The Trap. An epilogue.
The list of loopholes, Lord of the Rings references (for some reason) and a landing.
For the first time ever, I begin my journey to Vietnam by driving. Down country lanes, through fog and frost in the dark morning, with all England's black fingers reaching round me. The first train is cancelled so I wait in the car. It’s full of my little son's paraphernalia: a ladybird blanket, a laminated sheet of Costa Rican mammals and two mismatched green mittens. My wife will have to take a taxi back to the station later to pick up the car because I didn’t manage to book one in the early morning. This after she’d told me she was still always picking up the slack and I’d protested it was no longer true. Song thrushes sing above me in the station car park. The next trains look set to be cancelled too.
I recently finished a series of posts about the idea that I was stuck in a trap. I wanted to look at the lineaments of this trap, shaken loose of all the vegetation from Nam Đông. I described what I thought were the accepted ways to get out of the trap but which it seemed to me did not work. In my last four posts, I wrote about why I thought they did not work and, at the end I also promised to write a list of the ways that perhaps I, and others, could still get out. I thought that would be a quick thing to write. Seems not. This is the best I can do for now as events have rather taken over.
The trap:
My story is that the trap closed during one particular conversation in the guesthouse in Nam Đông in July 2008. It was a conversation with an anthropologist colleague, Nikolas Århem. It followed several conversations with Katu people; of which the most memorable, for me, was with a man waving his hands over one of our maps and telling us that “the spirits had been driven back to the stream sources by the Power of the Revolution.” Our interpreter thought this was too boring and obvious a sentiment to even translate. A few months earlier I had been reading Moby Dick in the shadow of - as it later emerged - the most powerful spirit-mountain in the area. In chapter 105, Melville claims that humans will never be able to wipe out whales, and I felt that this argument undermined what I wanted to take from the book. The “powerful spirit mountain” was now the local hotspot for illegal hunting and logging because fear of the spirits’ vengeance had kept people away in the past, leaving richer pickings. That fear was no longer effective, apparently because of the “Power of the Revolution.” In the conversation with Nikolas, we discussed an approach to conservation which affirmed the old Katu way of relating to the land rather than aligning with the state model of control. At that point, it seems, I finally gave up on that kind of approach because it seemed that, even in its own words, the Katu world was losing to modernity. Either modernity was winning because it was right or it was winning because it was powerful. The second possibility, I referred to internally as ‘Big Demon Theory’, reinforcing a long-standing sense of conservation as a Faustian pact. I still signed up to that pact because there seemed like no alternative. That’s why a dream couldn’t easily dissuade me from my course; there seemed like no alternative.
There we are; finally did it in a paragraph. That took months.
The escapes I find it hard to believe in.
In the first post in this series I questioned the idea that changing our perceptions could help change the world. Of course, there is one way that changing perceptions instantly changes the world. But it’s also true that there is a great and terrible power and you cannot blink it away.
In the second, I questioned that there is ‘an answer’ to be found by listening to indigenous cultures. It doesn’t mean it’s not worth listening to them but basically, if they had a way to fight or escape that power, they would have used it themselves.
In the third, and perhaps most controversially, I questioned the story that the power will collapse by itself and leave us standing among older things. I don’t feel any kind of confidence that this will happen. That doesn’t mean I think that things will go on as they are (they never have), but I think it’s possible that what comes next may be utterly unexpected. I need a cosmology that isn’t smugly sure about ‘progress’ but which can also handle the Great Oxygenation Event.
The fourth post is about the idea that wildlife conservation is a Faustian pact. My thesis is that if, like me, you are focused on “large charismatic vertebrates,” then it is very hard to believe that there’s some ‘bug’ like “Capitalism” that can be removed. If you want to do that, you have to arbitrarily decide that the adzebill, the bibimalagasy, the giant Maltese swan and tiny elephant, every single ground-sloth and mega-armadillo, the maruspial panda, the actual panda outside China, the giant deer, the giant owl, the giant sea cow except for one tiny island - all of these and so many more - just don’t count. Because it wasn’t Capitalism or modernity that did for all of them but Homo sapiens. There’s no way of taking the moral high ground and refusing to deal with the enemy because we are the enemy. And not because of the systems or ideas we’ve been forced into either, but because of what we are; including our capacity to be swayed by such systems and ideas. Whether you accept that or you are constantly struggling against it, it makes it hard to know where to draw the line, when it comes to allegiances.
The ways out which just might work.
OK I wrote a lot here but I need to keep it simple. I might come back to any of these but, right now, I need to move on. I need to get out myself. Maybe I’ve done good work so far outlining the trap but I’ll still choose the wrong way out of it. I need to list the possible ways I can see now so that later, if I do choose wrong, anyone who might be watching can see there are other possibilities. And maybe they can see right now that there are other possibilities I haven’t noticed. Anyway here are the possible loopholes as I see them.
One: Go deeper in understanding ‘the spirits’. After all, my understanding of biology based on a childhood obsession, long years of schooling, my upbringing, my bachelor’s and higher degrees, all the conversation and all the thought I had since. The idea that “The Revolution” can really push back the spirits is based on something a guy told me once. He wasn’t an elder or a shaman or anything; just some guy. He was kind of drunk. I could be pinning a bit too much on what he said.
Two: Embrace the change. Embrace the bewilderment. Change doesn’t mean progress - there’s no evidence for such an axis to the world. Seek out and unbuckle any hopes of an Eden that exists in our continuum. Accept impermanence; stop trying to make exceptions to it for things - like species - that have been around for “a long time.” No times are long. It is true that we were not made for times like these but only because we’re not made for times at all, but by them.
Three: I’m exaggerating -
suggested this - exaggerating the power of the Revolution, the Machine. It has blind spots. In fact, a model is only a model because it has blind spots; otherwise it would be the world. What’s more, model begets model and blindness inheres; I’ve seen it happen. There is no need to believe that any particular thing inhabits the blind spots. They might just be full of shed skins and mould. But you don’t know until you’ve looked. If there’s no known hope then there is necessarily an unknown hope; because we don’t know everything. The seemingly dry eyes of the streams hold water in the shadows under the red rubble in the folds of the mountain. Maybe that’s not all they hold. And tides can shift.Four: A bit more specific. Not just ‘there might be something out there’ and not ‘see these same facts in a new way’ but propose actual miracles - not metaphorical ones. Find actual evidence for them, or at least deconstruct the evidence against them. However it’s got to be something that transcends perspectives. It can’t be just ‘those things exist for other people.’ It can’t be ‘indigenous people live in their own, equally valid, worlds’ - not if something can come out of our world and attack theirs and the reverse isn’t also true. This ties into number one, above.
Five: Be more specific still and affirm that God has a plan for the future. Not ‘the spirits of the forest’ or even Gaia, who can all be defeated, but God - who cannot. It doesn’t have to be the God of the Bible and maybe not even a person, but it has to be something infinitely far beyond power as we understand it; as powerful as mathematics, at least.
I could see this working for me, perhaps, if I maintain the spirit of loopholes ‘two’ and ‘four’ above. I don’t believe or have faith in God’s plan but I can see myself maybe doing so in future. What I find much harder is the idea that I or anyone could guess even vaguely at its lineaments. When I read Paul Kingsnorth’s essay from last May on What Progress Wants, and I think of its arguments in terms of ‘God’s plan’, I am left with a problem. It seems to me that Kingsnorth can affirm the idea that God’s plan for the world must be achieved in spite of technology and progress, or through its fall, and reject the idea of Kevin Kelly - which he discusses - that the plan is to be achieved through these things. I can’t summon that kind of certainty; I’m thinking of the Great Oxygenation Event again.
I’m also thinking about the Lord of the Rings. I think that the good people at Amazon have rushed in precisely to the point in Tolkien’s legendarium that he himself was afraid to touch. The elves make a terrible mistake, tempted by the prospect of preserving their world’s beauty when God intends it to pass away…
I remember the old ‘climate skeptic’ Peter Stott, who was humble enough to describe himself as ‘Heraclitus looking down on the folly of the Athenians,’ also banging on about LotR as a work of Political Ecology…. But I should be keeping this short. The point is, for me, I could imagine taking the leap of faith towards believing in God’s ineffable, beneficent plan, but I think I’d have to maintain truly radical uncertainty about what that plan is. With regard to my simplistic portrayal of Paul Kingsnorth and Kevin Kelly’s viewpoints above, I would have to consider neither more likely than the other.
I tend to put beliefs that natural selection will ultimately favour cooperation over selfishness under the ‘God’s plan’ heading. Perhaps that’s unfair.
Six: Talk demonology not eschatology; as Kingsnorth, in fact, does. Then, instead of trying to predict the future, you can simply look at something that is present right now and trust your intuition that this thing is wrong. Making any kind of pact with it is bad news because it will twist that pact to fulfil its own objectives. However, while the demons could be literal or metaphorical, as here, they have to be literally or metaphorically demons and not merely powers which happen to be hostile to humans.
I’ll take as a definition Neil Gaiman’s: “They can be summoned to your world for a price; the price is ‘too much’.” Making a pact with such a thing, no matter how dire the circumstances, can only make things worse because a demon’s objective is to make things worse. When I used the words ‘demon’ and ‘Faustian pact’ in my head in Nam Đông, I didn’t mean that literally. I saw the monster as something indifferent to the saola and the forest. Had I seen it as intrinsically hostile to their survival, or hostile to their being anything other than its toys, I might have proceeded very differently, even with no different perception of the probability of victory.
Some warnings though: Jesus apparently says that demons never drive out other demons (Luke 11:17-20) and, if I accept that, it causes me immediate problems. It suggests that the spirits that once demanded the blood of children, and ‘the Revolution’ cannot both be demons. Which makes it a lot harder to believe that ‘demon’ is really a deep category.
And, to get back to Tolkien again: a common criticism of him is that he makes it far too easy to know who is on the side of evil (though not as easy as Peter Jackson makes it). Maybe Hayao Miyazaki is a better guide. To twist that a little further; can we trust Tolkien’s intuition that industrialization is on the side of evil more than we trust his intuition that black people are? There are some definite reasons why the answer there could be ‘yes’, but I think it flags up a definite reason to be careful.
Seven: Just run. For me, in the Lord of the Rings, the characters with the most relatable stories are the men of the line of the stewards. Faramir, the only ultimately heroic one of the three, does little to help save the world but manages to avoid endangering it further just because he recognises that ‘there are some perils from which a man must flee’.
As Caroline Ross just put it: “Words are like blackberries in August. They are very easy to find, you always pick more than you need, they can really stain if not handled correctly, and you can get a nasty scratch trying to extricate yourself from the tangle. Also, if you overfill your basket with them, there won’t be room for anything else.” That is very good. I didn’t start this substack for the kind of writing I have been doing in 2023 and I’m not sure it’s doing me any good. I’m open to returning to the idea that all this kind of thinking is always going to be part of the trap. Caro also recently recorded a conversation with Iain McGilchrist and that might be a good thread to follow.
Speaking of threads, though, I think I’ve tried to use a violence against words like a sword to slice through the Gordian knot and I think that was a mistake. A shocking idea from Martin Shaw - I think it’s in Wolf Milk - is that this knot could actually be patiently worked loose. Seeking release and fearing it, I took my own wilderness vigil with Martin’s school in a Dartmoor wood and the guide - Tim Russell - drew this image out for me at the end. He spoke about finding the thread of life. Can I find it anywhere in what I’m writing now, I wonder?
Eight: It’s not about the future.
It seemed that the most precious thing I took out of that Dartmoor wood was something of a quite different quality from the life lessons and personal insights: pure still scenes of the Earth’s life, present behind my eyes and just there.
I drew a lesson from those lessonless images and it was that the past is not lost or unreal. Meaning isn’t found at the end of a story that unfolds over time. And - a logical deduction - even though no-one knows what colour an adzebill was, or a Tapejara either, they each still have a colour that is true. O’Brien is wrong1.
Martin himself went into that same wood thinking about wolves and, after far longer in there than I spent, came out talking of Jesus. Still wolves yes, but also Jesus. That’s scary. “The Revolution” is defence not only against goddesses and fairies, not only against vampires and demons, but also against Jesus. The defences, the vulnerabilities, are not selective.
But I still see Christianity as the religion that places eternity in the future. “They should never have given us an eschaton to immanentize,” that’s the steam that rises when the memory of those old Earth visions meets the hot current of my opinions.
So….
It was really hard to write this piece on the eight loopholes. Really hard to keep it short. I am back in Vietnam now, though, and it is time to stop this kind of talk, I think. Exactly what does come next, I am not sure.
A problem I have is that I never know what I’m writing until I’ve written it, which makes it very hard to plan. I didn’t realize until quite late that, from a starting point of talking about a conflict between materialism and animism, I seem to have ended up talking about a conflict between Christianity and Buddhism. Or rather between ideas that I associate with those religions. Broadly, Christianity seems to be saying: ‘there are causes for hope outside what you have considered’ and Buddhism seems to be saying ‘let go of how you want things to be in the future.’ Of course, you could say either of those things from the perspective of either religion or none and yet I still feel there is a conflict. Trying to do both at once makes both harder. Loophole three (“you don’t know what you don’t know”) seems to be the point of convergence between them but loophole three is no place to rest; rather, it invites exploration.
Landing
I had some useful things to do on the plane, including writing this but I am too worn out by the ordinary stress of getting to the airport to catch a plane. I have a middle seat and don't even notice when we take off because I'm watching Superman and Lois which is really rather good. However it's about being a man who is always off saving the world and so has been a bad father to his two boys. I watch Black Adam which is not good at all and is about a man whose 'darkness lets him do the things that other heroes can't.' Why other heroes might not want to do them isn't explored. I am as sick of superheroes as anyone so I try a romantic comedy which has even harder and more personal lessons for me. I watch The Flash and it's exactly what I was looking for: pure meaningless dreck. I turn it off.
Eventually I step out under the white roads and read on their pillars that it is “forbidden to suck leaf medicine” - i.e. no smoking. I breathe air now that everybody knows is toxic, and which, nonetheless, lets the white roads move through it; it’s not toxic to them. It is once more difficult, breathing this in, to believe that modernity is a moribund thing. I am dully at home in the sights and smells but my memory for sounds is so anomalously poor that I can’t tell if I’m hearing birds or machines. Over the empty lot with its tape-wide grass, there is certainly a pipistrelle. I walk out of the airport, under the white road.
…and imagine that vaguely hopeful note will be the end of this post. Then, at 2:30am in a new white room, I put down my bed and face up to my sleeplessness. Back home I had small hours horrors every so often: house, job, money, family, serious stuff. I know what it feels like to have these night time missives rupture the illusions I skate on, especially the ones about being a decent person. This is different, but also familiar, like a background noise you recognize when it starts up again, or like a smell. It’s hard to describe or even remember; I think the best I can do is to think of is Larkin’s Aubade but with the difference that the horror is not at my own death, or death in general; of something rising not always there and of something white, not black. Not maggot white or whale white but the white of the pillars of that underpass; the white of the tower blocks fading into cloud. No longer, “clean and beautiful”, to impress and delight the people; not for the people at all. Somewhat shabby, somewhat grim. Huge as all smoke.
Machines periodically thrum and then flip to silence around me in the hotel room in the night. I wonder if they are still governed by anything as comprehensible as the bimetallic strips of GCSE physics lessons. My phone suggests that China has fully taken Russia's side, I remember. Go back west, sit under a hedge and dream of Arthur; or of mushrooms if you prefer. Wonder vaguely if Keir Starmer can get the ticket machines working again. and wake up in the small hours with man-sized worries about being an inadequate father or husband. Not this.
Just run.
from 1984.
Digesting this (for me) introduction to your thinking-writing-life, Nicholas. A cousin of mine has been living-working-loving in Vietnam since the mid-2000s; thinking he would/will appreciate what you've written (and perhaps is aware already). I delight in the many "lessonless images" he shares of his life there. I would steal that phrase from you (with attribution when used, of course) if you would approve. Those two little paragraphs grip me most, at the moment, as an amator photographer (primarily of "pure still scenes of the Earth’s life"). "The past is not lost or unreal" and "Meaning isn’t found at the end of a story that unfolds over time." What I notice (whether recorded or not) is always real, true, and there. And that's all I ever mean it to be, and want it to mean, when I share. Thanks for articulating and sharing!
Substack in its wisdom threw me back to this post today, plopping a notification in my current notifications that you'd tagged me back in March. Reading it for a second time, I wondered if I ever pointed you towards Rowan Williams' essay on Tolkien? Almost as an aside, he drops in a statement that I found deeply helpful: "Tolkien is seeking to model the way in which the creator works not by intervening but by interweaving." (The next time someone brings him together with Nick Cave, I hope the pair of them talk about this...)
https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2018/08/master-his-universe-warnings-jrr-tolkien-s-novels
It's interesting to me that you experience Christianity as characterised by a certainty about the future and 'God's plan'. I'll grant that those tendencies are there in the mix – yet part of what draws me back into some kind of relationship with this tradition is precisely that taking God seriously seems to imply letting go of any possibility that I might know 'the plan'. I remember, too, Illich's definition of hope as remaining open to surprise, rather than thinking that you know how the story ends. When I read the Bible, it's full of stories of people having their certainties up-ended and their meanings turned inside out. I'm tempted to say that a faith which goes by way of the crucifixion has the capacity to hold the Great Oxygenation event – but at that point I know that I'd be demonstrating Illich's point when he says that faith is absurd and foolish, that we may experience it, but it is nothing that we can reasonably expect of anyone. In that sense – and knowing you've travelled some way since you wrote this piece in any case, and that what I find it possible to say about faith varies a lot from day to day – I can't see that it could help you to reason your way out of the trap you describe so vividly.