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.

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.

As Andrew Belfield said yesterday:

Well, between “friend” & Google’s Olympics ad, it’s been a bad couple days for humans.

It’s true! Which is why I am glad to have read the chapter “Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass” in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass yesterday. It’s a refreshingly humane contrast to the artificiality of Silicon Valley.

The chapter discusses an experiment performed by Kimmerer and a graduate student at the request of some basket weavers. The ancestral wisdom of the weavers stated that sweetgrass wanted to be harvested, in accordance with the principles of the honorable harvest (e.g., never take the first plant you see, never take more than half). That was known and acknowledged. What was not agreed upon was the method of harvest—snip the stems at the base or extract the plant, roots and all.

So, knowing Kimmerer is a botanist, they asked her to determine if one of the two harvesting methods might be the cause of sweetgrass’ ongoing disappearance. Kimmerer proposed the task to a grad student, who then presented it to a faculty committee. They were not impressed. The project had an insufficient theoretical framework, they said, and “everyone knows that harvesting harms a population. You’re wasting your time.”

The grad student went ahead, however, and worked on the project diligently for two years. Some grasses were harvested by snipping, some by uprooting, and some were untouched as a control population. The results were surprising: it didn’t make much difference which harvesting method was used. Both havested stands flourished. The control group, on the other hand, did not. “It didn’t seem to matter how the grass was harvested, only that it was.”

Later analysis also compared areas where sweetgrass was known to have once thrived and since disappeared and areas where it still thrives. The areas where it still thrives were found to be clustered around Native American communities that use sweetgrass in their basket weaving.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that it is Sweetgrass that reveals this story. Wiingaashk was the first to be planted by Skywoman on the back of Turtle Island. The grass gives its fragrant self to us and we receive it with gratitude. In return, through the very act of accepting the gift, the pickers open some space, let the light come in, and with a gentle tug bestir the dormant buds that make new grass. Reciprocity is a matter of keeping the gift in motion through the self-perpetuating cycles of giving and receiving.

Our elders taught that the relationship between plants and humans must be one of balance. People can take too much and exceed the capacity of the plants to share again. That’s the voice of hard experience that resonates in the teachings of “never take more than half.” And yet, they also teach that we can take too little. If we allow traditions to die, relationships to fade, the land will suffer. These laws are the product of hard experience, of past mistakes.

I don’t know what future the machine minds are planning. The world as it actually exists, however—the world of flesh and stem, soil and water—has an essential place for us.

I have a couple of friends who refuse to shop at Walmart because the Walton family have funded private school vouchers. These friends are both public school teachers and they do not want their money contributing to that effort.

This, of course, makes no sense, economically speaking. The Walton family wealth is well-established and long-lived. Walmart could close tomorrow and it wouldn’t touch the Walton family. Moreover, the refusal of two teachers to buy their groceries at Walmart doesn’t even budge the bottom line at that particular Walmart, let alone the corporation or the founding family.

With all of that said, I support such quixotic refusals. Despite making no real-world impact, they are good for the soul. It’s a miserly heart that looks at such acts with condescension and pity.

To be clear, some such refusals are made out of a foolish pursuit of purity. In such cases, the refusals become more puritan than quixotic.

But when the refusal can be made in pursuit of your own principles, with a proper disdain for “results”, then that refusal moves out of the realm of calculation and into a healthy exercise of your will against the powers that would subject you to their own purposes. We will never have full (or even much!) control over our lives or the environment in which we live. But if we can stake out a small piece of our lives where we refuse to do what is easy, we will have in that space refused to give our consent to destruction.

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.