Interesting - I first read this line "which is the name of the beast I once thought I might help save" as: 'which is the name of the beast I once thought might help save me.' Is that how it has felt to you, also?
Wonderful, this - succinctly brilliant: "I love people but humanity isn’t a person."
I'm finding it hard to think this week. I suppose the idea makes me feel guilty and anxious. It makes me think 'so was it really all just about me, then?'
I've been listening to a podcast recently by a Christian lady called Elizabeth Oldfield (she's also on substack here https://morefullyalive.substack.com/) - she asks her guests what they consider sacred. I have wondered what I would answer because it seems to me that 'sacred' means both 'worshipful' and 'inviolable'. So what if something seems worshipful and not inviolable? Writing it down, I realise that would be a pretty silly question to ask a Christian.
Well, in some way, at some level, it's always about 'me'. And/or, it can be about me, without being ALL about me, yeah? One of the wisest, kindest, most generous people I've ever met, Marshall Rosenberg (founder of Nonviolent Communication) once said, "Never do anything for anyone else, ever." What he meant (and further said) was that if doing it doesn't bring joy to my heart - if I'm doing something for another person (or creature) solely out of guilt, fear, sense of obligation, etc. "one or both of you will eventually pay for it in resentment."
Human beings evolved as a cooperative, group-living species. Contributing to a community is hard-wired into our DNA, and so doing something for others in a community (however we define that group) can also be doing something for 'myself'.
"The greatest illusion we all have to overcome, is the illusion of separateness". -Chuck Chamberlain.
Well, you know, Elon Musk once said 'if I'm a narcissist (which may be true), at least I'm a useful narcissist.' I thought at the time that that was quite a cool thing to say. Now I'm not so sure!
I think that if you're going to compare conservationist:species to a human:human relationship, then the obvious one is doctor:patient. If a doctor goes 'I hoped this patient would save me' or even 'I hoped my patients would save me,' you've got to be a bit suspicious, right?
But then, of course this may be the problem: we're supposed to keep it professional.
Sadly, seemingly most Europeans and many other non-Americans benefiting (or at least operating under the belief that they benefit) from the ludicrously unpeaceful "Pax Americana" have been colonized by the idea that the DC-based mafia running the neoliberal imperial racket is necessary and constitutes a civilization, "the west," or even worse, "the free world." These addicts are going to have a long hard withdrawal process learning to become again more directly responsible for their own processes of killing, eating, and defending themselves from other predators.
Thanks. I guess I don't have so much to say about that. I'm not sure that I see this civilization as particularly fake or bad compared to others, but then I am not a historian or anything of the kind. I wasn't trying to offer any kind of response to the election - or a response to other people's responses. I only mentioned Donald Trump because I was looking at the picture on my wall and then remembering when I bought it - though, of course, I probably wouldn't have mentioned it if he hadn't just won again. I have fears for my family and friends, and I have fears for the biosphere. Fears for my country or civilization come less naturally to me - which does not mean they're less valid. I just want to be able to talk about other kinds of doom.
I think we're getting all possible dooms — it's overdetermined by the logic of our traps, the machinery of our hubris, the wrath or justice of the gods, and pretty much all ideas of doom ever imagined. Maybe we can invent a new doom beyond the planetary level.
My doom is bigger than your doom ;-). Yes, AI raises ideas of doom on a vast scale. However I think my purpose here is precisely to resist unifying narratives of doom. A mass extinction isn't the same thing as a civilizational collapse, just as a civilizational collapse isn't the same thing as an individual death. Stories to help (as best they can) with the death of a loved one don't necessarily help you deal with the death of a civilization, though they may. Stories that help you deal (as best they can) with the death of a civilization don't necessarily help you deal with a mass extinction because those aren't actually at all the same thing and don't have the same kind of cause.
Also mass extinction belongs to what people are likely to call 'the dominant materialist scientific paradigm' or something like that. But in fact it seems to me that stories of human civilization/s are far more dominant and powerful in our culture than stories about the history of all life. So if you try and tell a story that works on the million-year scale, people are likely to say they understand and claim it is 'all part of' some story they have on the hundred or thousand year scale. At the same time, people (sometimes the same ones) say that the million-year story is the dominant one because it's 'scientific'.
...I seem to have got rather petty and bitchy about the end of the world.
So you are looking for stories that help people cope with "doom" (endings) on different timescales? Or their awareness of limits — the scope of their own lives, the life of their people or "civilization," the life of their bioregion, and the viability of the biosphere for organic life — and the life of the earth, the sun, etc.?
What problem would be solved with different stories? Would they teach people their proper place within the scope of different orders and scales of being? Like Douglas Adams' "total perspective vortex," awareness of how small, irrelevant, and late we are seems crushing to most people, which is bad and enables a few exceptional personalities to mount a resistance against time in great demonstrations of will — empire building of one form or another. What stories could provide an alternative?
Is part of the problem the fact that humans (late to language and everything) only recently acquired a conception of the future (future tenses are late additions or absent in languages) and really bungle it — perhaps on purpose? Are we willfully ignorant about everything concerning mortality and limits unless we are forced to face them constantly in the process of the daily killing and eating life requires? In successful empires, slave societies, and power hierarchies of elites, we're not forced to face them, which briefly allowed bubbles of delusion called liberalism and middle classes where every incentive exists to be blind to cause and effect, real versus perceived risk, compound interest, keeping the balance line in the black, the bathtub effect, etc. Why should highly evolved gastrointestinal tracts be more concerned about moderation, quality, and future meals/savings/profit/atmospheres?
The problem with stories is that people revise them in the retelling, so we have dominant and lost/underground/peripheral traditions about Eve, Pandora, etc. Illich was interested in how the indigenous American myths had, in his view, a healthier conception of the earth mother that were corrupted early in the West. I've been reminded of that material while expanding an essay of mine that may be stalking the same problems you are concerned with. Our place in time is harder to imagine than our place in space.https://knauss.substack.com/p/three-views-of-earth-from-the-moon
I really like that essay (though I'm counting 4 views?). You're asking a lot of questions I don't really have answers to, I suppose.
I think it's easy to respond to all your points by engaging with an implied question of 'is this where it all went wrong?' Did it go wrong when we started imagining the future? Did it go wrong when our image of Mother Earth became corrupted? Did it go wrong when we became alienated from the necessity of killing? Could we fix it at all with new stories?
All I seem able to talk about is what the traps are. I think that there's a powerful trap in the temptation to tell that kind of story - whether or not that is what you intend. My brain is exhausting itself spinning those wheels.
Whether we'd be better as a society with a different kind of story, I don't know. I think I become fundamentally untrustworthy if I start thinking like that. I think I just have to say when something seems false, inadequate or unhelpful.
It all (elections, extinction crisis, personal reflection) feels existential right now. But in that light, don't think about what you could have been/done but rather about what you will be and do.
Well it seems like I can't really do the one without the other. I mean, it looks like a lot of what I tried to do made no sense. To find out what would make sense, I have to be clear about why.
I've become less and less and sure of anything these days and so I find your "flippant" wonderings helpful, a sort of leaky life raft in a sea of black and white.
My phone is too old to run the Substack app so I use a browser on the phone and laptop and in my suggested recent history pages at the top, is Substack, and for some reason the logo of this has defaulted to your saola(?) icon. I like that this has happened, don’t know why.
I also do that and I have no idea either. The icon is a very old image I made in MSPaint, I think, of a juvenile saola. It looks pretty rubbish at large size though. I have found Substack a bit much recently, to be honest!
Anyway, I'd like to hear more what you're unsure about. Lot of certainties crystallizing recently.
MSPaint! That image must almost be vintage (or as the mechanic likes to call my 15 year old car; "Classic". If only you'd sold it during the NFT boom, you could be rolling in bitcoin or whatever it is and not hanging around down here with us miserable bastards (and maybe in a penthouse not a basement). haha. (now I'm really feeling old, I just looked up NFTs to see if they are still a thing and I see yes they are still a thing, being traded in currencies I do not understand and for prices I also do not understand. My family of four could live for a year on the trading price of what looks like a pretty simple-looking gif)
My "less sure comment" comes from finding out over the last year or so that so many of the people I respected and followed, especially in the agroforestry/agricultural fields, and so many of them Aussies too, are turning out to be right-wing, facist-loving, nut jobs. I'm not just talking about leaning a little to the right, I'm talking about actively cheering it on. When they talk about the persecution of the Jews in WW2 and about these people who risked their lives to hide them or keep them safe, and the question is what sort of person would you be if that situation ever arose again, I'm afraid it seems I'm surrounded by people who would happily slam the oven doors shut and turn the gas on. I'm sorry, that may have been a bit much, feel free to delete this comment.
The same goes for denial of what's going on with the biosphere. It just makes me more and more reclusive, I'm just getting more and more disappointed in people. Which is hard, because what else is there.
Sorry I should edit and add, it's not just right wing nut-jobs, it's left wing nut-jobs too, it doesn't seem to matter their political persuasions, it's their denial or refusal to acknowledge the violence against people (humans and non-humans) in order to live their comfortable lives in this civilisation.
I feel like I'd like to hear more about that to be honest. I do think a lot about denial but I don't know what kind of crazy right wing ideas Aussie agroforesters are going to be supporting. Crazy 'left wing' ideas I might have a better notion. There's definitely been a breaking of a consensus.
Interesting - I first read this line "which is the name of the beast I once thought I might help save" as: 'which is the name of the beast I once thought might help save me.' Is that how it has felt to you, also?
Wonderful, this - succinctly brilliant: "I love people but humanity isn’t a person."
Thanks Bill.
I'm finding it hard to think this week. I suppose the idea makes me feel guilty and anxious. It makes me think 'so was it really all just about me, then?'
I've been listening to a podcast recently by a Christian lady called Elizabeth Oldfield (she's also on substack here https://morefullyalive.substack.com/) - she asks her guests what they consider sacred. I have wondered what I would answer because it seems to me that 'sacred' means both 'worshipful' and 'inviolable'. So what if something seems worshipful and not inviolable? Writing it down, I realise that would be a pretty silly question to ask a Christian.
Well, in some way, at some level, it's always about 'me'. And/or, it can be about me, without being ALL about me, yeah? One of the wisest, kindest, most generous people I've ever met, Marshall Rosenberg (founder of Nonviolent Communication) once said, "Never do anything for anyone else, ever." What he meant (and further said) was that if doing it doesn't bring joy to my heart - if I'm doing something for another person (or creature) solely out of guilt, fear, sense of obligation, etc. "one or both of you will eventually pay for it in resentment."
Human beings evolved as a cooperative, group-living species. Contributing to a community is hard-wired into our DNA, and so doing something for others in a community (however we define that group) can also be doing something for 'myself'.
"The greatest illusion we all have to overcome, is the illusion of separateness". -Chuck Chamberlain.
Well, you know, Elon Musk once said 'if I'm a narcissist (which may be true), at least I'm a useful narcissist.' I thought at the time that that was quite a cool thing to say. Now I'm not so sure!
I think that if you're going to compare conservationist:species to a human:human relationship, then the obvious one is doctor:patient. If a doctor goes 'I hoped this patient would save me' or even 'I hoped my patients would save me,' you've got to be a bit suspicious, right?
But then, of course this may be the problem: we're supposed to keep it professional.
When did you meet Marshall Rosenberg?
Sadly, seemingly most Europeans and many other non-Americans benefiting (or at least operating under the belief that they benefit) from the ludicrously unpeaceful "Pax Americana" have been colonized by the idea that the DC-based mafia running the neoliberal imperial racket is necessary and constitutes a civilization, "the west," or even worse, "the free world." These addicts are going to have a long hard withdrawal process learning to become again more directly responsible for their own processes of killing, eating, and defending themselves from other predators.
Thanks. I guess I don't have so much to say about that. I'm not sure that I see this civilization as particularly fake or bad compared to others, but then I am not a historian or anything of the kind. I wasn't trying to offer any kind of response to the election - or a response to other people's responses. I only mentioned Donald Trump because I was looking at the picture on my wall and then remembering when I bought it - though, of course, I probably wouldn't have mentioned it if he hadn't just won again. I have fears for my family and friends, and I have fears for the biosphere. Fears for my country or civilization come less naturally to me - which does not mean they're less valid. I just want to be able to talk about other kinds of doom.
I think we're getting all possible dooms — it's overdetermined by the logic of our traps, the machinery of our hubris, the wrath or justice of the gods, and pretty much all ideas of doom ever imagined. Maybe we can invent a new doom beyond the planetary level.
My doom is bigger than your doom ;-). Yes, AI raises ideas of doom on a vast scale. However I think my purpose here is precisely to resist unifying narratives of doom. A mass extinction isn't the same thing as a civilizational collapse, just as a civilizational collapse isn't the same thing as an individual death. Stories to help (as best they can) with the death of a loved one don't necessarily help you deal with the death of a civilization, though they may. Stories that help you deal (as best they can) with the death of a civilization don't necessarily help you deal with a mass extinction because those aren't actually at all the same thing and don't have the same kind of cause.
Also mass extinction belongs to what people are likely to call 'the dominant materialist scientific paradigm' or something like that. But in fact it seems to me that stories of human civilization/s are far more dominant and powerful in our culture than stories about the history of all life. So if you try and tell a story that works on the million-year scale, people are likely to say they understand and claim it is 'all part of' some story they have on the hundred or thousand year scale. At the same time, people (sometimes the same ones) say that the million-year story is the dominant one because it's 'scientific'.
...I seem to have got rather petty and bitchy about the end of the world.
So you are looking for stories that help people cope with "doom" (endings) on different timescales? Or their awareness of limits — the scope of their own lives, the life of their people or "civilization," the life of their bioregion, and the viability of the biosphere for organic life — and the life of the earth, the sun, etc.?
What problem would be solved with different stories? Would they teach people their proper place within the scope of different orders and scales of being? Like Douglas Adams' "total perspective vortex," awareness of how small, irrelevant, and late we are seems crushing to most people, which is bad and enables a few exceptional personalities to mount a resistance against time in great demonstrations of will — empire building of one form or another. What stories could provide an alternative?
Is part of the problem the fact that humans (late to language and everything) only recently acquired a conception of the future (future tenses are late additions or absent in languages) and really bungle it — perhaps on purpose? Are we willfully ignorant about everything concerning mortality and limits unless we are forced to face them constantly in the process of the daily killing and eating life requires? In successful empires, slave societies, and power hierarchies of elites, we're not forced to face them, which briefly allowed bubbles of delusion called liberalism and middle classes where every incentive exists to be blind to cause and effect, real versus perceived risk, compound interest, keeping the balance line in the black, the bathtub effect, etc. Why should highly evolved gastrointestinal tracts be more concerned about moderation, quality, and future meals/savings/profit/atmospheres?
The problem with stories is that people revise them in the retelling, so we have dominant and lost/underground/peripheral traditions about Eve, Pandora, etc. Illich was interested in how the indigenous American myths had, in his view, a healthier conception of the earth mother that were corrupted early in the West. I've been reminded of that material while expanding an essay of mine that may be stalking the same problems you are concerned with. Our place in time is harder to imagine than our place in space.https://knauss.substack.com/p/three-views-of-earth-from-the-moon
I really like that essay (though I'm counting 4 views?). You're asking a lot of questions I don't really have answers to, I suppose.
I think it's easy to respond to all your points by engaging with an implied question of 'is this where it all went wrong?' Did it go wrong when we started imagining the future? Did it go wrong when our image of Mother Earth became corrupted? Did it go wrong when we became alienated from the necessity of killing? Could we fix it at all with new stories?
All I seem able to talk about is what the traps are. I think that there's a powerful trap in the temptation to tell that kind of story - whether or not that is what you intend. My brain is exhausting itself spinning those wheels.
Whether we'd be better as a society with a different kind of story, I don't know. I think I become fundamentally untrustworthy if I start thinking like that. I think I just have to say when something seems false, inadequate or unhelpful.
It all (elections, extinction crisis, personal reflection) feels existential right now. But in that light, don't think about what you could have been/done but rather about what you will be and do.
Well it seems like I can't really do the one without the other. I mean, it looks like a lot of what I tried to do made no sense. To find out what would make sense, I have to be clear about why.
Glad you didn't finish. Or die.
Welcome back. It is good to have you back asking awkward questions and refusing to accept cosy consensus.
So good to read your words again.
I've become less and less and sure of anything these days and so I find your "flippant" wonderings helpful, a sort of leaky life raft in a sea of black and white.
Do write again please, no pressure, haha
My phone is too old to run the Substack app so I use a browser on the phone and laptop and in my suggested recent history pages at the top, is Substack, and for some reason the logo of this has defaulted to your saola(?) icon. I like that this has happened, don’t know why.
I also do that and I have no idea either. The icon is a very old image I made in MSPaint, I think, of a juvenile saola. It looks pretty rubbish at large size though. I have found Substack a bit much recently, to be honest!
Anyway, I'd like to hear more what you're unsure about. Lot of certainties crystallizing recently.
MSPaint! That image must almost be vintage (or as the mechanic likes to call my 15 year old car; "Classic". If only you'd sold it during the NFT boom, you could be rolling in bitcoin or whatever it is and not hanging around down here with us miserable bastards (and maybe in a penthouse not a basement). haha. (now I'm really feeling old, I just looked up NFTs to see if they are still a thing and I see yes they are still a thing, being traded in currencies I do not understand and for prices I also do not understand. My family of four could live for a year on the trading price of what looks like a pretty simple-looking gif)
My "less sure comment" comes from finding out over the last year or so that so many of the people I respected and followed, especially in the agroforestry/agricultural fields, and so many of them Aussies too, are turning out to be right-wing, facist-loving, nut jobs. I'm not just talking about leaning a little to the right, I'm talking about actively cheering it on. When they talk about the persecution of the Jews in WW2 and about these people who risked their lives to hide them or keep them safe, and the question is what sort of person would you be if that situation ever arose again, I'm afraid it seems I'm surrounded by people who would happily slam the oven doors shut and turn the gas on. I'm sorry, that may have been a bit much, feel free to delete this comment.
The same goes for denial of what's going on with the biosphere. It just makes me more and more reclusive, I'm just getting more and more disappointed in people. Which is hard, because what else is there.
Sorry I should edit and add, it's not just right wing nut-jobs, it's left wing nut-jobs too, it doesn't seem to matter their political persuasions, it's their denial or refusal to acknowledge the violence against people (humans and non-humans) in order to live their comfortable lives in this civilisation.
I feel like I'd like to hear more about that to be honest. I do think a lot about denial but I don't know what kind of crazy right wing ideas Aussie agroforesters are going to be supporting. Crazy 'left wing' ideas I might have a better notion. There's definitely been a breaking of a consensus.
Maybe a lot of it might be the Murdoch empire saturates Australian media, and maybe also because they've really enjoyed some good, prosperous times (what global financial crisis?) times. Actually just reading a good essay at the moment, no need to read the whole lot, but the first few paragraphs explain a lot I think: https://open.substack.com/pub/hipcrime/p/the-anatomy-of-neo-fascism-final?r=fhgru&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web