There seems to be an epidemic of anger, and it’s been this way for a while now.

I made a traffic mistake today, took my turn too early at a four way stop. My mistake, no big deal, no near miss. But the guy immediately laid on his horn and flipped me off, and not briefly.

One of my neighbors plowed the snow off the alley and the next time I saw him I thanked him. He told me another neighbor came out while he was doing it and started griping at him because as the snow was being moved, it blocked a part of his driveway. The first guy offered to fix it but second guy snapped “I don’t need your help.”

We’ve had some unpleasantness on micro.blog this week. I stumbled across it and was shocked at the heatedness of the accusations. Everything cranked to eleven. Accusations of bigotry and fascism. It was a lot to take in, given the normally placid nature of the micro.blog timeline. In my dismay at the fury, I called someone’s response “unhinged.” That was not a helpful word to use. Nevertheless, all this anger is deeply disturbing.

For years now, our politics have operated in the register of anger, and now more than ever. Anger is one of the primary languages of social media (the other being sarcasm). Based on the behavior I’ve seen over the past few years, it would seem that people walk around just at the boiling point. How else would they explode so quickly when something goes wrong?

What is it like to live with such rage all the time? No wonder there is so much addiction!

When the guy disproportionately reacted to my traffic mistake today, I waved back at him through the back window–with all five fingers. I tried to pack a spirit of contrition into the gesture. He must have caught it, because he backed off.

When I saw angry neighbor shoveling snow shortly after he griped at helpful neighbor, I asked him if I could help. I’d been making an effort to be friendly with him since last summer. He’s a prickly old guy, but I found out he’s had back surgeries. My dad had back surgeries; I know how that kind of pain and discomfort can affect a person. Angry neighbor appreciated the offer and we talked a bit about how heavy this snowfall was.

Heaven knows I’m not holding myself out as an example for anyone. I’ve waved back at other drivers with a single finger, plenty of times. In fact, all of my worst outbursts of anger happen behind the wheel; I don’t know what that tells us about driving, but surely it means something.

What I’m saying is that there is an epidemic of anger and we must take care not to catch it. That will require some practical steps to avoid anger triggers. It will require some self-examination and–dare I use such an abused term?–shadow work. What causes anger to rise most quickly in you? Could it be a violent reaction against something you have repressed in yourself? Are you acting out of some unacknowledged trauma? The source of the red hot, fast rising rage I’m talking about is never really its object.

The epidemic of anger will burn the world down around us. It will start wars, foreign and domestic. In 1954, some students asked Jung if nuclear war could be avoided. He replied:

I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves.

That is, it will depend on our recognition of the messy strangeness within each of us, patiently sitting with the tension that runs straight through our souls. Or, alternately, we can join the anger party and impose our pain on everyone else. Your choice.

For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Matthew 16:26)

There is nothing more urgent than the preservation of your own soul—not from the fires of hell but from destructive forces here and now. There are powers at large today seeking to rip love from your heart and replace it with fear and hate. In the name of all that is beautiful and holy, you must not allow it.

The powers of destruction are using your politics to get to you. They don’t care about your opinions; your opinions are tools the powers will use to corrupt you. Do you feel that will to dominate, defeat, demean that other, with whom you disagree? The degree to which you feel that is the degree to which the agents of destruction have gained power over your soul. You should be alarmed.

How you play is what you win. (Ursula Le Guin)

If you win through violence, what you have won is violence. What is won by violence must be kept through violence. However noble your intentions, the territory you win through violence will be ruined, dead, sown with salt.

This is a plea for you to resist, not politicians (the poor fools), but the demons running freely through a population, jerking people around like marionettes.

What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis? (Bayo Akomolafe)

You’re playing a game rigged by the powers of destruction; you can’t win. They have captured your mind and they’re dosing it with fear and anger. The angrier you get, the more you play the domination game, the more you buy into the myth of separation—the more lost you are.

Listen to that still, small voice that you can only detect when you’ve quieted yourself. That voice will call you to nobler, humbler action. That is the voice the powers of destruction need you to ignore. You will feel the echoes of that voice when you look into that formerly hated other’s eyes with compassion. How they react when you attempt that connection is not your business. The only soul you can save is your own.

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. 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.