Happy birthday to Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), “inhumanist” poet of the central California coast. In one of the highlights of 2022 and possibly my life, we visited Tor House and Hawk Tower and got a personal tour. They ask visitors not to post any interior photos, so here I am standing outside the gate while we awaited our guide.

I have three birthdays of people unrelated to me on my calendar: Wendell Berry, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robinson Jeffers. They are there because each writer’s unique vision has formed me in important ways.

If Wendell Berry is my icon for the close, domestic, and dear, then Robinson Jeffers is my icon for wild and indifferent nature. He is medicine for our innate, human egocentrism. He called his outlook “inhumanism” and described it like this:

It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. We know this, of course, but it does not appear that any previous one of the ten thousand religions and philosophies have realized it. An infant feels himself to be central and of primary importance; an adult knows better; it seems time that the human race attained to an adult habit of thought in this regard. This attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimist nor irreligious, though two or three people have said so, and may again; but it involves a certain detachment.

…

To sum up the matter:–“Love one another” is a high commandment, but it polarizes the mind; love on the surface implies hate in the depth,–(Dante who hated well because he loved)–as the history of Christendom bitterly proves. “Love one another” ought to be balanced, at least, by a colder saying,–this too a counsel of perfection, i.e., a direction-giver, a guide though it cannot be a rule,–“Turn away from each other,"–to that great presence of which humanity is only a squirming particle. To persons of Christian faith, if any should read this, I would point out that Jesus himself, intuitive master of psychology, invoked this balance. “Love your neighbor as yourself”–that is, not excessively, if you are adult and normal–but “God with all your heart, mind and soul.” Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity.

Our lives are so taken up with ourselves. We spends hours of each day talking to each other, watching and dreaming about each other. Jeffers, though, sitting atop his pile of sea-washed granite overlooking the Pacific, writes of hawks and storms and takes a long view of history. Reality is out there, beautiful and pitiless.

Credo
My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum
And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.
He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
The bone vault’s ocean; out there is the ocean’s;
The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself, the heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

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.