Happy Solstice, everyone!

The Winter Solstice has always been my favorite of the Quarter Days. I was marking it long before I would have thought of calling myself an animist or pagan. For many years, winter was my most dreaded season, probably due to some seasonal depression that thankfully has eased over the past few years. Just as hitting the halfway point of a long walk flips some mental switch, so the Solstice has been an annual turning point for me.

Here in southern Indiana, however, it wouldn’t be right to call it the beginning of winter, which has always set in long before the solstice. Here, Thanksgiving could be called the last day of Fall—and the Solstice as the descent into the depths of winter. The Christmas lights on the houses don’t usually stay up past the new year, rendering the early evening darkness still darker. The sun is making its return trip, yes, but the increase in daylight following the solstice moves very slowly. The worst winter weather here happens in January and February. So while Solstice is a turning point, it’s a turn taken in patient hope.

Our Yule log was cut from a windfall in the nearby woods. The branches are from the front yard. The candles are a bit less local—from a beekeeper in Cincinnati.

Simple, uncomplicated things. Imbue them with whatever symbolism you wish but, for myself, I prefer it simple. I’ve done complicated; I understand the appeal. But these days I’ll take what has worked for aeons of humans: Sky Father. Earth Mother. Sitting in silence. Conversing with ancestors. Observing the seasons.

This is enough.

The times in which we live are almost enough to make me into a Gnostic.

• The stupidity on display everywhere has the flavor of fatedness. The fatedness, however, arises not out the beneficient providence of God but the delusions of a Demiurge. We have become entrapped in a lunatic mind. The levers are broken because the Engineer has disconnected the power.
• American voters will be forced to choose between two elderly men representing two dying ideologies. And every effort to find a way out of this bind serves only to heighten the hatred and division and further solidifies the goddamned inevitability of it all. We both must and must not act. Is some new Archon set to inherit this age? Has this Archon devised some perfect Chinese finger trap?
• Is reality an illusion? Whatever the answer to that question, Apple intends to wedge glass and silicon between you and the physical world. Enhanced reality, like enhanced interrogation, is a euphemism taken up by those who love their fantasies. Gnosticism told us that we were born into a world of unreality—a world from which, if we would listen, secret knowledge would deliver us. Soon enough, a large number of us will be paying premiums for beautiful blinders and immersive illusions.

I know I’m playing a bit fast and loose with some ideas here. On the other hand, maybe that’s sound strategy. Stay slippery; surf the weird. If we are in fact living in gnostic times, we should not count on predictability and solid reality. Perhaps the key skill we must learn is negative capability, which John Keats said is

when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

Just as there will be merchants of illusion, there will be merchants of certainty. Reject them both and trust your gnosis.

In a recent continuing education course on AI, the speaker said, “No one will lose their jobs to AI, but some may lose their jobs because they don’t use AI.” On that first half, bullshit.

The second half, however, may contain some truth. I’ve reluctantly begun using the university’s enterprise version of Microsoft Copilot—mostly to answer questions about Excel so far. It’s useful. Basically a much more efficient search engine.

I don’t actually think I’d lose my job if I didn’t use AI—but over the course of the next few years my work could suffer comparatively without it. But here is where I need to be cautious: while I may find a tool to make my work more efficient, I must remember that the goal of my work is not efficiency. Ivan Illich:

Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user.

Tools are not neutral. They are products of intelligence and have an intelligence of their own. Used mindlessly, they will shape the worker according to the tool’s nature.

What does this mean for my use of AI at work?

1. I will remain in control of my work’s purposes.
2. I will not use artificial intelligence as a substitute for my own.
3. I will not allow the values of the designers of AI—which perforce exist within AI itself—to override my own values.

Matt Cardin:

For much of my life, I read books and other things in a frankly desperate, craving way, hoping to find The Answer to the problem that was given to me when I was born. It took several decades and college degrees, and the cultivation of a hyper-developed intellect stocked with more texts than the Library of Congress and the Library of Alexandria combined, for me to arrive, not through reading but through realization, at the recognition that the answer isn’t in a book at all but in the one who reads books in search of the answer.

Something like this realization—less fully realized, no doubt—has been nagging me for some time. Early January will be the 20th anniversary of our departure from Christian fundamentalism and for the entirety of that time I have been hoping to find The Answer in books.

The fundamentalism my wife and I left was intellectually incurious. I started to say it was anti-intellectual but that’s not quite right. Intelligence was valued as a gift of God. That gift, however, could only be put to narrow uses. College education was tolerated for men for the purpose of establishing a career. Reading was encouraged, as long as you limited yourself to the list of acceptable writers. Preaching was typically more emotional than intellectual, but intelligent teachers were valued for the purposes of Sunday School.

More than anything else, it was when Rachel and I realized that these bounds of acceptability not only ruled out people who were clearly devoted and sincere Christians but also were limiting us in harmful ways that it became clear that we needed to get out. We’ve often described our exit as the world opening up for us—an almost physical sensation of walking out of a dimly lit room into brilliant sunshine and blue skies.

So you can imagine how 27 year old me—curious and intelligent, finding the world open—devoured book after book after book. Even academic work that I barely understood but had the virtue of exercising my mind with ideas that were just out of my reach. After a few years of that, I had a broader and richer understanding of theology than some of the seminary-educated ministers I knew.

In the years that followed, I chased ideas—whether they appeared in books or online. With every new idea came the hope that this would be the one. Then the midlife transition arrived (I do not say “crisis,” though there were many critical moments) and I began to wonder if this was all just a monumental exercise in compensation and fear and trauma. This is the idea that has nagged me for much of my forties, particularly since that time in mid-2020 when I shut down all my social media accounts, quit the news, and started reading about hermits.

Wise teachers keep telling me that in order to become wise I must become a fool—yet I keep building teetering piles of books around me. Little by little, though, I manage to laugh at my piles and glimpse the lie hiding within them. Eventually, perhaps, I won’t need them any longer.

Wendell Berry, “Renewing Husbandry”:

I remember well a summer morning in about 1950 when my father sent a hired man with a McCormick High Gear No. 9 mowing machine and a team of mules to the field I was mowing with our nearly new Farmall A. That memory is a landmark in my mind and my history. I had been born into the way of farming represented by the mule team, and I loved it. I knew irresistibly that the mules were good ones. They were stepping along beautifully at a rate of speed in fact only a little slower than mine. But now I saw them suddenly from the vantage point of the tractor, and I remember how fiercely I resented their slowness. I saw them as “in my way.” For those who have had no similar experience, I was feeling exactly the outrage and the low-grade superiority of a hot-rodder caught behind an aged dawdler in urban traffic. It is undoubtedly significant that in the summer of 1950 I passed my sixteenth birthday and I became eligible to solve all my problems by driving an automobile.

Two things:

1. When I drive I become a different person. I am normally a patient person—but not when I’m driving. I become aggressive. I call people assholes. I would never do that in person! (And not just because I wouldn’t want to get in a fight.) I offer this as a counterpoint to those who would suggest that our tools (using that word broadly) are morally neutral. They do, in fact, train us in certain ways of being.
2. Berry’s story is another example of Illich’s ideas about the development of tools

We often hear about child development, less so about adult development. There does seem to be an ideal pattern:

• Youth, with its hopefulness and orientation toward the future
• Middle age, with its wistfulness and orientation toward the past
• Elderhood, with its slow releasing toward death

Each stage is necessary and beautiful. In a time where politics dominate the minds of so many people, this ideal pattern can be seen as a problem. As with everything it touches, politics transforms what is beautiful into slogan and tool.

If we can disengage from that way of thinking, however, we can see this progression as a breathtaking tableau. We feel love and pride for the young person setting out with passion and big ideas. We feel the gravity of middle age, and sympathize with the person who longs for simpler times. We reverence the elder, who through some mysterious alchemy, takes experience, blends it with resignation, and works wisdom.

This would seem to be the way most traditional societies saw the progression of life. We might find more peace if we didn’t struggle against it.

Alan Jacobs makes a good response to Freddie deBoer’s assertion that people believe in religions because they offer comfort. (The Freddie post is behind a paywall so I can’t access it.) Jacobs:

I might want to take one step back and ask: Do religions comfort? My experience as a Christian has been more about challenge than comfort, about figuring out how to respond to what I feel to be an unshakable claim on my life.

This is, of course, correct. The idea that religion persists because it’s comforting is the sort of thing that modern atheists say—that I myself have said—but a moment’s reflection shows that is not the case. Jacobs gives good examples in his post. Others could easily be multiplied. “Religion as comfort” seems to be an error that can be traced to our particular time and place, where modern, American, evangelical Christianity dominates the culture.

Jacobs again:

I can’t now remember who said it, but one scholar of religion said that the only thing all religions have in common is that they use candles. That seems right to me. 

So “religion” is an intractably fuzzy concept, the many religions of the world do many different things and do them in many different ways, and even within a given religion people may believe and may commit themselves for as astonishing variety of reasons. The whole enterprise, if indeed we can call religion an enterprise, is so fraught with complications that I don’t think there’s anything that can be legitimately said in general about it.

Here’s where I would disagree: it seems to me that religion is universal and persistent because it gives meaning to human life. That is to say, religion is the answer to nihilism. Any religion. Even a death cult gives a reason for living—or, in this case, dying.

It appears that human beings can abide anything except meaninglessness. Even scientific materialist atheists (and I was one for a while) appeal to wonder and discovery as an organizing principle for life. That line of Sagan’s is popular among them for a reason: “we are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”

I drifted away from atheism precisely because I needed something more life-giving than consuming science documentaries as if they were sacraments. I needed a scaffolding for my life. While I can’t say I have fully erected that scaffolding at this point, the work itself has been meaningful to me.

I could be wrong about meaning-making being the universal characteristic of religion—but it does feel more true than religion as comfort.

A few days ago a friend sent me this interview with Robert Sapolsky on free will. It was well-timed. I had already been thinking about the impact of my ancestor’s varied experiences on my own life and the two together clarified some ideas.

First of all, I believe in free will. I’m aware of the scientific arguments against it, both in the form of the interview above and in Sam Harris’ book that I read a few years ago. But my purpose isn’t to argue against those ideas per se—not least because I’m unqualified. I just want to develop a few ideas of my own here.

I grew up believing in what I would call a naive version of free will. In this version, a human makes wholly independent decisions that are thoughtful and purposeful. In such a view, a person might take into account other views or influences but does not necessarily need to. It’s a sort of radically free-floating free will. Homo economicus, in short.

This idea didn’t survive very far into my adult years. Buddhist ideas of interrelatedness, Wendell Berry’s ideas about community, and scientific ideas I learned from Sam Harris made it nonsensical to me.

Yet while I understand and appreciate the scientific arguments against free will, I don’t accept them—primarily because I don’t share the materialist assumptions behind them. Why should we believe that consciousness (a nonphysical phenomenon) bubbles up from sufficiently complex arrangements of neurons (a physical reality)? Far smarter folks than me have asked this question and have come to no satisfactory answer (see: the hard problem of consciousness).

I’ve said before that I think a person is a nexus of intersecting forces—parents, ancestors, friends, environment, culture, etc. There is no person apart from these forces. Nevertheless, it still seems apparent from human experience that free will remains, to some extent.

We often talk about free will as if it is an absolute possession—humans either have it or they don’t. What if, instead, it is a quality that has degrees?

I’ve been thinking about this recently in connection to my ancestors, particularly my dad’s side of the family. While I don’t know a lot about them, as far as I can tell they were–for at least two generations and very likely more–poor, unhealthy, uneducated, and addicted to various substances. Dad’s childhood was hell for him and everyone else in the house—including the ones perpetrating the horrors, I’m sure.

Based on what we know about these patterns in families, it’s hard to imagine that this hell was created ex nihilo by my grandparents. For people in such situations, how much free will do they have? Sure they have some choice, especially in the mundane details of daily life. But how free are they in a larger sense? Not very, in my opinion. It is typical in these situations that the trauma is passed on, generation after generation.

Yet there is not zero freedom: my dad got out. He left that town and, for many years, his family of origin also. Nevertheless, some demons followed him out and he was not always successful in beating them back.

And so some of that intergenerational trauma lives in me. I hope now that my daughter, two generations from hell, will inherit still less of that trauma.

What makes the difference between being entrapped in circumstances and moving beyond them? I don’t know. I’m entirely unsatisfied with any variation on the boot-strap theory, which feels derived from the naive view of free will. I’m also uninterested in moralistic takes on these matters, so eager to assign blame that compassion is forgotten.

What if the key to a greater degree of free will is something like interior spaciousness? (That phrase is from Attuned by Thomas Hübl.) Again, how some people in the worst circumstances manage to attain that interior spaciousness while others do not is a fearful mystery. Nevertheless, it happens. Some people manage to cultivate a sense of curiosity and inward development. Some manage to see other possibilities than the ones immediately before them and the will to pursue them.

I agree with Sapolsky’s desire for a more compassionate world—but I do not agree that we reach that goal by denying free will and framing humans as biological machines. Interior spaciousness has the salutary effect of greater clarity and compassion. What if we arranged society in such a way that more people had the ability to cultivate it?

My local writing group’s prompt this month was to write about a dream. It’s a fiction-focused group but I’m far more comfortable with and interested in nonfiction. Nevertheless, I wrote about my favorite dream and drew on the ideas of James Hillman. So here’s my essay-pretending-to-be-a-story.