities WERE rooted), anyway - due to the Depression/WW2/the car - people often moved not just for economic purposes but to be with people who shared their beliefs. For example, the American South used to have a larger Jewish population - but as mobility became possible, many of them left the South which was in many ways hostile to them as a people, and moved to bigger cities where there were larger Jewish communities and more tolerance. Ditto, very famously, large segments of the African American population in the US that moved North and West to pursue factory work and get away from the Jim Crow era violence. So it's not JUST wanting what the Machine makes possible - it's also a longing for one's "right home place" - one's true Jerusalem. One's people, one's proper cultural story. I don't really fit in the traditional South or the progressive urban landscape. I'm a bit of a Platypus - a mix of traditional and more liberal values. So where is "home" and how does one root? Personally I'm beginning to think rootedness is best accomplished in small community, the hyper local. Even though we are in a big city, we find rootedness in our children's alternative school community (it's about 100 families), and I'm also part of a local "plant swap" club in the neighborhood where we trade plants and gardening tips and compost and things. These things sound so basic - but they weave you into the fabric of a place, both the social fabric and the Earth fabric. I can't get out into the country easily, but I can tend my own tiny plot of ground right here, with help from my neighbors. It makes a difference.
The thing that kills me in all of this though, is our continued inability to escape the Machine and the City. My husband I both work within the Machine to get the money for the children's school and our mortgage, etc. And as long as we are hooked to the Machine and the City, we will share their fate. We learned that first hand recently in February when a winter storm knocked Dallas's power out for days in very, very cold temperatures. As a Southern city it's not adapted in its infrastructure, architecture, services, or individual skillsets to deal with the cold. Some people froze to death. Water pipes burst everywhere. We had to shelter with friends and were without running water for about a week. It makes a person want to go build a compound in the wilderness - which I hear the very rich, in increasing numbers, are doing.
St. Benedict, for obvious reasons. But as a Catholic, the words God spoke to St. Francis - “rebuild my Church” - speak strongly to me in this time where the institutions and so many members of my faith (including myself!) are so entangled in the Machine. I keep hearkening back to then-Father Ratzinger’s prophetic 1969 speech on the future of the Catholic Church. He said, in part,
“The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century.
But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.” [Faith & the Future, Ignatius Press]
This attitude of humility, of seeking a genuine holistic path forward with our fellow travellers, whatever their personal faith journey, is what drew me here. I thank our host for his generosity of spirit in creating such a space to reflect upon and discuss these things!
Well, it's hard, I think, to remain rooted when you have become an invasive species that simply takes up too much space. There's not enough land out there for all the roots we think we have a right to set down. We battle it out even with our own kind, not to mention non-human species. So I don't think it's so much a question of being uprooted as it is of being rootbound. There are too many of us, and the pot is too small.
Well maybe - there are certainly too many humans for the world to sustain, at least living like this. But if we were all living in Tolstoyan communities, or in subsistence communities, even this number of humans might be fine. It's not numbers that cause this feeling of uprooting. After all, it's the 'developed' countries, who don't even have replacement fertility, which are the most rootless. That's more to do with city life and market economics, I'd say. But more on that another time.
Althought I would also say that, yes, given the size and scale of the Machine now, all we can do is seek roots on the margins. But more on that as the series goes on.
Yes, roots on the margins, banging up against the edge of the pot. That makes perfect sense to me. I am one of those rootless Americans, first generation on one side of the family, second or third generation on the other. I lived for many years in the Prealps of northern Italy, in a tiny rural hamlet where we could drink the water from the river because no one lived above us. I knew that land, I knew its trees and wild medicinal plants, I knew where the fog came in through a crack in the mountains and brought rain, I knew the day the cuckoos would begin to sing in the spring, and the day the sun first appeared above the mountain after months of no direct sunlight every winter. That land didn't particularly like me, or probably any humans, and maybe it was because of our history of destruction and bloodshed, from the burning of the witches to the executions of partisans in 1944. We soaked that land in blood and killed off its bears and wolves long ago. Now more humans are crowding into that little hamlet, and the frog pond has been filled in and all the frogs destroyed. Italy is one of those places where the population is growing older and older and people are constantly worried about themselves disappearing. Oh, they are not disappearing, they are spreading like a disease. I myself set down my little roots at the edge of that pot up there in those mountains, and now when I, rootless and living in an American suburb where the land has never spoken to me, go back to that hamlet, all I see is more roots crammed in there, complete with chained barking dogs and a new playground and a new asphalt road lined with villette a schiera. I just see no end to it.
And what a tragedy that I find myself saying: "May it be so." What a tragedy that the apocalypse now seems to be the only solution, the best we can hope for. Saved, sort of, by our own demise.
Thanks, Paul. Looking forward to seeing your thoughts expounded this year. NB - you misquoted Lewis above - it was not "books" that were barren. I hope that's not a Freudian slip - that barrenness seems an important inter-related component of, or perhaps consequence of, the Machine
Thankyou Mr. Kingsnorth for this , it gets my imagination stirring. As my folks would say your " carrying the fire". Cant wait to read more, hope to meet you on the other side brother.
Thanks, Paul, for these good and provocative thoughts. Alan Jacobs has a great book on Christian writers in 1943 trying to imagine the shape of the post-war world. He includes a chapter on Weil. It's well worth a read.
Thanks for your insights. I can only offer my observations from a land devoid of any sense of rootedness. My parents' families moved to California after WWII. California rightly holds a reputation for un-rootedness. I've lived here my whole life and can honestly say I have no interest in or sense of belonging to the suburb in which I grew up. Today, my wife and I live in a community limited to those over 55 years. It is shocking to note the number of elderly people living here who have family locally, but who have only rare contact with their own children and grandchildren. The residents may have a tenuous connection to a faith community, but that is about all. The pandemic has truly laid bare the lie that "we are all in this together" as the marketing agencies have been assuring us for the past year of imposed isolation.
I am intrigued by our fascination with "home" and whether it is as important as we imagine. Reading Strange Gods got me thinking about your frequent use of "belonging". If humans are nomadic animals, which it could be argued we are, especially in our hunter-gatherer days, what does home or belonging feel like for a creature always on the move? Maybe it's interesting to explore less our relationship to a particular place but more how we relate or "dwell" where ever we are? Morris Berman's fascinating (and hackle raising!!) book The Wandering God suggests that when we stopped moving and became settled it changed our experience of the earth and how we make meaning. He argues that when we become stationary it shifts us away from our horizontal relationships with the rest of the earth. We then create vertical "sacred authority complexes" to make sense of things whether they be religious systems, political systems, ideologies, metanarratives, paradigms, etc. which appeal to something outside of the "What is. I am curious about whether a sense of being grounded is more about ways of relating to things (that the Machine takes us away from) than a sense of belonging with a specific place (unless, to contradict myself, the place is very distributed like Songlines). Anyway, just a thought.
I keep hearing about Berman. Maybe it's time to read him!
Human history is a great history of migrations - but also a great history of settling, and creating cultures in-place. Personally, this is what has always gripped me - how humans can live deeply and well in particular places. I believe that all of the great and distinctive cultures of history were created that way, just as all the disastrous ones were giant and rootless.
But it sounds like Berman is talking about scale to some degree - and maybe even agriculture? I'm quite sold also on the idea that once agriculture took hold it was all downhill into the progress trap. But I have also seen many times how deep relationship to ancestral place can create beauty and nurture truth, and that above all, I think, is what we have lost.
Very good, made me think of the still intact small farm, small town agrarian Midwest culture I was raised in back in the 1960’s. It began to dissolve in the 1970’s and a mere shell remains.
Thanks, Paul. Good stuff. And a few random thoughts as I think about your essay:
- This dovetails with some thinking I've been doing about placeless and footloose people and a goal of the machine, at least, it seems like a goal to me, to peel us away from our communities, tribes, families, turn us all into isolated individuals wholly dependent on the machine. Reminds me a bit of how wolves hunt, separating an animal from the security of the herd, and then bringing it down. Are we being hunted by the machine? Maybe.
- I suppose I long for Eden. I think it is one of the reasons I love the mountains so much. I've watched the sun drop behind the Hurwell Divide from a campsite on the edge of Ice Lake in the Eagle Cap Wilderness and wept because I had never, never seen anything so beautiful. Maybe Eden's been a dream haunting our species since we were booted from the garden?
- I come from a rootless people. They left Scotland, Ireland, and Norway, made their way to this country, washing ashore along the East Coast of the US and within a few generations, their children and grandchildren had crossed the continent and bumped into the Pacific Ocean. But that impulse wasn't unique to my people - it seems intertwined with who we are as a species. What drove the early Polynesians to leave paradise and make their way east across thousands of miles of open ocean to Hawaii? No maps, GPS...nothing but the stars and some impulse? Hope? A vision? What was it? Or the Vikings? What pushed them out of the north. Or the thousands of tribes that populated Europe and Asia that washed back and forth across the land before it all ossified into kingdoms and states? Was it just a lack of resources, or seeking refuge and safety from predatory tribes, or was a deeper impulse a play? Maybe they were looking for Eden, too?
- We spent a few weeks in the desert southeast, and I was struck by all the isolated RVS (caravans, I think you call 'em), dotting the desert between Phoenix and Tucson. I asked my sister about it and she said, "oh yeah, they're everywhere. Most head north when it gets to hot." She mentioned that there's a new movie about these placeless people: "Nomadland" - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9770150/ . I suppose all the folks living in this "park" where we stayed with friends for few days are also Nomads, though a regular supply of water means they're a bit more well off than the folks camped in the desert. Everyone we met in this park was from somewhere else. And I found that disconcerting. Like tapping a bell and finding it slightly out of tune. Where are you from? Toledo. Bong. And you? Michigan. Bong.
I think the Machine's goal is absolutely to uproot us: to make us all broken individuals in a marketplace who can be sold things to full the void it has created. I'll be writing plenty about this!
But yes - the great migrations that stud human history - including the ongoing migration to outer space. We can't stop searching beyond the horizon - for Eden?
Hmmm. I think so. Partly, anyway. At least, that's how it is for me, and what energized my restless early years, and what I find so haunting about Lewis's "The Great Divorce," his Sci-Fi Trilogy, Narnia, and places in Tolkien's Middle Earth (don't the elves live in a kind of Eden surrounded by barbarians?). Charles Williams in his weird supernatural novels also touches on this longing. They all, at times, hint at a true home that I find myself longing for, even as I go about my days here, fussing with what I do to make a living, and tending my land. You might find interesting Patrick Fermor's account of his journey as a young lad of 19 or so from England to Constantinople in the early 1930s. He's a terrific writer, and describes a time and people on the cusp of Change. And time for me to go back to make a living... cheers!
I think this is the search at the heart of all faith - the Christian story being, of course, that home is ultimately beyond time. Not just the Christian story, either. I think we seek something we can sense just beyond reach, but know is real.
"We turned away from a mythic, rooted understanding of the world, and turned away from the divine, in order to look at ourselves reflected in the little black mirrors in our hands. Some people are quite happy with this, and have no time for Romantic Luddites like myself when we lament it."
Not only quite happy about this but it's regarded by many as "freedom". Rootlessness as an ideal. Brave New World as heaven on earth. Commitment to land and a community means being tied down and enslaved. We must remove all limitations to be free. Nothing should stand in the way of instant gratification. And yet rates of anxiety/depression tell a different story. But not to worry, with advances in antidepressants and tranquilizers, the sense that all is not well is medicated away. Utopia!
Weil ought to have known about rootlessness — she was herself tragically rootless. First of all, she was Jewish, so denied by birth the sense of deep dwelling or rootedness that she could pick up on — even as it was being eradicated — in rural France. But she was furthermore a Jew who had lost or renounced her religion (for 1900 years a religion rooted in text and liturgy and prayer rather than sacred place, but rooted nonetheless), adding another layer or kind of dispossession to her experience. And then the war, and exile. I think a lot of the attraction she felt for Catholicism came from her perception of the way its traditions could really sink into a place, sanctify it, put down roots.
The aspect of Weil, though, that I have seen the most people react to most strongly has been her stark asceticism, which is another strand of Catholicism that attracted her. People (academic types), I have found, very much dislike her asceticism, just as they get uneasy about her religious inclinations. We all do at some level, probably, and it’s no wonder. Nothing strikes so deep a wound in the zeitgeist than voluntary self-restraint and even, dare I say it, what in the bad old days of western Christianity was called ‘mortification of the flesh,’ or what in eastern Christian terms is I believe more commonly termed ‘taming the passions.’
There is a correlation, I think, between rootedness and the asceticism proposed by all the major religious traditions. To really dwell anywhere properly requires precisely the recognition and even celebration of limits.
I think you make a crucial point Jonathan, and it's one I want to come back to and expand on in future - 'To really dwell anywhere properly requires precisely the recognition and even celebration of limits.' Absolutely, and this point is missed right across the political spectrum.
I read Susan Sontag a while back complaining also about Weil's asceticism. The take seemed to be that she could have been a good left-feminist critic were it not for her weird belief in religion and attachment to actually living it. You're right: nothing makes us more uncomfortable than this. I think it is because it shows us who we are.
A wonderful start Paul.
I am a suburban-raised, American Gen X'er. My grandparents lived in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. Their life in the 1970s and '80s was a throwback even then. One of the first things I would do upon arriving was to raise up a yell from their front yard to hear it echo in the hills. Once, when walking with my grandfather we came upon a spring bubbling fresh water up from the ground -- it was like magic to me! My grandfather grew corn and hunted deer to eat. Their lives weren't centered around the TV, though mine was. In the late 90s, I visited Ireland a few times. There was still a sense there of a similarly rooted sanity (whatever one might otherwise say about Ireland, and people do, I loved it). These experiences haunt me. Though if I talk about them too enthusiastically now it seems like I am breaking a taboo. That to desire roots and a love of place and a deeper connection to the people around you is akin to incipient Fascism (as noted above). I have lived instead shuttling between the parking lots of the endless shopping mall. Working mindless jobs to pay for it. Most of my friends have moved away looking for something else -- who knows what? Nobody's fault but my own, I guess, that this is how it is. Still, I would rather have been suckled in a creed outworn...
I ran from Western PA as a teenager, after 20 years came back to a hollowed-out version of once what was. There is still a lot of beauty and some tradition, but Pittsburgh is gobbling it up an inch at a time.
Thank you so much for this - it made me reflect.
There was a computer programmer called Terry Davis. Not a lot of people have heard of him, but Terry suffered with schizophrenia, and he wrote an operating system called TempleOS. It was a technical achievement, and was remarkable because Terry said that God had told him to build it as the third temple, for God himself to live within. What was unique about the system was that it held fast to design principles from the 1980s, when Terry had been a boy, growing up. God had commanded him to stick to those design parameters. When I think about TempleOS, I feel that somewhere inside there was a little boy trapped in a prison of a mind that he couldn't understand and couldn't control, and Temple was the only place that he felt safe.
And that's where I think we all find ourselves now, and have done for a long time. We have this instinct, as humans, to find the things which made us safe in our youth, and reassert them in adulthood, perpetuating tradition and continuing to build something that lasts across generations. But modern culture overwrites tradition in children and replaces it with other things, and so the natural drive to tradition is replaced by grown men fetishising old computers, steam trains, Star Wars, comics, and Pokemon.
In as much as man is made in God's image, the drive to tradition, which is obviously a natural impulse, is a reflection of the nature of God. So in as much as that must be true, it must also be true that the perversion of that instinct into the unnatural channels that we see today are de facto evil.
Perhaps the job of "rewilding" humans is discovering authentic expressions of our instincts. And perhaps they can be found by identifying these aberrant behaviours that we associate with modern life and understanding what they once were, that they can be rebuilt, not just as a regressive return to savagery but in a new and greater form.
I love this and yet it also pings me in several ways. What is, or ever was, home to many African-Americans living in America? You’ve spoken of the ideas being exported from the states so I hope it’s fair to speak from a US pov.
To African-Americans “Home” is something in the future, something that has not yet been achieved. To many Caucasian Americans “Home” is in the past just after World War II when the US had “saved the world” and enjoyed a long period of growth with limited global competition. That period has become synonymous with “the American Dream” for much of white Americans, but it was a blip in history and by definition temporary.
To many white Americans the past is rich and there is so much worthy of preservation and renewal. To Africans who were forced to this country or immigrated the past is mostly something to escape. Political polarization makes it near impossible to present that both of these realities are simultaneously true.
In a culture that cannot admit it has a gun problem due to how the wealth generated by weapon sales can influence politics, how can we possibly negotiate racial cohesion when doing so necessitates acknowledging a need for a mass wealth transfer that will take away from the wealthy?
I've no idea how to answer those questions, I'm afraid. But Weil wrote about America, in The Need For Roots, as the ultimate in uprooted places: formed by uprooting its native inhabitants, and then by peoples imported from all over the world, willingly or otherwise. She saw the US as a global threat for precisely that reason - a land full of restless, forward-surging people with no deep roots to hold them back. She was keen to warn against the danger of Europe becoming 'Americanised' after the war for just that reason.
Too late! Maybe we are all America now. That was certainly the idea, from the Marshall Plan and the UN onwards. But I think I will touch on this a bit more next time. The notion that 'home' is either in the past or in the future though - that sounds spot on, and not just for Americans.
Thank you for the thoughtful response.
"In a culture that cannot admit it has a gun problem due to how the wealth generated by weapon sales can influence politics, how can we possibly negotiate racial cohesion when doing so necessitates acknowledging a need for a mass wealth transfer that will take away from the wealthy?"
Your diagnosis doesn't go back far enough to the root cause. You're essentially looking for a technical solution, a new law, to keep people safe from those who have lost their mind or soul. You might as well support banning violent video games or violent movies. That would at least goes some way to reducing the unproductive/negative influence and stimulation/inspiration that results in twisted minds/souls. Assuming either could be legislated for and enforced, I'm convinced the latter would have the greater effect. Ultimately though the problem is one of culture/values/relationships and the answer is therefore spiritual and not technical. We can't just remove video games and expect the void to be filled by something positive. Neither can we take away the legal ability to obtain firearms and expect that those who would have committed shootings are now going to do something benevolent (assuming they wouldn't just obtain the firearms illegally in any case). Ultimately its all interlinked with modernity, industrialisation, secularism etc. Looking at shootings in isolation or attempting to remove guns does nothing to address the root cause. It actually prevents you from seeing the interconnectedness of all the cultural phenemona we are witnessing. Whenever you whack a mole in one location and think you've "solved" something, you'll be confounded by another one appearing in another location. You'll be left lurching from one symptom to another, trying to politically and legislatively solve a problem which is spiritual/cultural.
Nikola - just to weigh in here re: violent video games and movies vs. guns as sources of violent behavior. Personally, as someone who lives in Texas and knows what it's like to live around a significant number of people practicing their "open carry" rights - I am team "regulate the guns." I won't go into why - there's research backing my POV - but I won't argue with you about it, as I suspect you and I won't align on it, and that's ok. The videogame point is interesting though - and I thought you might be interested in this. I did some research, played violent games myself, and wrote on this topic back in the early 2000s. I expected due to my own biases to find that "violent games are bad" - personally I had it out for a particular game, "Grand Theft Auto 3." However - that's not what I found. The quick summation of the psychological research on the subject is that violent games and movies, because we experience them as "not reality / a fantasy state" don't affect the behavior of people who have a good grip on what is real vs. not real. In other words, if I choose to kill someone in a fantasy world, and I'm well aware it's a fantasy world, it won't influence how I behave or make choices in the real world. I won't become more violent. Same is true for violent movies. There's one big exception to this: People who can't tell fantasy from reality are vulnerable to having their behavior influenced by violent content. Developmentally, this means children have no business playing violent games bc separation of fantasy from reality doesn't really kick in until....I'm forgetting my Piaget but it's not present from birth. Comes closer to late childhood / early adolescence. Similarly, people with mental health issues that impact their ability to differentiate fantasy from reality also can be influenced. There is another factor that influences the "dangerousness" of games as well - which is simply that they increase targeting skill. If you spend a lot of time playing a realistic shooter games, you will get better at shooting guns. All of this is to say: Violent media needs to be kept well away from children and people with mental health issues. I do think we fail miserably at this as a culture.
The whole debate around gun ownership is more of a US one. I've never owned a gun and don't aspire to owning one. I guess my issue is more about the pet causes that certain groups have and their insistence that their hierarchy of values should be everyone elses hierarchy of values (that their priorities should be everyone's' priorities). It's interesting that those that agitate for gun control on the basis of x number of deaths per year have no issues with exponentially more abortions per year. This is something that came to my mind when reading the Wendell Berry text that Paul linked to, specifically this part:
"Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this “freedom” are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored."
The research on video games sounds interesting. I can't claim to have any familiarity with it. It sounds sensible that children should avoid violent video games whilst they're developing. Personally I am averse to much screen time at all for children, violent or not. As for adults, even if they are according to the research "safer" to play such games, I find it quite a sad indictment of our culture that so many spend so much time playing them. I was quite hooked myself up until my early 20s, at which point I went cold turkey and never looked back.
"It's interesting that those that agitate for gun control on the basis of x number of deaths per year have no issues with exponentially more abortions per year. "
Or the number of traffic deaths. We are so enamoured of the car machine culture that we won't slow down or take the train. There has been a lot of progress in the safety of automobiles but they still cause so many deaths and tragedies. We don't look at the whole culture in relation to our right to drive. If we slowed down every driver many lives would be saved. We allowed so many covid restrictions without whimpers from many people for dubious results and we could have saved so many more people with slower speeds.
As someone who played video games you would probably deem violent as a child, I want to dispel any delusion that they lead to violent behavior. It is entirely of your own imaginings that this occurs, some abstract reasoning that seems good enough on paper. It carries as much validity as worrying that someone who likes watching westerns will go buy a revolver and horse, and start hunting bandits in Wyoming.
Any violent inclinations that I had could probably be attributed more to a father that hit me, than a video game character. Maybe parental abuse is a more worthy cause to rally against?
Even if I grant you your own analysis of yourself, that says nothing about the impact of video games on others. Your argument is based on the assumption that everyone else must be just like you but you don't expand on why this is a reasonable assumption. You simply assure me I am imagining things and I must accept your experience.
Fair enough, but others have already replied that the studies that have been done don't validate this theory.
“In all the time I have spent with people who live in genuinely rooted cultures - rooted in time, place and spirit - whether that be here in the remnants of rural Ireland, in indigenous communities in Mexico…I have been struck by one fact: people don’t tend to talk much about their ‘identity’ unless it is under threat.”
Perhaps we need to cultivate both our rootedness in time, place and spirit, as well as our “identity”? I mean “identity” not in the narrow or political sense, but as an abiding awareness of why we are cultivating our rootedness.
I am not fond of the term “intentional living”, but I think this is sometimes used to express a balance between these polarities: being embedded in a meaningful pattern of life, and knowing why one has chosen this life. Perhaps another way to say this (thinking of the end of Paul’s essay) is that one needs to be both a Romantic and a Luddite; capable of floating aloft, yet being drawn to things one can tangibly grasp.
Is there a historical precedent for this? I imagine that monasteries, at a certain time, managed this balance, being places where tradition and knowledge (the lofty) and the workaday world (the Luddite) lived in an intermingled manner. In our times, the Benedict Option seems to propose a similar balance: networks of people or communities who concretely structure their familial, educational, and spiritual lives, on the basis of some well-articulated purpose and understanding of reality.
It is not clear to me that achieving this balance is sufficient to escape, or evade, the progress of the Machine. Balances are precarious; they can tip to extremes or just fall apart. And maybe “balance” is the wrong concept? Maybe there are certain ways of life in which a self-aware rootedness inheres more strongly - and strongly enough to jam the teeth of the Machine when it tries to plough through us?
The strange thing in all of this talk of rootedness is that once people were told they were free to go, they did. I did. Apparently, for many, it doesn't take much convincing. It took me a good, long time to realize that it was a mistake. Let alone why it was a mistake. I wonder if you asked most of us whether would give up what the machine offers us, even if we could find something deeper, truer, more meaningful by so doing, would walk away. We are odd beings. So, this is a big question for me, how to create something together that is more joyful, more meaningful, more real? How do we convince each other that there are unimaginable depths to our lives worth everything to pursue when we have lived only on the glittering and banal surface? I don't even know how to begin to answer that.
Absolutely. And I did too (not that my family really deep roots in the first place.) You're right: most, or at least many, people will. This relates a bit to some of what I have written about climate change and eco-destruction in the past: the reality is that people want the things that cause climate change and mass extinction - but they/we don't want the consequences. This is how we get to the point where we hope that 'technology' will dig us out of the hole.
The older I get the more I think that this is about time and age also. As a young man, I wanted to leave and see the world and find myself. As a middle aged man I see the value of what I left. I think that's timeless. I'm struck by the fact that the Amish apparently allow their teenagers out into the big wide world, and that they can then choose whether or not to come back, and supposedly most do - even though those communities are clearly more rigid, less individualist and much less materialist than the outside world. Perhaps that's about building places that people want to come home to. Easier said than done, of course.
Desert Hermit and Paul - I very much ponder these same things, and have been trying to sort them out in my own life. As a child I grew up in the Old South, Louisiana, and at 22 I fled to California - for grad school but more deeply to go have my Big Adventure (which at the time I thought was PERMANENT) - and then after 15 years, at age 37 - I figured out how to get my husband and our toddler back "home" to Louisiana to "put down roots" and reconcile with my childhood culture (with mixed results). 4 years ago, when my husband lost his job, we bounced to Dallas where he could find employment. Anyway, economics aside I agree there is a rhythm to the movement, in terms of age and time of life. I'll add that it's not just middle age - but childbearing that can make the "Oh right, roots are important!" instinct kick in. It's quite visceral. There's another factor at play beyond economics and age/life stages though, and that's searching for a cultural story and community that fits. One of the things that has happened in the United States, and that I think has driven a lot of the geo-political polarization, is that once our society became more mobile in the mid 20th century (with the exception of native peoples, the rest of us were always immigrants - but for several hundred years we were NOT very mobile - so some communities WERE rooted), anyway - due to the Depression/WW2/the car - people often moved not just for economic purposes but to be with people who shared their beliefs. For example, the American South used to have a larger Jewish population - but as mobility became possible, many of them left the South which was in many ways hostile to them as a people, and moved to bigger cities where there were larger Jewish communities and more tolerance. Ditto, very famously, large segments of the African American population in the US that moved North and West to pursue factory work and get away from the Jim Crow era violence. So it's not JUST wanting what the Machine makes possible - it's also a longing for one's "right home place" - one's true Jerusalem. One's people, one's proper cultural story. I don't really fit in the traditional South or the progressive urban landscape. I'm a bit of a Platypus - a mix of traditional and more liberal values. So where is "home" and how does one root? Personally I'm beginning to think rootedness is best accomplished in small community, the hyper local. Even though we are in a big city, we find rootedness in our children's alternative school community (it's about 100 families), and I'm also part of a local "plant swap" club in the neighborhood where we trade plants and gardening tips and compost and things. These things sound so basic - but they weave you into the fabric of a place, both the social fabric and the Earth fabric. I can't get out into the country easily, but I can tend my own tiny plot of ground right here, with help from my neighbors. It makes a difference.
The thing that kills me in all of this though, is our continued inability to escape the Machine and the City. My husband I both work within the Machine to get the money for the children's school and our mortgage, etc. And as long as we are hooked to the Machine and the City, we will share their fate. We learned that first hand recently in February when a winter storm knocked Dallas's power out for days in very, very cold temperatures. As a Southern city it's not adapted in its infrastructure, architecture, services, or individual skillsets to deal with the cold. Some people froze to death. Water pipes burst everywhere. We had to shelter with friends and were without running water for about a week. It makes a person want to go build a compound in the wilderness - which I hear the very rich, in increasing numbers, are doing.
Do we have or need a patron saint?
St. Benedict, for obvious reasons. But as a Catholic, the words God spoke to St. Francis - “rebuild my Church” - speak strongly to me in this time where the institutions and so many members of my faith (including myself!) are so entangled in the Machine. I keep hearkening back to then-Father Ratzinger’s prophetic 1969 speech on the future of the Catholic Church. He said, in part,
“The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century.
But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.” [Faith & the Future, Ignatius Press]
This attitude of humility, of seeking a genuine holistic path forward with our fellow travellers, whatever their personal faith journey, is what drew me here. I thank our host for his generosity of spirit in creating such a space to reflect upon and discuss these things!
Well, it's hard, I think, to remain rooted when you have become an invasive species that simply takes up too much space. There's not enough land out there for all the roots we think we have a right to set down. We battle it out even with our own kind, not to mention non-human species. So I don't think it's so much a question of being uprooted as it is of being rootbound. There are too many of us, and the pot is too small.
Well maybe - there are certainly too many humans for the world to sustain, at least living like this. But if we were all living in Tolstoyan communities, or in subsistence communities, even this number of humans might be fine. It's not numbers that cause this feeling of uprooting. After all, it's the 'developed' countries, who don't even have replacement fertility, which are the most rootless. That's more to do with city life and market economics, I'd say. But more on that another time.
Althought I would also say that, yes, given the size and scale of the Machine now, all we can do is seek roots on the margins. But more on that as the series goes on.
Yes, roots on the margins, banging up against the edge of the pot. That makes perfect sense to me. I am one of those rootless Americans, first generation on one side of the family, second or third generation on the other. I lived for many years in the Prealps of northern Italy, in a tiny rural hamlet where we could drink the water from the river because no one lived above us. I knew that land, I knew its trees and wild medicinal plants, I knew where the fog came in through a crack in the mountains and brought rain, I knew the day the cuckoos would begin to sing in the spring, and the day the sun first appeared above the mountain after months of no direct sunlight every winter. That land didn't particularly like me, or probably any humans, and maybe it was because of our history of destruction and bloodshed, from the burning of the witches to the executions of partisans in 1944. We soaked that land in blood and killed off its bears and wolves long ago. Now more humans are crowding into that little hamlet, and the frog pond has been filled in and all the frogs destroyed. Italy is one of those places where the population is growing older and older and people are constantly worried about themselves disappearing. Oh, they are not disappearing, they are spreading like a disease. I myself set down my little roots at the edge of that pot up there in those mountains, and now when I, rootless and living in an American suburb where the land has never spoken to me, go back to that hamlet, all I see is more roots crammed in there, complete with chained barking dogs and a new playground and a new asphalt road lined with villette a schiera. I just see no end to it.
Ah, but all the true prophets tell us there will be an end to it, for the Machine is demonic and cannot last. D. H. Lawrence, for one:
So mechanical man in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine
will be driven mad from within himself, and sightless, and on that day
the machines will turn to run into one another
traffic will tangle up in a long-drawn-out crash of collision
and engines will rush at the solid houses, the edifice of our life
will rock in the shock of the mad machine, and the house will come down.
Then, far beyond the ruin, in the far, in the ultimate, remote places
the swan will lift up again his flattened, smitten head
and look round, and rise, and on the great vaults of his wings
will sweep round and up to greet the sun with a silky glitter of a new day
and the lark will follow trilling, angerless again,
and the lambs will bite off the heads of the daisies for very friskiness.
But over the middle of the earth will be the smoky ruin of iron
the triumph of the machine.
And what a tragedy that I find myself saying: "May it be so." What a tragedy that the apocalypse now seems to be the only solution, the best we can hope for. Saved, sort of, by our own demise.
Yes, indeed. And I think that the apocalypse - the great unveiling - is already here.
Thanks, Paul. Looking forward to seeing your thoughts expounded this year. NB - you misquoted Lewis above - it was not "books" that were barren. I hope that's not a Freudian slip - that barrenness seems an important inter-related component of, or perhaps consequence of, the Machine
Thankyou Mr. Kingsnorth for this , it gets my imagination stirring. As my folks would say your " carrying the fire". Cant wait to read more, hope to meet you on the other side brother.
Thanks, Paul, for these good and provocative thoughts. Alan Jacobs has a great book on Christian writers in 1943 trying to imagine the shape of the post-war world. He includes a chapter on Weil. It's well worth a read.
Thanks for your insights. I can only offer my observations from a land devoid of any sense of rootedness. My parents' families moved to California after WWII. California rightly holds a reputation for un-rootedness. I've lived here my whole life and can honestly say I have no interest in or sense of belonging to the suburb in which I grew up. Today, my wife and I live in a community limited to those over 55 years. It is shocking to note the number of elderly people living here who have family locally, but who have only rare contact with their own children and grandchildren. The residents may have a tenuous connection to a faith community, but that is about all. The pandemic has truly laid bare the lie that "we are all in this together" as the marketing agencies have been assuring us for the past year of imposed isolation.
I am intrigued by our fascination with "home" and whether it is as important as we imagine. Reading Strange Gods got me thinking about your frequent use of "belonging". If humans are nomadic animals, which it could be argued we are, especially in our hunter-gatherer days, what does home or belonging feel like for a creature always on the move? Maybe it's interesting to explore less our relationship to a particular place but more how we relate or "dwell" where ever we are? Morris Berman's fascinating (and hackle raising!!) book The Wandering God suggests that when we stopped moving and became settled it changed our experience of the earth and how we make meaning. He argues that when we become stationary it shifts us away from our horizontal relationships with the rest of the earth. We then create vertical "sacred authority complexes" to make sense of things whether they be religious systems, political systems, ideologies, metanarratives, paradigms, etc. which appeal to something outside of the "What is. I am curious about whether a sense of being grounded is more about ways of relating to things (that the Machine takes us away from) than a sense of belonging with a specific place (unless, to contradict myself, the place is very distributed like Songlines). Anyway, just a thought.
Oh and P.S., great start. Really looking forward to both your articles and the dialogue they promote.
I keep hearing about Berman. Maybe it's time to read him!
Human history is a great history of migrations - but also a great history of settling, and creating cultures in-place. Personally, this is what has always gripped me - how humans can live deeply and well in particular places. I believe that all of the great and distinctive cultures of history were created that way, just as all the disastrous ones were giant and rootless.
But it sounds like Berman is talking about scale to some degree - and maybe even agriculture? I'm quite sold also on the idea that once agriculture took hold it was all downhill into the progress trap. But I have also seen many times how deep relationship to ancestral place can create beauty and nurture truth, and that above all, I think, is what we have lost.
Very good, made me think of the still intact small farm, small town agrarian Midwest culture I was raised in back in the 1960’s. It began to dissolve in the 1970’s and a mere shell remains.
Thanks, Paul. Good stuff. And a few random thoughts as I think about your essay:
- This dovetails with some thinking I've been doing about placeless and footloose people and a goal of the machine, at least, it seems like a goal to me, to peel us away from our communities, tribes, families, turn us all into isolated individuals wholly dependent on the machine. Reminds me a bit of how wolves hunt, separating an animal from the security of the herd, and then bringing it down. Are we being hunted by the machine? Maybe.
- I suppose I long for Eden. I think it is one of the reasons I love the mountains so much. I've watched the sun drop behind the Hurwell Divide from a campsite on the edge of Ice Lake in the Eagle Cap Wilderness and wept because I had never, never seen anything so beautiful. Maybe Eden's been a dream haunting our species since we were booted from the garden?
- I come from a rootless people. They left Scotland, Ireland, and Norway, made their way to this country, washing ashore along the East Coast of the US and within a few generations, their children and grandchildren had crossed the continent and bumped into the Pacific Ocean. But that impulse wasn't unique to my people - it seems intertwined with who we are as a species. What drove the early Polynesians to leave paradise and make their way east across thousands of miles of open ocean to Hawaii? No maps, GPS...nothing but the stars and some impulse? Hope? A vision? What was it? Or the Vikings? What pushed them out of the north. Or the thousands of tribes that populated Europe and Asia that washed back and forth across the land before it all ossified into kingdoms and states? Was it just a lack of resources, or seeking refuge and safety from predatory tribes, or was a deeper impulse a play? Maybe they were looking for Eden, too?
- We spent a few weeks in the desert southeast, and I was struck by all the isolated RVS (caravans, I think you call 'em), dotting the desert between Phoenix and Tucson. I asked my sister about it and she said, "oh yeah, they're everywhere. Most head north when it gets to hot." She mentioned that there's a new movie about these placeless people: "Nomadland" - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9770150/ . I suppose all the folks living in this "park" where we stayed with friends for few days are also Nomads, though a regular supply of water means they're a bit more well off than the folks camped in the desert. Everyone we met in this park was from somewhere else. And I found that disconcerting. Like tapping a bell and finding it slightly out of tune. Where are you from? Toledo. Bong. And you? Michigan. Bong.
Anyway.
I think the Machine's goal is absolutely to uproot us: to make us all broken individuals in a marketplace who can be sold things to full the void it has created. I'll be writing plenty about this!
But yes - the great migrations that stud human history - including the ongoing migration to outer space. We can't stop searching beyond the horizon - for Eden?
Hmmm. I think so. Partly, anyway. At least, that's how it is for me, and what energized my restless early years, and what I find so haunting about Lewis's "The Great Divorce," his Sci-Fi Trilogy, Narnia, and places in Tolkien's Middle Earth (don't the elves live in a kind of Eden surrounded by barbarians?). Charles Williams in his weird supernatural novels also touches on this longing. They all, at times, hint at a true home that I find myself longing for, even as I go about my days here, fussing with what I do to make a living, and tending my land. You might find interesting Patrick Fermor's account of his journey as a young lad of 19 or so from England to Constantinople in the early 1930s. He's a terrific writer, and describes a time and people on the cusp of Change. And time for me to go back to make a living... cheers!
I think this is the search at the heart of all faith - the Christian story being, of course, that home is ultimately beyond time. Not just the Christian story, either. I think we seek something we can sense just beyond reach, but know is real.
Yes, indeed...and I agree, not just a Christian story.
"We turned away from a mythic, rooted understanding of the world, and turned away from the divine, in order to look at ourselves reflected in the little black mirrors in our hands. Some people are quite happy with this, and have no time for Romantic Luddites like myself when we lament it."
Not only quite happy about this but it's regarded by many as "freedom". Rootlessness as an ideal. Brave New World as heaven on earth. Commitment to land and a community means being tied down and enslaved. We must remove all limitations to be free. Nothing should stand in the way of instant gratification. And yet rates of anxiety/depression tell a different story. But not to worry, with advances in antidepressants and tranquilizers, the sense that all is not well is medicated away. Utopia!
Weil ought to have known about rootlessness — she was herself tragically rootless. First of all, she was Jewish, so denied by birth the sense of deep dwelling or rootedness that she could pick up on — even as it was being eradicated — in rural France. But she was furthermore a Jew who had lost or renounced her religion (for 1900 years a religion rooted in text and liturgy and prayer rather than sacred place, but rooted nonetheless), adding another layer or kind of dispossession to her experience. And then the war, and exile. I think a lot of the attraction she felt for Catholicism came from her perception of the way its traditions could really sink into a place, sanctify it, put down roots.
The aspect of Weil, though, that I have seen the most people react to most strongly has been her stark asceticism, which is another strand of Catholicism that attracted her. People (academic types), I have found, very much dislike her asceticism, just as they get uneasy about her religious inclinations. We all do at some level, probably, and it’s no wonder. Nothing strikes so deep a wound in the zeitgeist than voluntary self-restraint and even, dare I say it, what in the bad old days of western Christianity was called ‘mortification of the flesh,’ or what in eastern Christian terms is I believe more commonly termed ‘taming the passions.’
There is a correlation, I think, between rootedness and the asceticism proposed by all the major religious traditions. To really dwell anywhere properly requires precisely the recognition and even celebration of limits.
I think you make a crucial point Jonathan, and it's one I want to come back to and expand on in future - 'To really dwell anywhere properly requires precisely the recognition and even celebration of limits.' Absolutely, and this point is missed right across the political spectrum.
I read Susan Sontag a while back complaining also about Weil's asceticism. The take seemed to be that she could have been a good left-feminist critic were it not for her weird belief in religion and attachment to actually living it. You're right: nothing makes us more uncomfortable than this. I think it is because it shows us who we are.