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.

John Halstead’s post “Re-placing Ourselves” contains that blend of an animist worldview with Wendell Berry-style thinking about place and rootedness that I find very satisfying. I highly recommend it.

I like it so much, in fact, that I considered splitting this into two posts so that it wouldn’t seem like the following is a criticism—but it provides a perfect context for what I want to say.

Over the past couple of years, several writers I respect have, in varying degrees, criticized remote work in terms of its placelessness and dehumanizing character. I understand the criticism. My problem with it is entirely a matter of my own subjective experience of remote work.

I began working from home in March 2020 and continue to do so. (Most people working for my employer are hybrid at this point.) It has improved my life in a number of ways. I will admit up front that, although I have always been an introvert, I may actually be worse at large social events than I was before. So maybe remote work has caused me to lose some of the social skill of navigating large events comfortably.

But I’m totally fine with that, given the benefits. In the context of this post, remote work has integrated me into the life of my own household in a way that I have never experienced before. My wife Rachel is a homemaker ¹, so this means we’re normally within 20 feet of each other 24 hours a day. We talk all the time, including discussions of what’s going on with my work (poor thing). During the growing season, I can take a break from work and go see what the plants are doing. I can get a sense of what’s happening in the neighborhood.

The locus of my life is now here, at home. My mind is obviously occupied with work for the same amount of time per day, but it feels more integrated into the life of the household. I can watch the birds in the tree outside my window during the many, many Teams and Zoom meetings.

I no longer go to work, driving my car ninety minutes a day with all its attendant emissions, spending money on gasoline and lunch costs. I do not doubt that many people have socializing experiences at work, feeling connected to people and making friends. I’ve never been that way. I do have a friend at work and I genuinely value the people on my team. But I’ve always had the “it’s just a job” attitude toward work. Despite being good at my job, I’ve never found—and never expected to find—meaning in it. It’s always been the way I make money to live my real life, which is undoubtedly why it’s always been a “non-place” for me.

A non-place, for Halstead, is a location that does not have “depth and complexity of history and relationships.” My employer does have that depth and complexity for certain people, but not for me. Remote work, then, means that I can stop traveling every day to a non-place and instead remain in a place with a great deal of history and complexity. By being here, I am nurturing and deepening my relationship to it. My work still gets done. In fact, my team is better than ever. (The problems that people attribute to remote work are almost always the result of bad management.)

I do understand the criticism and concerns of people life John Halstead and Charles Eisenstein and Alan Jacobs. I am very aware of the increasing artificiality of life in a high-tech world. On the issue of remote work, however, my lived experience does not square with their concerns. This is almost certainly because of the particularities of my history and personality—but then that’s always the case. We can’t let our theories get in the way of actual practice. We have to keep in mind our actual goals, which are (quoting Halstead):

Real places. Places with history. Places that are bound up in a network of relationships with the human and more-than-human world. And if we are ever to find one another again, we have to find real places again. We have to reclaim them. We have to restore them. And we have to re-place ourselves in them again.

It is said that God is able to witness the multi-faceted suffering of the world, hear the prayers of its desperate creatures, and remain, nevertheless, eternally beatific.

Whatever your opinion of the ontological status of God, one thing is certain: we are not God.

The quantity of data created each day is staggering.

Data flow at these levels can only be managed by a vast infrastructure of computing machines. Not even the creators of algorithms and large language models fully understand what is going on inside their creations.

No organic life can be expected to survive undamaged when it is jacked into information moving at this velocity.

We are not God. We are not machines. We are organic life facing a destabilizing year. (Particularly those bits of organic life on Turtle Island.) Organic life requires rest. Organic life requires ebb and flow, creation and destruction—it requires cycles. Organic life cannot—must not!—be always on. Organic life needs to shit in peace and quiet.

As we face a time of uncertainty and increasing demands on our attention, we need to decide now: will we pretend to be God, who can see and know all with perfect love and equanimity? Will we imagine our minds to be made of silicon, capable of handling the endless flow of data? Or will we accept ourselves as organic life: limited, frail, and worthy of peace and compassion, come what may?