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.

Robin Wall Kimmerer:

The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction—not just for Native peoples, but for everyone. Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.” If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.

Note that she says “we think twice”—because we do in fact sometimes take up the chainsaw.

I believe this is what a truly functional animism offers over generic environmentalism. The latter too often drifts into the idea that the world would be better without humans. It’s too cause and effect—rooted in dead materialism—where animism is more relationship focused.

When I was a vegan, I came across that sort of environmentalism. To clarify, I’m talking about ethical, animal rights-style veganism—not the sort that seems to be a current diet fad.

What ultimately turned me away from ethical veganism was the realization that it is utterly unnatural—that predation is at the heart of the living world. In short, the ethical veganism I was familiar with at the time needed a strong dose of animism.

Back to the chainsaw, one of the questions that first confronted me when I started woodworking was how to square it with my values. How can a self-confessed tree-hugger build things from intentionally killed trees? I believe the answer has to do with the long-standing relationship between humans and trees and humanity’s role as a beautifier and craftsman.

As with humans eating animals, there are two opposing but complementary mistakes with regard to trees. One is that humans must never cut down trees and the other is that trees are “natural resources” that must be “managed.” The mistakes are complementary because they forget relationship, in opposite directions. Humans and trees, however, have had a long, mutually beneficial relationship.

What would an animist woodworking practice look like? I have a few preliminary ideas, which I will continue trying to integrate into my life. Such a practice might:

• Avoid a total reliance on machines. Machines are brute force tools–and that is not always inappropriate. Hand tools, however, require more attention to the character of the wood upon which you work. I’m not a hand tool purist, but I do want to make sure they’re always a part of my repertoire because of the quality of attention they cultivate.
• Restore what is already built. If one of the chief roles of humanity in the world is to be a beautifier, then it is right that beauty be preserved as much as possible. Waste should be reduced not only for the obvious environmental reasons, but also because our role should not be neglected or forgotten. It both honors us and the trees with whom such beauty is created. Update: A good extension of this point from @dwalbert: “Make things that can be repaired, and that are worth the trouble of repairing.”
• Use wood from local, native trees where possible. Such a practice places your work. It embeds it within the historic, creative relationship between humans and their tree neighbors. This is something I have not done, but I have some leads.

Early on in my gardening experience (2020 or 2021, probably), I was working on something in the raised beds and worried about killing some creature as I worked. At the time, the pendulum was obviously swinging a bit too far in one direction. The thought occurred to me, “We cannot be precious about death.” This arrested the swing of the pendulum.

Death is a part of life; in fact, it is necessary for its continuance. A healthy perspective–whether it’s animist or whatever perspective is most meaningful to you–takes this into consideration. There is no standpoint of purity; we’re all guilty of violence, one way or another. In a properly constituted relationship, however, the violence is not psychologically repressed. It is understood, and made whole by reciprocity and sacrifice.

I’m planning a post on my pet theory about the origins of the religious tradition in which I was raised. In preparation for that, I searched my archives to see how much I’d actually written here about those churches. Passing references, mostly. I gave a bit more detail here.

I still believe the main point of that linked post: purity is a fool’s errand. But I’d like to resurrect another point I made there, especially given the American political situation:

This is not an argument in favor of moderation. The truth does not inevitably reside in the middle. I have opinions that people in the so-called moderate middle would call extreme. What I hope to avoid, though, are opinions that are driven solely by opposition to an “other”, in pursuit of purity.

So often I see people in the political middle, the “moderates”–the rationalists, as they would have it–seemingly adopting the belief that the truth always lies in the middle. They are often rightly disturbed by the extremes they see around them; they then make the mistaken leap to the idea that the fault lies in the existence of the extremes.

For me, however, the problem is that the two main “sides” in American politics are mirror images of each other. The exist in perpetual reaction to and dependence on each other. This weird psychological relationship between the sides only heightens the conflict.

So, despite the protestations of the moderates, the problem we have is not that there are people with ideas outside the mainstream. That’s just part of a healthy society. The problem is that the main sides are in a relationship rotten to its core.

Cardinal points of my politics:

• The nonhuman world is beautiful, fearsome, and faithful. It is worthy of your reverence.
• Humans are mostly okay and can shine in the context of a personal situation. But they’re also gullible and clannish.
• Humans with power—even modest power—must not be trusted.
• Humans flourish on a human scale, working within the sphere of their competence, fulfilling their role within the community of beings.

R.G. Miga, on the current crisis sparked by both an overabundance of information and a lack of trust in supposed experts:

There are three options in responding to this epistemological crisis:

1. Hold the line and keep the faith. This is, ironically, no different than the irrational religious faith that science was meant to save us from: if we trust in the existence of that Ultimate Truth, brothers and sisters, and follow the technocratic priests who commune with it, we’ll eventually make it through this desert of uncertainty and into the Promised Land. This requires us to spend much of our lives reciting the catechisms of modernity, persecuting heretics, and studying the ever-expanding canon of sacred texts, so that we might better understand the natural laws that Science has laid down for the righteous to observe. Only then can we bring the utopian Kingdom of Heaven down to Earth. Amen.

2. Cultivate a Zen-like detachment in the face of uncertainty. Buddhism has a perfectly coherent answer to epistemological crisis: recognize the fundamental unknowability of reality, and the ephemeral nature of all forms. Greet the end of the world and your own existence with equanimity. The challenge with Buddhism is always to balance the transcendence of seeing through reality while continuing to live in a physical body; with practice, it can be done. The detachment that Buddhism offers can be a great relief to the emotional strain of epistemological crisis—but it does have its pitfalls.

3. Take an epistemological stance that allows for something like what Dr. Jack Hunter refers to as “ontological flooding”: the perspective that many different claims about the nature of reality–beyond the dominant Western ontology of material-reductionism–can be simultaneously valid. This allows us to treat a variety of different possibilities as potentially true, or true enough, and permits the type of applied metaphysics I’ve been describing in this series.

Miga is advocating for option three–and I’m posting about it here because it seems to be the way my mind works. To be clear, I am definitely not commending my own idiosyncrasies; what I describe below is offered only as an illustration of a possible way of being.

Rachel and I have been together since 1995, married since 1998. Over that time, like other couples in long-term relationships, we’ve become a lot alike. We do, however, have very different approaches to new ideas that I think are each rooted in our experience in a strict, fundamentalist Christianity. Her experience of it was much more personally oppressive, since women were the targets of the strictest rules as well as treated with deep mistrust as the ultimate source of sin in men. While my experience (as a man) was not quite so personally oppressive, I did experience the churches as pervasively anti-intellectual and opposed to curiosity. It was limiting. When we finally left in our mid-twenties, we both experienced that departure as profoundly liberating–even though it resulted in being utterly rejected by a large, close-knit social network.

(By the way, I believe that is why we were never even tempted to return. We weren’t the usual “backsliders”, who quit going because of hurt feelings or some besetting sin but who never truly stop believing what those churches teach. Those folks almost always end up going back. In that way, I believe we were something of a puzzle for those we left behind: very few people left, not because of sin or hurt feelings, but because they came to truly reject the entirety of what the churches teach. The typical backslider is earnestly sought after by their friends and families. We got a sum total of two letters asking us to come back. And not because they didn’t like us; I think it’s fair to say we were regarded as up-and-comers.)

For Rachel, this experience instilled in her a “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” approach. Unsurprisingly, she moved pretty quickly to atheism, though she’s dialed that back a bit over the past year. At this point, I’d say she’s less full-on atheist, and more skeptical-but-curious. Because her experience in the Holiness churches was more personally oppressive, she has refined her bullshit detector in order to avoid such a situation again.

For me, the liberation from Holiness churches allowed me to fully engage my curiosity. I gradually–it took a while–stopped worrying about being “wrong.” Sometime not long after leaving Holiness, I read in a Canon Press book a statement about how we could judge the truth of something by whether it was beautiful. (I’m not bothering to look up the reference because those books are emphatically not worth your time, despite a few bits having a salutary effect on my life.) I am quite sure the writer would be horrified about the uses to which I have put his idea. Nevertheless, my approach to ideas is less logical, more aesthetic. Frankly, I get bored with details pretty quickly. I look for how ideas inspire me and enlarge my world. (I was Hitchens-Harris type atheist for a while but it didn’t stick precisely because it made–for me–a dull world.)

To change the metaphor, I treat my mind like a huge soup pot. I throw in a little of this, a little of that, and then taste to see what I like. If I don’t like the taste of something, it doesn’t go back into the pot. If I do, I add more. Mostly I let it simmer for a while before making any decisions. I don’t test ingredients first before throwing them in. My rule is that I must always add more, not less, and that time and patience will bring clarity.

So when I come across an idea like “ontological flooding”–break down the barriers to damned/dammed facts (see that Jack Hunter presentation) and let them flood in–I am drawn to it. Are stories of the paranormal or miraculous or High Weirdness “true”? I don’t know–and nothing will bore me quicker than a presentation of arguments for or against. The question I’m more interested in is the one with which R.G. Miga ends parts two and three of his series: “Which world do you want to live in?” This is perfect. Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t believe. Don’t present me with logical arguments. Tell me a story. Map out an idea–not in intricate details but like a map of Middle Earth, so I can orient myself within it.

A couple of days ago I posted about the idea of a “Speaker for the Squirrels” and got some good responses from John and Donny.

John:

I agree we very much need speakers for the squirrels, the lichens, and on and on. It’s interesting that this (I think) circles us back to humans' special responsibility as stewards of creation.

I completely agree with this. There is a school of thought within environmentalism (how widespread, I do not know) that Earth would be better without humans. And it’s not hard to see why people would think that, especially given human history since the Industrial Revolution. And (if I correctly recall something I read at some point) as prehistorical humans migrated across the continents, they may have caused the extinction of megafauna. So our record is not good. Nevertheless, I do believe humans have an important ecological and–yes–spiritual function in the cosmos. On this, various indigenous traditions and the biblical book of Genesis agree (and likely many others). We are not the only intelligent creatures on this planet, but the unique character of our intelligence suits us for a stewardship role.

Donny:

I don’t have a quote but I do remember Abram talking about the role of the shaman or “magician,” and the fact that they lived (literally and metaphorically) at the edges of civilization rather than the center, and acted as something of a medium between the human world and the rest of the world.

This sent me back to re-read that section; I’ll quote some of it here. David Abram:

… such magicians rarely dwell at the heart of their village; rather, their dwellings are commonly at the spatial periphery of the community or, more often, out beyond the edges of the village amid the rice fields, or in a forest, or a wild cluster of boulders. I could easily attribute this to the just-mentioned need for privacy, yet for the magician in a traditional culture it seems to serve another purpose as well, providing a spatial expression of his or her symbolic position with regard to the community. For the magician’s intelligence is not encompassed within the society; its place is at the edge of the community, mediating between the human community and the larger community of beings upon which the village depends for its nourishment and sustenance. This larger community includes, along with the humans, the multiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the diverse plants and the myriad animals–birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, insects–that inhabit or migrate through the region, to the particular winds and weather patterns that inform the local geography, as well as the various landforms–forests, rivers, caves, mountains–that lend their specific character to the surrounding earth.

The traditional or tribal shaman, I came to discern, acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth. By his constant rituals, trances, ecstasies, and “journeys,” he ensures that the relation between human society and the larger society of beings is balanced and reciprocal, and that the village never takes more from the living land than it returns to it–not just materially but with prayers, propitiations, and praise. The scale of a harvest or the size of a hunt are always negotiated between the tribal community and the natural world that it inhabits. To some extent every adult in the community is engaged in this process of listening and attuning to the other presences that surround and influence daily life. But the shaman or sorcerer is the exemplary voyager in the intermediate realm between the human and the more-than-human worlds, the primary strategist and negotiator in any dealings with the Others.

For those of us who would never consider ourselves shamans, note that Abram says “every adult in the community is engaged in this process of listening and attuning to the other presences that surround and influence daily life.” The shaman is the “exemplary voyager”, but every adult has a responsibility to attune and act as stewards. How does one attune? Well, magically:

The most sophisticated definition of “magic” that now circulates through the American counterculture is “the ability or power to alter one’s consciousness at will.” No mention is made of any reason for altering one’s consciousness. Yet in tribal cultures that which we call “magic” takes its meaning from the fact that humans, in an indigenous and oral context, experience their own consciousness as simply one form of awareness among many others. The traditional magician cultivates an ability to shift out of his or her common state of consciousness precisely in order to make contact with the other organic forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human existence is entwined. Only by temporarily shedding the accepted perceptual logic of his culture can the sorcerer hope to enter into relation with other species on their own terms; only by altering the common organization of his senses will he be able to enter into a rapport with the multiple nonhuman sensibilities that animate the local landscape. … Magic, then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives–from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself–is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own.

“The experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences”–not the idea of it, the experience of it. Your daylight consciousness will only take you so far here. Call it magic, mysticism, meditation, awe–whatever works. The crucial thing is to get out of your head and into relationship. Get good at that and maybe you can be Speaker for the Squirrels.

There seems to be a natural affinity between animism and anarchism. Animism sees people everywhere. Human people are most obvious to other humans-—but nonhuman people are not hard to perceive for those with eyes to see. In animism, the world is a community of people of every size and shape, with unexpected and unknowable intelligences, carrying out their own purposes.

Alan Jacobs made a very useful distinction recently:

The goal of libertarianism is to increase individual liberty, while the goal of anarchism is to expand the realm of cooperation and collaboration.

It’s useful because it could be easy to lump libertarianism and anarchism together as “small government politics.” (In fact, the first politics I discovered and adopted in college was anarcho-capitalism, which is a right-wing version of libertarianism.) But Jacobs point neatly differentiates them: anarchism is community-focused, not individualistic.

At the same time, it rejects hierarchy and the domination of the powerful. It is mutual governance, not top-down rule. A politics based on cooperation among equals, with no centralized structure demanding conformity–sounds a lot like animism, don’t you think?

An anarchic animism, politically speaking, would be centered on local governance, in community with all the local, living beings. Decisions would be based on consensus and humans would not be unduly favored. Granted, hawks and chipmunks are unlikely to attend meetings. But their concerns should be taken into account by people familiar with the habits and needs of hawks and chipmunks. The political goal would be the flourishing of the local community of beings.

Utopian, I know. And, yet, is it not an serious indictment of our current system that such ideas are taken to be absurd?

The Luddite comic I posted a few days ago mentioned a couple of movements I hadn’t heard of before so I followed it up by watching a couple of videos. Actually, a few seconds of a couple of videos, because it quickly became apparent that the videos were part of yet another trendy lifestyle. “I tried slow living for thirty days and it changed my life.” More would-be influencers with clickbait titles trying way too hard.

But, listen, I get it. It’s easy for me to mock these folks because their style is most definitely not my own. But underneath that style? I get it.

We’re all so damned self-conscious. So many of us are trying to live authentic lives (whatever the hell that means) but the best we can do is define ourselves against the regnant culture and slap together practices wistfully imitating lifeways that have been destroyed by … well, pick your destructive system. There’s a lifestyle trend available for opposing whatever you hate.

It’s the self-consciousness that gets me. Maybe we’d be better off without it. Maybe it’s what the Adam and Eve story is about. Maybe it’s our “happy fault.” I just don’t know. There are times when I envy the apparent mental freedom of wild animals; their lives may be short but at least they don’t blog.

Consciousness feels like an unbridgeable gap. Are Buddhism and Taoism not pointing to the abandonment of self-consciousness as the solution to our suffering? What is ultimate human happiness in Christianity but the beatific vision, the abandonment of self-consciousness in union with God All-in-All? And what are we dirt worshippers looking for if not a rapprochement with the nonhuman world and a more “animal” existence?

Aren’t we all just wishing for our long-lost, unselfconscious primate existence on the African savannah? Who knows. Anyway, it’s going to be a nice weekend and I have work to do.

A friend and I were talking last year about our mutual need to over-intellectualize everything we do. “I need a theory to tie my shoes.” Now, mind you, I’m not saying that’s a good thing; quite the opposite, in fact. I think this friend and I do this because we both have similar sorts of brains that have suffered similar traumas.

All of which is to say I can really get into practical work once an idea has given it a framing.

Ever since I wrote about my experience with working from home, I’ve been thinking about households as workshops. I am 90% sure I derived this from Wendell Berry’s various discussions of productive households, as opposed to households as sites of consumption. (I’m a blogger, not an academic, so that’s the best you’re gonna get for source citation.) The preeminent example for Berry is of course the family farm, which is both the site of work and the source of goods that fulfill the needs of the family itself and contribute to the local economy.

Now, obviously, most of my work is for the benefit of an entity thirty miles away from here. But that work is done here, and that means it is in some real way situated within my household. This relativizes my “day job” in ways that wouldn’t be possible if I was sitting in the office, surrounded by co-workers, in an environment where The Institution is all. (This is, no doubt, behind some of the most insistent calls to return to the office by those who would have their employees devote their lives and bodies to their work.)

I grew up in a blue collar household and I’ve always had what you might call the blue-collar attitude toward work, that is, it’s just a job and its purpose is to give you money to do what you really want to do. Hustle culture, devotion to career, finding meaning in employment—these things have always been nonsensical to me. This attitude, combined with working from home, works well to remind me of the purpose and limitations of my day job. It places it within its proper context, i.e., the household.

People who read this blog know that I also garden and dabble in woodworking and DIY. Rachel gardens even more than I do and bakes bread and cooks and shovels seven hundred pounds of rock and many, many more things. We were discussing this the other day and we concluded that we really are making some progress on turning our household into a productive—not merely consumptive—place.

Reframing my household as my workshop has helped rid me of the nagging feeling that I should be doing something else. That repairing the stove, for example, is an annoying distraction from my “real work.” And, strangely, I was never quite able to articulate what that “real work” was meant to be. It was always just the vague feeling that it was something else, something more important. (Arrogance is a besetting sin of mine.) But if my household is my workshop, then my real work is here, now. My real work includes all of this, from accounting to building raised beds to helping my daughter navigate adult problems.

It’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m not sure why it took a certain idea clicking into place to make me see the union of all these things, but that’s the curse of my addled mind.