Once upon a time, Joshua Klein asked “should it be easy?” and that question has lingered with me. He was asking in the context of woodworking, but it is a question worth asking of our high tech era.

It does seem that we are hellbent on landing ourselves on a couch, our sense organs attached to some augmented or virtual reality device, being served by a machine. The goal of some powerful and wealthy folks, it would seem, is the elimination of all human activity apart from bare willing. Technological manifestation of your desire. To be God, in fact, creating ex nihilo.

I am not suggesting that everything should be hard. I don’t have any final answer but I do suggest that we–in company with people like Ivan Illich and Wendell Berry–might gain some clarity by thinking with the question, “should it be easy?”

I am not fragile.

I am one of a species evolved over millennia to be survivors. We have survived every climate and government. We have survived famines and fools. We are adaptable.

I live in a time of rapid change and rampant anxiety. Yet I get up every day and do what must be done. Perhaps through stress and uncertainty and fear, but done nonetheless. I have faced difficult times and yet here I am.

I am a shard of the living cosmos. I am the cosmos conscious, carrying the light forward. I am a light bearing witness to other lights and experiencing darkness.

I may be many things, good and bad, but I am not fragile.

I hope you’ve had the experience of listening to someone recall people and places as you pass through the countryside. I also hope you were not bored or impatient with the experience–because you were experiencing the conjuring of a living landscape through the magic of memory.

For all of our society’s embrace of a mobile workforce, its stereotyping of those who never move away from their hometown, and its elevation of travel to the sacramental, there are certain experiences only available to those who have settled into a place long-term. One such is the perception of a landscape spread across space and time. Beautiful places become such through the infusion of a place with the awe and gratitude of a thousand generations. Houses become projects undertaken by hands that never shook in greeting but meet in the intimacy of shared work. Maybe we have ceased to believe in an enspirited universe because we so rarely remain in a place long enough to meet the neighbors.

I won’t pretend that I have a sophisticated understanding of AI or a nuanced idea of where and how it can be safely used. I do, however, have some principles that will guide my own personal approach to the technology. And, unsurprisingly, they can be found in a passage from Wendell Berry (from Life is a Miracle):

And so I would like to be as plain as possible. What I am against–and without a minute’s hesitation or apology–is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves. If we state the problem that way, then we can see that the way to correct our error, and so deliver ourselves from our own destructiveness, is to quit using our technological capability as the reference point and standard of our economic life. We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

Creatures before machines. That’s the crux of it for me. Machines are useful tools, but the health of creatures is far, far more important. We are in the age of unconstrained machines and we creatures are suffering for it.

And in this age of unconstrained machines, the old boundary markers are unimportant. What matters now is not whether you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or atheist or pagan. What matters now is this: are you on the side of life or are you a servant of machines? As a leftist pagan, I find more in common with some traditionalist conservatives than I do with mainstream liberals–despite having more agreement with them on the traditional political topics. Many mainstream liberals seem perfectly content to serve the machines and nod sedately along with whatever the “realist” technocrats say is necessary.

Creatures before machines.

Creatures before machines.

Creatures before machines.

Content warning: paganism

I’ll be linking to this post (partly jokingly, partly seriously) when I write something about paganism.

It’s always tricky writing about religion online. Thankfully I’ve had no particularly bad encounters here–and I’m posting this only because I want to ensure that continues.

Why do I write about paganism?

1. To develop my own thoughts. This is my blog, after all, and it’s a tool I use to clarify my thinking.
2. To be helpful to those few of my readers who are pagan or pagan-adjacent.
3. To build a constructive picture of what a normal pagan looks like for that majority of my readers who are Christian.

A promise: I will never attempt to convert you.

An intention: I will remain curious about your beliefs and experiences. I’m a religion nerd and this interest is sincere and in no way patronizing.

Some background: I grew up in a sect of extremely fundamentalist Pentecostal Christianity. (Don’t worry: you’ve never heard of them.) From there I moved into the Lutheran church and then to the Episcopal church. After that I spent some time in what was basically a house church. Around 2014 I stopped calling myself a Christian. I was a Sam Harris-style atheist for a couple of years until I found it insufficient as a worldview. Since then, I’ve been a pagan.

Nevertheless, I’m not mad about Christianity. I’m also not hurt or attached to some secret sin or uninformed. Actually, I was pretty theologically sophisticated for a Christian layman. I probably know something about your particular Christian tradition. I say that because I want you to understand: it’s unlikely I’ll be converting back to Christianity.

At Thanksgiving one year, my wife’s uncle asked me which was my favorite football team. I said I wasn’t a sports fan. He then offered to explain the rules of football to help me out. I replied, “Oh, I know the rules pretty well. It’s just not for me.” Same for Christianity.

To sum up: I want to talk to you about religion in an attitude of friendly curiosity. If you post something about your religion that interests me, I may reply with a comment or a question meant to engage in that shared interest. I will not, however, make comments that are dismissive or sarcastic, even if I strongly disagree with something you’ve said. All I ask is the same in return.

If I ever make comments critical of monotheism or Christianity, it will be because I find it necessary to some point I’m making. I will always attempt, however, to make such criticisms in a fair way. Such criticisms will never be made from a place of mockery or superiority. I may not worship your god but–as much as it may annoy you to hear it put this way–I recognize your god as one god among the many and, therefore, worthy of respect. I know you can’t reciprocate that for theological reasons. We can, however, be friendly while remaining in disagreement.

I was glad to read this bit from Bill McKibben in his tribute to Wendell Berry:

I’m lucky that I was reading Ed Abbey at the same charged moment, because that helped me love the wild as fully as the pastoral, and the irreverent as fully as the good.

I’ve often considered the same contrast, but with Berry and Robinson Jeffers. Berry a poet of the domestic; marriage and community are some of his most common themes. Jeffers is a poet of the wild; hawks and granite and the roar of the Pacific are everywhere in his work.

Having read quite a bit of both of them, I cannot imagine them anywhere other than where they are. Wendell Berry writing and working his farm, considering the soil along the Kentucky River. Jeffers looking out over the Pacific as it washes over the granite cliffs. They are the two most “placed” writers I’ve ever encountered. Some day when I have more time, I’d like to write more about this, with specific examples from their work.

William Stringfellow’s discussion of the Powers in An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land had a large impact on me when I read it many years ago. (I’m less familiar with Walter Wink’s more substantial and systematic writing on the subject, which I believe is derived from Stringfellow’s thought.) The Powers, Stringfellow said, are essentially every institution, corporation, ideology, etc. He also argued that they have some sort of creaturely existence, i.e., they’re not just “ideas.” And, just like humans, they are fallen, fighting against their own death and in rebellion against the Creator.

Here’s where I get sloppy with ideas and start (mis)using them for my own ends. (After all, I’m not writing an academic paper here.) I’ve written about my interpretation of the Garden of Eden here and here. Essentially, I think it’s the mythological rendering of our break from the nonhuman world deep in our evolutionary history. I agree with the “wrongness” at the back of the idea of “fallenness”, but I think it’s a problem with humans, and not shared by the rest of the cosmos.

So while there are indeed Powers, I do not believe they are universally fallen. I believe Stringfellow is right in a lot of ways, but I prefer a more pagan shaping of the idea. The Powers are indeed primal and ancient forces that are greater than humans and shape human lives. And because I’m an animist, I believe the Powers have some sort of independent existence outside the heads of humans. (Jung’s idea of archetypes is useful here but I’d rather stay out of that mode of thought for the moment.)

The Powers just are. They may or may not be interested in your or any other human life. They may or may not be perceived by you as harmful or beneficial. Like the more materialist idea of the “powers of nature,” they are simply doing their thing.

Stringfellow’s belief in the incorrigibility of the Powers is right in some ways. There are some Powers (the nation state, corporations, ideologies) that will always resist any diminishment of their status. And those who are made captive by those same Powers (politicians (yes, all of them), CEOs, ideologues) have been in some sense possessed. Those who try to reform them into something essentially different will be disappointed.

But all Powers are not like this, are they? I’ve been struggling to name the difference. The metaphor that comes to mind has to do with distance. The incorrigible Powers are, relative to the self, distant. They have influence over any given individual of course, but it’s a mediated influence. And the influence is unidirectional: they have some power over you, but you have none over them. You must suffer their existence.

But then there are what I’ll call the Homely Powers. These are the Powers with whom you can have some sort of relationship. These are the powers that constitute your life, e.g., your ancestors and the beings who live in your immediate environment. A daily prayer practice can be seen as an exercise in presenting yourself before the Homely Powers; in it, you are reminded of your place in the nexus and recommit yourself to your responsibilities in the relationship.

Framed like this, the Powers are not a monolithic, evil force. Rather, they are amoral in the same way as the forces of nature. Some subset of them are, in fact, actually constitutive parts of your self. In this way, a person is not simply a mariner caught in hostile winds. Certainly there are hostile winds. There are also, however, winds that carry you home.

As Andrew Belfield said yesterday:

Well, between “friend” & Google’s Olympics ad, it’s been a bad couple days for humans.

It’s true! Which is why I am glad to have read the chapter “Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass” in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass yesterday. It’s a refreshingly humane contrast to the artificiality of Silicon Valley.

The chapter discusses an experiment performed by Kimmerer and a graduate student at the request of some basket weavers. The ancestral wisdom of the weavers stated that sweetgrass wanted to be harvested, in accordance with the principles of the honorable harvest (e.g., never take the first plant you see, never take more than half). That was known and acknowledged. What was not agreed upon was the method of harvest—snip the stems at the base or extract the plant, roots and all.

So, knowing Kimmerer is a botanist, they asked her to determine if one of the two harvesting methods might be the cause of sweetgrass’ ongoing disappearance. Kimmerer proposed the task to a grad student, who then presented it to a faculty committee. They were not impressed. The project had an insufficient theoretical framework, they said, and “everyone knows that harvesting harms a population. You’re wasting your time.”

The grad student went ahead, however, and worked on the project diligently for two years. Some grasses were harvested by snipping, some by uprooting, and some were untouched as a control population. The results were surprising: it didn’t make much difference which harvesting method was used. Both havested stands flourished. The control group, on the other hand, did not. “It didn’t seem to matter how the grass was harvested, only that it was.”

Later analysis also compared areas where sweetgrass was known to have once thrived and since disappeared and areas where it still thrives. The areas where it still thrives were found to be clustered around Native American communities that use sweetgrass in their basket weaving.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that it is Sweetgrass that reveals this story. Wiingaashk was the first to be planted by Skywoman on the back of Turtle Island. The grass gives its fragrant self to us and we receive it with gratitude. In return, through the very act of accepting the gift, the pickers open some space, let the light come in, and with a gentle tug bestir the dormant buds that make new grass. Reciprocity is a matter of keeping the gift in motion through the self-perpetuating cycles of giving and receiving.

Our elders taught that the relationship between plants and humans must be one of balance. People can take too much and exceed the capacity of the plants to share again. That’s the voice of hard experience that resonates in the teachings of “never take more than half.” And yet, they also teach that we can take too little. If we allow traditions to die, relationships to fade, the land will suffer. These laws are the product of hard experience, of past mistakes.

I don’t know what future the machine minds are planning. The world as it actually exists, however—the world of flesh and stem, soil and water—has an essential place for us.

I have a couple of friends who refuse to shop at Walmart because the Walton family have funded private school vouchers. These friends are both public school teachers and they do not want their money contributing to that effort.

This, of course, makes no sense, economically speaking. The Walton family wealth is well-established and long-lived. Walmart could close tomorrow and it wouldn’t touch the Walton family. Moreover, the refusal of two teachers to buy their groceries at Walmart doesn’t even budge the bottom line at that particular Walmart, let alone the corporation or the founding family.

With all of that said, I support such quixotic refusals. Despite making no real-world impact, they are good for the soul. It’s a miserly heart that looks at such acts with condescension and pity.

To be clear, some such refusals are made out of a foolish pursuit of purity. In such cases, the refusals become more puritan than quixotic.

But when the refusal can be made in pursuit of your own principles, with a proper disdain for “results”, then that refusal moves out of the realm of calculation and into a healthy exercise of your will against the powers that would subject you to their own purposes. We will never have full (or even much!) control over our lives or the environment in which we live. But if we can stake out a small piece of our lives where we refuse to do what is easy, we will have in that space refused to give our consent to destruction.

Communist Manifesto:

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

As many, many others have noted, one of the chief aims of liquid modernity is to remove all friction from the experience of life. Driverless cars. AI. Augmented reality. You know all the examples.

Do you know how many times I’ve had to work on my mom’s touch faucet? They’re a solution to a problem no one had. I finally just took off the electronic components and told her the touch feature was permanently broken.

One of the themes of Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive and (to my recollection) Shop Class as Soulcraft is the docility being trained into humans with our ever-higher tech. He contrasts this docile type with “spirited” people—an apt word that has stayed with me recently.

It is characteristic of the spirited man that he takes an expansive view of the boundary of his own stuff—he tends to act as though any material things he uses are in some sense properly his, while he is using them—and when he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands, this brings out a certain hostility in him. Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the face, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras. This man would like to know: Why should there not be a handle? Instead he is asked to supplicate invisible powers. [Shop Class]

We need spiritedness. We need people who engage with the stubborn resistance of reality—not with arrogant willfulness but with curiosity and artistry cognizant of limits.

The world is too beautiful for a harsh asceticism. At the same time, the promise of a frictionless life is a lie—or, at least, it’s not a life. Beauty comes with burnishing.