So what does metaphysics have to do with the assassination of Brian Thompson? As I’ve argued already, what’s particularly powerful about this breach is that it re-embodies accountability. Here’s why it matters: the body is the source of qualitative experience. Implicit in a re-embodiment of accountability is a return to the primacy of qualitative experience. After Thompson was killed, many responded to the glee erupting online with reminders that he is a father and husband. This is an important point, and a telling one. What they are effectively saying is “he doesn’t only have an exchange (quantitative) value as a CEO, he also has an experiential (qualitative) value as a human being.”
They are right, and also making exactly the point Mangione was making, knowingly or not. Big pharma treats living, breathing people with qualitative experiences as meaningless quantities. What the killing does, and what gives it so much power as a breach event, is to remind us that the body is the source of ultimate reality. It is the container of all qualitative value. It forces us to acknowledge that quality is more real than quantity.
I’m glad to have encountered Lewis Mumford’s phrase “life cannot be delegated.” I’m also glad for the way L.M. Sacasas invokes Illich to relativize an idea that could become overly rigid–because, of course, a great deal of our work is delegated:
The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost. It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.
I may not agree with everything Charles Eisenstein says in this column, but I totally agree with his conclusion:
The mindset that demonizes one’s political opponent is the same one that demonizes a foreign enemy to make war, or that demonizes a population to facilitate ethnic cleansing. Left unchecked, it will erupt into civil unrest, violence, and then tyranny. It may even lead to World War Three. I speak here as an American, but the same dynamics are rampant across the West. My country is not exempt from what it has sown in the world. The fate of Libya, of Iraq, of Venezuela, of Ukraine, of Syria, of Yugoslavia, of Lebanon, of Gaza could easily become our own.
What allows political authorities to commit heinous crimes against humanity? They are not, after all, superhuman. They don’t have special powers like Magneto or Darth Vader. So they must turn the population into willing accomplices in their own oppression. They instigate wave after wave of fear and hate, and ride each to new heights of power. As the Nazi Hermann Goering put it, “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
There’s always a bogeyman. The insane escalation in Ukraine requires the bogeyman of Vladimir Putin leading the resurrected corpse of the Evil Empire (the Soviet Union). The wave of surveillance and censorship and persecution of dissidents in the West requires the bogeyman of “MAGA extremists” or “Russian agents” or “domestic terrorists” or “spreaders of dangerous anti-vax misinformation.” The razing of Gaza and slaughter of its people requires the bogeyman of implacable hate-crazed enemies of Israel thirsty for the blood of Jews.
Every hateful word, every dehumanizing smear, every note of mockery and contempt, every denunciation and condemnation that we put into the public square feeds the powers that would manipulate us into war, genocide, and fascism. And so, politicians and media set the example of hate for us to follow. It isn’t even deliberate — that’s the thing. It is just the way things are done. I don’t mean here to set up politicians and media as the new evil. “Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do.” But that is what they do. They divide us. They teach us to hate each other.
Don’t fall for it. That’s my request. Don’t fall for it. Instead, enter the political sphere with the questions that come from compassion and lead to love. That is the only revolution worth having.
I cannot, of course, provide documentary proof for that claim. But as the Marxists used to say I believe it is no accident that the shaking of the foundations of the global economy and “the longest period of declining real incomes in recorded economic history” happened just as the iPhone was taking serious hold on the imagination of the developed world, and Facebook and Twitter were becoming key components of everyday life in that world. On your smartphones you can get (a) a stream of prompts for visceral wrath and fear and then (b) games and distractions that accomplish the suddenly-necessary self-soothing. Between the wrath and fear and the subsequent soothing, who can remember what happened last week, much less ten years ago? Silicon Valley serves the global capitalist order as its Ministry of Amnesia. “What is it I was so concerned about?”
Good essay from @tinyroofnail:
But here again Farmer stands out as an example. He did not begin by trying to change the world, but by applying himself to something relatively small. Whether in Haiti or in downtown Augusta, each of us can be inspired to do the same.
Going to the store on a Saturday with some small plumbing part in hand always makes me think of my dad. Of course, now I’m going to Lowe’s instead of the little hardware store in Oolitic but, still, a good memory. The smell and feel of those classic hardware stores was wonderful.
Nick Cave says something I’ve often heard from Christians:
Freedom finds itself in captivity. Disorder, randomness, chaos and anarchy are where the imagination goes to die, or so I’ve found.
So it is with matters of faith and the freeness of belief. I experience a certain vague ‘spiritualness’ within the world’s chaos, an approximate understanding that God is implicit in some latent, metaphysical way, yet it is only really in church - that profoundly fallible human institution - that I become truly spiritually liberated. I am swept up in a poetic story that is both true and imaginative and fully participatory, where my spiritual imagination can be both contained and free. The church may appear to some as small, even stifling, its congregation herdlike, yet within its architecture, music, litanies, and stories, I find a place of immense spiritual recognition and liberation.
Cave appears to be talking about art–but I’ve heard this deployed in other contexts as well. My question, whenever I hear this is always: Do you mean something like the creative freedom that can be found, say, within the sonnet form? Or do you mean that true freedom can only be found within the rule of the Church? The former I can get with. The latter sounds quite Orwellian to those of us who aren’t Christians. Again, I believe I understand what is meant by most of the people who say this sort of thing. The phrasing, though, makes some of us twitchy.
It may seem, from the infant’s point of view, that he’s achieving something. But in fact, the mother is doing almost all the work. However, the reactions of that infant are part of the birth process. He doesn’t have to know what to do, though. But if you were a stillbirth, the birth would be a lot harder. So the aliveness of the baby being born is actually helpful to the birth process. And the same is true of our aliveness. And all of our anguished desperate and hopeful attempts are futile attempts to invent rituals and invent myths. They do not create the real rituals and the real myths that we will live in. But they are part of the creation of the rituals and the myths that we will live in.
The wheel of time has brought us back around to the earliest cathedrals, built into the landscape. We’ve returned to Lascaux Cave. The next stage of our spiritual development could just as easily take place—has probably already begun—in dark tunnels etched with strange graffiti, among the standing stones of unfinished overpasses. Initiates will follow hidden voices into cement chambers lit by candles; spray-painted sigils will hold mysteries for contemplation; the ceiling will disappear into the shadows above, stretching higher than the dome of any basilica, and it will be more than enough.
John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism:
Much of polytheist theology can be seen as the application of ecological thinking to religion.
This snaps together several pieces in my mind. There has been a revival (relatively speaking) of polytheism in the years since the rise of ecological thinking. The dominant model of monotheism is of a king and the ruled, which has sometimes had what we might call poor historical consequences. A polytheism rooted in ecological thinking could be a shift from a hierarchical “great chain of being” to a relationship of reciprocity.
The most trustworthy people in the world are those who have been to the underworld. Those who’ve been torn open, rearranged, and made new by suffering. Myths are riddled with descents into the underworld wherein the hero confronts the darkness of the shadowy depths and reemerges with gifts and lessons. This is a kind of wisdom that is not on offer in the clouds or on earth. It can only be found below.