No revelation coming.

Mistrusting spiritual intuition about the future of the planet.

Apologies. I had the original draft of this scheduled to go out Saturday morning but, looking through it on Friday evening, it just seemed a mess. I had spent the week working on the draft anthropology paper I’d been working on alongside this writing; something which really oughtn’t to have taken me all week. Friday evening I was tired and did not have the spoons to re-jig this.

This morning, all the things I put off for that anthropology work are very pressing: tax return, prep for an interview, meeting for the next field trip. However I just had quite a strong reminder of why I had better get on with this.

On the way to the doctor’s for a blood test, I passed a woodpigeon that appeared to be tangled in a street tree. It was still but leaning forward, its wings in a blazon as if caught mid glide. Its eye was white and wild, but they are always like that; still I was pretty sure it was stuck. I was early for my appointment but not that early. I went and came back. Then I got the loppers out of the cellar, gardening gloves, a black fleece to throw over it, scissors and my old Vietnamese army rucksack to lug all that up the tree in. It was one of those hybrid Sorbus that serve as street trees and half of its branches seemed to be dead. Not enough kids climbing trees in this village. I had to lean rather precariously to hook the loppers round the right branch and I squeezed and sawed and cursed until I’d severed it. Then I dragged it in through the other twigs and brought the bird close. It was flapping madly all the time, of course, and I roughly managed to pin its wings back with one hand. I’d seen one wing was bloodied in the struggle but, as I drew it in, it became clear that the tangled leg was lost to use. What I should have done then, in retrospect, was lop that leg straight off at the ankle. Instead I snipped away as much as I could of the fishing line that bound it to the twig. Then I snipped away the twig itself each side and then, of course, I dropped the pigeon.

It was a bungled job. I’m not a vet and haven’t any experience handling birds this size. It fell through the tree, flapping and I came down after to find the bird nestled among the roots. I should have thrown the fleece over it right then but instead I stumbled closer with my hands out and of course the bird flew off, long low and panicked to hide behind a gardener’s van in the yard on the corner. I gave up; whether it lived would probably depend on whether it could peck its leg off before the rot set in. I’d given it a chance. We’d had a one-legged woodpigeon happily aldermanning¹ it over our old garden in Grantchester. Three-legged muntjacs, serow, bears and hunting dogs too can still be snapped by camera traps among the aroid fronds in the snare-hung forests so there’s a chance.

Traps, whether real or deliberate, don’t just hold you, they fuck you up. And, for a certain kind of trap, they use your own strength to do it. In these posts, I’m supposed to be describing an intellectual trap that I’m stuck in myself and I do not have forever to get out of it. I’m supposed to be doing it by describing four interlocking propositions that are supposed to get me out but don’t seem to. I’m supposed to be doing it in terse, pared-down prose. How likely is that? I’m going to pick up the thing to shake the leaves off and then I’m going to start describing how they fall.

I’m already tired.

Still, to re-cap:

During fieldwork in Vietnam in 2008, a man told me that “the spirits had been pushed back to the stream sources by the power of the revolution.” Several other people told me similar things. One of those ‘spirits’ (abhuy in Katu) is the Tiger which illustrates the difference in their thinking. The most important defining feature of an abhuy, it seems, is not what it is made of, but what it can do to you. And now, for whatever reason, it is clear that we can do far worse to tigers than they can ever do to us. We can, for example, tie them up on concrete slabs and pump them full of drugs so they couldn’t fight back while we punched them in the face. I’d seen a picture in a book in the WWF - but that wasn’t even the worst thing.

I was reading Moby Dick at the same time and declaring myself “on the whale’s side” despite the fact that the whale would kill me. It seemed the purest ideal I could imagine for what conservation was about and it presented a terrifying ideal of alliance with powers greater than the human. But under the terrifying ideal is a horrifying doubt: what if there are no powers greater than the human? Or, more accurately, what if there are no powers that are securely beyond our reach forever. I wonder, are you scoffing? I’d like to be scoffing. In chapter 105, with arguments that still sound quite sensible, Melville argues that its absolutely impossible for mere humans to hunt whales to extinction. Whatever he was trying to prove by that in the context of his story, it changes its meaning in light of the fact that the premise has been proven utterly and obviously wrong. How will things look a century or two from now?

I spoke already about how the lessons from this make it hard for me to accept two common propositions that I hear from those who care about the wild and are - broadly speaking - spiritually inclined. Now it’s time for proposition three:

“There are, in fact, two possible futures; one of apocalyptic destruction and another where we re-develop respect for the wider non-human world.”

I could call this the eschatological argument. It’s really popular. By driving the spirits back to the stream sources, all we are doing is sending back the messengers. More potent ministers may already be setting forth from their Green Chapels. Perhaps, if we keep killing these messengers, the King Himself will come. I’m making it sound very Christian - more on that later - but I could also say that maybe things with many heads are already bubbling into life in the womb of the earth. Personally I first heard this kind of prophecy with a Buddhist flavour from Joanna Macy who has long spoken of the choice between a Great Unravelling and a Great Turning.

Those who followed Joanna sometimes seemed too sure what the Great Turning was going to look like and I often found this alienating, though I could find allies in my alienation within the Work that Reconnects. I read somewhere that Joanna and Chris Johnstone (I think) were working on rolling back some of the sureties in the movement about what the good future was. I can’t find the link now, but I hope it’s true.

Still, the way I originally heard it from her in 2005, everything about it seemed up for grabs. The idea, as I understood it, was simply that we were headed for a big crash and there was a possibility - probability uncalculated - that we would pull out of it somehow. You didn’t have to be on board with any particular story about exactly how that was going to happen, or even to have a story at all. It seemed, at root, a statement that either you have some hope or you think you know the future (which you don’t). That just seemed like logic. What could be wrong with it?

Well, it’s not necessarily true that any possible outcome falls into either of those two categories: Turning or Unravelling. I don’t mean that everything could be just fine. I mean it’s technically possible that it could. In the way that it’s technically possible that our entire reality is part of an ephedrine dream in the positronic brain of Zippy from Rainbow and in five seconds we’ll all turn purple. I don’t mean that, though: I mean that there’s wiggle room in the ‘we’ of the Great Turning story. The “we” that could pull out of the crash definitely doesn’t include Steller’s sea cow or the Passenger pigeon; it’s too late for them. It looks pretty unlikely now that it’s going to include the saola but I can mourn later; I’m being brittle and flippant right now. It looks like “we” means ‘humans’. But what if it only means some humans? And what if the humans that get through this aren’t any kind of indigenous community or back-to-the land collective but - well - what if it’s Elon Musk in a colony on Mars or Ray Kurzweil as an uploaded intelligence? Or what if the turning that has to happen for survival of human heritage involves abandoning rather than dwelling in ideas about equality, democracy, human rights or the sanctity of human rights? What’s your reaction to that? Your emotional reaction, I mean, not the arguments.

Sorry, I’m not sure where the aggressive questioning came from. It seems this has, just possibly, got a little silly. I’m not trying to say it’s definitely wrong that there are two possible futures (respect and apocalypse); I just think that people seem unnervingly confident about it. That confidence makes me suspicious because I fear it is actually confidence about something unconnected with the world we live in; the one where history happens. I think there was some reason why Melville was sure that The Whale was eternal. I think that he may well have been speaking some kind of a deeper truth, a spiritual truth. I don’t think it’s necessarily meaningless to talk about things that are true ‘in the spiritual sense’ or ‘in a spiritual world.’ I just think that intuition of this kind hasn’t proven itself a very reliable guide to the future.

This might seem like a bizarre and irrelevant thing to say when so much is very obviously dying and collapsing. But - well - what if the collapsing doesn’t actually bring down the power? If we think of “our civilization” with the UN and the World Bank and the WEF and Davos and all the rest, and we think of fossil fuels and climate change; then yes, the civilization must utterly change or it must die. But as soon as you add even nuclear fission to the mix, things look a whole lot less certain. If it hadn’t been for Chernobyl, we might be getting most of our electricity from nuclear sources already. That’s just fission, not fusion and that’s not even going near topics like artificial intelligence or eugenics. I’m not saying, that we could have saved civilization with these things. But I could see - for example - a powerful elite getting to the point where they are able to increase, rather than roll back their domination of ‘nature’ and survive in a new and nastier relationship with it. And I think that ‘nature’ could, in fact, include the remnant of humanity over whom they would hold a power that is greater than political; power like the power we hold over other vertebrate animals. I’m not saying that’s going to happen but I don’t see that it is, or has ever been, impossible. You can always find karma after, but prophecy is hard, or interpreting it is.

An apocalypse isn’t just the biggest kind of disaster. Apocalypse implies justice, implies revelation, implies no place left for the sinners to run to. These are things which keep getting deferred in actual history; or isn’t that so? Christians and Marxists must both know this; or isn’t that so? Tell me if it isn’t! Seems to me that many of us have already lived out fat lives without breaking the habits of domination, objectification, extermination and negation. Others have suffered for it. Maybe now it is the turn of some of those who have benefited from it to suffer also - but maybe only some of us. Maybe it’s true that ‘the winners’ are now seeing the truths that have so long been apparent to so many less fortunate humans. But maybe that doesn’t mean the game is over; maybe it just means we - I mean middle class people in rich countries - aren’t among the winners any more. And it’s still possible to be a bigger loser than any human has ever been.

Maybe there are powers that would take vengeance but there are also greater powers that have pushed them back to the stream sources. Maybe trying to live with harmony and respect for nature will only make us more vulnerable to the vengeance from which others are protected precisely because they keep their distance. Gaia isn’t God. Gaia bred terrible vengeance against Zeus and came close to succeeding but nonetheless she did not succeed. Zeus won, for a while at least; and a while is all anyone can ever win for anyway. Nothing is sustainable in the end. But the fact that everything ends isn’t that reassuring; what comes after can be worse.

Also it isn’t really a two-character drama: Gaia v Zeus. Even if every single one of us will have to pay for the death of the coral reefs, we won’t have to pay for the loss of the saola. Not in material terms anyway and maybe not in any way at all. So please forgive me for doubting that what is going on here bears any resemblance to justice or that it ever will.

The thing is, if your response to this is that it can’t be like that, then it only increases my sense that, in fact, it can. If you are sure that our hubris must eventually lead to our downfall, then I want you to pay attention to that eventually. Because I’m sure in my heart that extinction can’t happen, that tigers can’t be extirpated, still less domesticated, by mere humans, that Moby Dick cannot die unless Ahab dies too. And I know that my heart is wrong.

I washed a gobbet of garnet blood off my loppers at the outdoor tap. Blood unlike the blood in the two full tubes that I’d left at the doctor’s. The red cells would be nucleated and the nuclei would contain Z-chromosomes if the bird was female. The cells would have lifted oxygen into and uric acid out of systems better-built than my slightly souped-up Permian lungs and kidneys. Blood of the ruling reptiles. It looked just the same as when I’d seen that same flesh exposed in a Medieval kitchen in Suffolk decades ago. A gastronomically-talented friend, now a monk, was preparing some birds culled from the dovecote to stew in their own juices. If that stone hadn’t hit the Yucatan then maybe it would be me in the tree, tearing my foot off or it would have been my flesh pulled bare on those slab. A red kite turns on the blue sky above me. I know where he could find a meal, I suppose. I’m always thinking like this. There are always loose ends.

And there’s also the rot that might set into that leg. A proliferation of anaerobic bacteria. I remember the story from Oxford; an untreated wound is a tiny refuge within a world that has been burning with poison for two and a half billion years. The old world was destroyed by toxic oxygen released by the creatures whose descendants are the chloroplasts of plants. The blooming of remnant anaerobes in our oxygenated world brings tragedies to us at every scale; every one an inadequate counterpoint to the doom we wrought on them. Look how tall the trees grow.

I heard this morning of the death of the man who told me that story, my old tutor from Oxford, Professor Barrie Juniper. He told us stories about finding the garden of Eden and he told us stories about just how impossible that was.

I had better stop there. I suppose that’s all I’m going to say about Christianity for now. I have more text about that to put in order - which should finally giving due credit to some others on substack - but I’ll have to shove it into another draft post for the minute. But, oddly, today’s SMBC comic seems pretty apt.

1. not a word.