Keeping It Local

Original European heathenism was very much involved with local, material, and observable
phenomena. The Lady of the Lake in Arthurian myth was undoubtedly a remembrance of
very local and particular water spirits, perhaps local to the wetlands that once surrounded
Glastonbury Tor. And in fact certain wetlands in Britain have been found to contain
large numbers of swords and other weapons which were sacrificed there to the local water
spirits in ancient times.

The multiple gods of polytheism are susceptible to the same shortcomings as the One God of monotheistic religions. Which is to say, once you create an abstraction that is not accessible to experience, you begin to progressively alienate yourself from the experience of the sacred. First the sacred becomes the exclusive preserve of priests, then even priests are cut out of the picture and it becomes the exclusive preserve of text. The "Word," the Bible or Koran, not your actual direct experience of the very real world. 

Problem is, not everyone's experience of the "real world" is the same. A young visitor to the USS Arizona Memorial, for example, who has no connection to WWII or Pearl Harbor, is going to experience that visit very differently to someone who was there on Dec. 7 1941. For one, it might be just a wreck and a piece of architecture. For the other, there might be a whole flood of memory and relationships, something that is as close to him as the very marrow of his bones. A sacred place. Some people might look at a lake and see a holy place, and others might just see a body of liquid. That is why the realm of the sacred tended to get shuffled off onto priests and shamans to begin with: some people have more of a gift for that sort of thing. The further you go back in time, the less specialized religion is, and the more the average person was intimately involved with his spiritual practices. The further you go back in time, the less people are polytheist, and the more they are animist. I am sort of focusing on European history here which is what I know, but basically the same principles seem to apply to some degree universally.

And the more people adopted a polytheistic viewpoint (a number of abstract gods,) the more they were setting themselves up for the eventual conquest of monotheism, because certain aspects of polytheism just don't make a lick of sense. So, I am supposed to believe that there are X number of gods and these are their exact names and those and not other gods are the gods that are actually there? At least with monotheism, the abstraction is narrowed down a bit. But unless you can actually see that god in some sense with your eyes, abstract gods of any number are all equally unworldly and, I would argue, equally unreal. 

Contrast this to the way some gods were regarded in Roman and earlier times. Sequana, the goddess of the river Seine in Celtic times, was worshiped at the springs at the source of the Seine. However, Sequana was not viewed as something distinct from the actual river Seine but as it were the whole being of which the river Seine was the visible part. Part of their reverence for the river could not be understood as merely respect for an abstraction, but that the river Seine was the goddess in a very material and sensuous way. It wouldn't have even occurred to ancient Man to have a completely invisible and immaterial religion: they were surrounded by their sacred world which was also the physical world. The hot springs of Aqua Sulis in the Celtic, Roman and later English city of Bath were originally dedicated to the Celtic goddess Sulis, but the goddess Sulis was not viewed as separate from the hot spring but inextricably one with it. The Romans came later and appended the Celtic spring goddess Sulis to their abstract goddess Minerva, creating "Sulis Minerva," since the Romans were more interested in abstract universal gods than the Celts were. 

However, even the religion of the Romans was not completely without animist aspects, and in fact even Early Medieval Christianity had its animist aspects. As well as adopting local deities and holy places under the names of Christian saints, they also had the rather heartwarming practice of relic reverence. People came from far and wide on pilgrimages to be near to the bones or blood or other possessions of a saint. The idea was that since part of the saint is physically there, you are quite literally in their presence, and so the saint could be prevailed upon more effectively to intercede for you in heaven. While relic reverence got a bad rap after the Protestant Reformation, at least you can say that people were there to revere something they could see. The relics were physical holy objects, in contrast to the completely textual and immaterial religious practices of the Protestants and Islam. There are certain survivals of this original animist perception in Christianity in certain parts of Catholicism - for instance, in continued relic reverence and in the sanctified host which is believed to be the body of Christ in a real and physical sense. 

Of course, the problem for modern Westernized Man is that we have so thoroughly desanctified the natural world (as a prelude to exploiting it) that it is an almost insurmountable perceptual leap to reunite the sacred and the physical. And it IS a perceptual deficit on our part. In the case of the WWII veteran in our earlier example, he has understood the deeper meaning of that memorial in his own body. He remembers the concussion of the bombs in his own flesh, remembers the smell of the burning fuel and bodies, and so has an understanding of that place that no casual observer ever could. The casual visitor to a sacred place sees trees and water and animals and various phenomena that he places in a 'merely' material context: in other words, in the context of a devalued materialism in which physical objects are essentially dead and inert and animals merely organic machines. A shaman who is familiar with the place knows it as the abode of many beings that are known to him and with which he has a relationship and communicates, and these beings are not something totally different from the tangible world but part of it. I would put it to you that it is the shaman and not the casual visitor who actually knows the place. His perception of the place is the deeper one.

And so I put it to you: abandon abstraction. If you cannot see your god, he isn't there. Think local, think direct. A spirit inhabiting a local lake is more likely to be encountered than a general god of lakes. A goddess that IS water is more likely to be encountered than a goddess OF water. A god that IS the Sun can be encountered every day: a god OF the Sun cannot. At the same time, abandon the perception that only sees in the world examples of what it already thinks is there. If you view a tree, for example, as mere object, you can never know it. A tree is a being; all things are in fact beings. Even a rock is not an object merely. We have inherited a certain view of dead matter: we must obtain a view of living matter and living beings and an entire world that is animated and alive. Otherwise, we will continue to deaden everything, as we have been doing now for a long time. 

"The universe is the only self-referential reality in

the phenomenal world. It is the only text without context. Everything else has to be seen in the context of the universe. 

The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive

the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs,

and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the

universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe.

The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The

story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so

important to know the story. If you do not know the story,

in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know

anything."

-Thomas Colebrook, describing the thought of Thomas Berry who was a Catholic priest and ecotheologian.

Whole Systems

Taking a break from gloom and doom, because honestly, they're no fun. I don't like gloom and doom any more than the next man. Well okay, I might like gloom and doom slightly more than the next man.... ;)

Anyway, I watched a very cool video made by folks at Harvard on a particular aspect of the internal workings of cells, in this case how white blood cells are alerted to sources of inflammation or disease.

Watching all these structures appearing and disappearing and being recycled in various ways, it seemed to me an apt metaphor for how the biosphere itself works. In other words, we humans are one particular part of this organism, one protein in the cell as it were, but we imagine that we are the whole show and also that we are separate from these processes going on around us. The cell proteins are assembled and disassembled just as in the world, we and everything else is born and dies: but we hardly ever think of one single cell as multiple things or a collection of individuals but as one thing. Indeed, most laymen don't think about cells individually that much either, but about the whole organisms we may encounter in our experience.

And herein lies a problem in our perspective, from the perspective of a protein in the larger cell of the Earth, which is that we have a very difficult time visualizing ourselves as part of a whole system. In fact, we seldom try to do that. We humans don't seem to be configured for such perception anymore, if we ever were. What evidence we have for such primordial perceptions are buried in myths and legends and archaic rituals of long-gone peoples who tried and failed to harmonize the microcosm of their own bodies with the macrocosm of the universe.

And yet, doing just that may wind up more essential for the survival of our species and the survival of many other species than just about anything else we could do.

Let me back up for a moment and talk to you about a very small farm. 

This is not a real farm, it's a farm in my head and it is taking up space there as a way of thinking about how a human being could live in such a way as to maximize the health of a whole biological system and to maximize the good of all the denizens therein, including himself. My thought experiment farm partially started from ethical motivations: to think about alternatives to the living nightmare which industrial agriculture brings about to all manner of beings. One need only do an internet search for images of the conditions which animals such as pigs and chickens endure in such a system, to see what I mean. I also do not exempt plants from my concern, to me they are beings too and should be regarded as such. So initially of course, being a soft-hearted sort of person, my ideal was to avoid violence in such a system as much as possible.

Thinking about chickens, I realized that such a goal could never be completely achieved. Even if I only buy hens and never eat them, well chickens don't lay only hens. Half of the chicken race is boys, so the fate of the hens siblings is to some degree on my plate even if I buy only hens. I might not kill the roosters myself, but I am implicit in the system by which the hens come to me. The hens will eat bugs and any number of other living things, and are intended to. Moreover, what do I intend to do when these hens get old and senile and start drooling in their dust baths? Move them to the old chicken's home? Or make chicken stock?

So okay, suppose I don't get the chickens at all. Is that helping the efficiency and diversity of the whole system of my little farm, or hurting it? I'd say hurting it. The chickens could make use of lots of resources that other organisms on the farm can't, and they turn those resources into eggs and chicken manure for the plants. If the vegetable crops could speak to such a chicken-free proposal they might say: "What are you thinking, not having manure on this farm? WE NEED THE EFFING MANURE." Plants are really pretty much the bosses on this imaginary farm; they need to get what they want above almost all other considerations, because everything depends on them. And of course it is hard to say I am exactly doing the chickens a favor by not providing them a way to live. Is it better to live a short but reasonably full life and ultimately wind up on a dinner plate, or better not to live period? Because that's really what we are talking about. A vegan world would be a world without chickens.

Imagine if a pseudo-compassionate alien race were to land on the Earth and say, "Gosh you humans have a lot of troubles in life, so we are going to make sure you are all taken care of and happy, and we will keep you from reproducing any more of your unhappy and unfortunate species." I am not sure we would consider our compassionate extinction a favor.

So absolute humaneness on my imaginary farm has become a secondary consideration to, "how do I increase the diversity, stability, productivity and efficiency of the whole system?" In other words, the happiness of the poor little chick-chicks individually has just taken a back seat to the happiness of the whole system, which will tend on the whole to provide them too with a fair portion of life. The plants get their days of sun and rain, and their days as organic matter in the compost pile. The chickens have their days scratching bugs in the dirt and their days on the menu. And the same with Farmer Bob, he too is secondary to the system as a whole. And it is a system that can be violent to individual forms. It can be violent individually to the chickens, to the plants, even to Farmer Bob. In this ideal farm, even Farmer Bob is compost eventually. If however the diversity, stability, health and welfare of the whole system, the whole farm, is maintained as the foremost value, then generally the chickens, the plants and Farmer Bob will have their share of good as well as bad. 

People sometimes have this idea of Nature as a happy paradise. It is a paradise, but it is a violent paradise, equal parts sunshine and butterflies and blood dripping from fang and claw. And it is this dark paradise that we must ultimately embrace when we put the good of the whole ecological system above the temporary profit of Man.

I have a new favorite image of Mother Earth. This image was so frightening when it was originally unearthed that they actually buried it back again, afraid of the power that it could still possess. It is an image of the Aztec earth goddess Coatlique, goddess of death and regeneration, to whom the dead go that she may take them back into herself. Coatlique: full of snakes, severed body parts, flaccid boobies, claws and skulls and shit. Not a user-friendly goddess, but the Aztecs didn't have much in the way of warm fuzzy gods. 

Coatlique: she's a mean mother

I generally think of the ancient Aztecs as bloodthirsty fascist assholes who we are better off without, but you can't accuse them of having a human-centric cosmology. In theory at least, their whole ritual life and the oceans of blood and all the tens of thousands of human hearts they ripped from their bodies were focused on the idea of human beings assisting the gods in their battle to keep the world alive. In actual practice the whole thing probably served more to reinforce the power of the kings and to instill fear in the populace, and it was all the sheerest superstitious nonsense. At least in part, though, they had sound motivations: that humans should function to enhance the life and vitality of the Earth. They approached this in the only way they knew how: with blood. It keeps us alive, after all.

We today however potentially have the knowledge to do what they couldn't do, which is actually enhance the diversity, stability, efficiency and overall biological mass of a given area and so ultimately of the planet as a whole. Of course we are very busy doing the opposite of all that and very busy failing to even see the pressing need to do that, but we are analytically more advanced than the Aztecs. The application of human knowledge to an environment can actually increase the fertility of that environment without taking anything significantly away from other environments. Rather than the sterile monocultures we now have, we can make our lands into incredibly diverse and rich environments which are more stable against changes in climate, disease and invasive organisms. Such approaches are typically called "permaculture," but the name seems almost to suggest a static state. I am not talking about maintaining the system at a given state, I am talking about making use of positive synergies and the increasing awareness of the functioning of a particular system to increase the system over time. We have always looked to natural systems like forests as an example of a sustainable ecological system, because that's pretty much the only sort of system that we know of that works. I see no reason why the application of human intelligence in understanding ecological systems could not improve on Nature, make more diverse and more productive systems than Nature might on its own. In fact we do see some examples of this in the permaculture field. We can be Nature's helpers.

This of course would require what the Aztecs had but we lack, which is a focus on the whole system rather than our particular short-term advantage in it. 

Innocence Lost

Cities of Texas from Space

Let's have a thought experiment. Let's suppose I could wave a magic wand and everybody on the planet started living sustainably. Stopped wasting, stopped unnecessary consumption, stopped unnecessary energy consumption, recycled, grew some major part of their food, the whole bit. Would that actually solve the problem this planet is having? That by itself? I would say, the answer is probably no.

Let's recap the problems for those who might just be joining us. Human beings are a cancer of this planet, heating up the world while destroying the life web of this world at a breakneck pace, killing the oceans, expanding at the expense of that which actually is keeping it alive. I am not going to paint a smiley face on it, look at that picture above. I live there. It's a picture of cancer, and I am nestled in the heart of one of the major tumors.

Even if, in my little fantasy thought experiment, every person in every one of these cities, and everywhere else in the world started living with a massively reduced resource footprint, there are still too many people for the planet to sustain in a healthy way. Sure, it would be a step in the right direction, it would give us more time, and if we also had massive compulsory worldwide birth control we might actually die down to a sustainable level in a hundred years or so. Of course as I mentioned, this thought experiment is an abject fantasy. Nothing of the sort is ever going to happen. Nothing is going to happen until Nature actually starts collapsing enough to force it to happen, with all the attendant ecological, economic, political and social upheaval that would follow in its wake. At that point, shit is going to start getting real very quickly.

Thoughts like these are why I like The Dark Mountain Project (http://dark-mountain.net/). They actually get it. 

"The Dark Mountain Project is a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself. We see that the world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling, and we want our cultural responses to reflect this reality rather than denying it."

-The Dark Mountain Project

NOW, let's suppose (another fantasy thought experiment) we have a magic golden bullet. A magic golden bullet for pruning Homo Sapiens to sustainable levels without otherwise inflicting lasting harm on the planet. This magic bullet is a disease with a long incubation time (5+ years), very highly transmissible during that time, and a 90% mortality rate. Perfect. Basically the entire planet catches the disease before they even know the disease exists, 90% of Homo Sapiens dies, problem solved right? Right?

A friend posed a good question: what makes me think we wouldn't do it all over again?

What makes me think that those remaining 10% aren't going to go, "We need to get this consumer civilization back up and running ASAP!" Will these 10% not look back upon the age of Iphones and jet planes and regard it as a mythic era and a model for their own aspirations, not unlike the way the Renaissance looked backwards to the glory of Greece and Rome? What is to keep it from all starting again?

Nothing. Not a damn thing. Having a second chance doesn't mean you won't wind up doing the same things all over again. Given the general short-sightedness of the species, I would even call it likely.

In fact, in certain ways it already HAS happened: many great civilizations have fallen over the millennia and it hasn't seemed to cure us of the habit.

All of these things do not mean that we should give up on sustainability, only that we must look clearly at what faces us. Sustainability is the right decision, even if it might not fix the problem alone. Ultimately the problem is civilization itself, and we have to lose our illusions about civilization itself and face this truth: civilization itself is violence against Nature. If people do understand that, there is a chance that we might actually use any second chances we get.

There was a time, once, when we lived in almost complete ignorance of civilization and of the unbalanced powers that Mankind could wield. For hundreds of thousands of years, it was a nonissue. We probably can't ever now return to that state of innocence, we can only hope against hope that we can understand how to restrain the powers of the human mind and human greed.

The goddess Inanna brought a gift to humanity from the god of wisdom, Enki.

It was a box containing all the blessings and curses of civilization. It contained all the art and music and craftsmanship and grandeur and all the war and strife and desolation and evil of which civilization was capable. Inanna spoke:

"This is our gift to you, civilization. And you must take it. And once taken, you can never give it back."

-Sumerian myth

Meltdown.

Photo from RT

I have not posted in awhile, apologies for that. I am also sick with flu-like crap and have been for several days, and this may be affecting my negative outlook, so apologies for that as well.

I will dispense with the pleasantries so we can get on to the business at hand. The Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) lied about the magnitude of the meltdown at Fukushima, continue to lie about it, and other governments and institutions seem happy to continue with the whole charade in the name of not instilling panic. It was initially reported to not be as bad as Chernobyl: it is clear now that it was much worse than Chernobyl. Chernobyl being on land, it was much easier to contain the spread of radioactivity. Fukushima is on the shore, and the spread of radioactivity was and is still impossible to contain, and probably never will be possible to contain, so more radioactive elements are going to continue seeping from the site into the ocean for the foreseeable future. Moreover, truly vast amounts of radioactive materials, debris, water and fuel rods kept on the site are still being kept in an earthquake and tsunami zone, with the very real certainty that on some finite time scale these materials will again be subject to earthquake and tsunami unless they are promptly dealt with in some way. Which does not appear to be happening and really is not being planned for in any way that the Japanese Government or TEPCO is sharing with the rest of us. The site is still an ongoing humanitarian and ecological disaster. It may be a couple decades before we truly comprehend what has been done to the planet here, and by then the damage to human lives and ocean ecosystems will have already been done and we will have created the next great disaster already by then. Eating seafood from the North Pacific may in the end prove to be an unacceptable radiation exposure risk now and for the rest of our lifetimes.

Moreover, the only folks who seem to be keeping Fukushima on their radar screens are the usual fear-mongers like Alex Jones, who are long on identifying problems but short on any sort of constructive approaches to them. They do have to be congratulated at least for realizing the magnitude of the issues and for avoiding the walking sleep that the rest of the planet seems to have voluntarily laid upon itself concerning them. They are also merchants whose product is fear, and fear is not conducive to clear thinking. Occupying the mind with fear is for those who do not fully realize that on a personal level (and ultimately on a planetary level as well), disaster and death are never avoidable. Suffering and death will eat you, it is just a matter of how soon and how inventively it will eat you and how you choose to define your life in the meantime. ;)

The real long-term problem is not Fukushima. The U.S. did over a hundred nuclear tests in the Pacific from 1946 onwards, many with hydrogen bombs that spread demonstrable fallout over populated areas. Fukushima is a unique event in a sense, but in another sense it is simply part of an ongoing and ever-expanding pattern, and it is that pattern that concerns me today.

Every time humanity plays God and it comes back to bite them in the ass, corrective actions are taken... against that particular event. And that not always, and always very belatedly. When it became clear that DDT was killing bird life and laying waste to whole ecological communities, it was finally banned... about a decade after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Meanwhile, in those decades after DDT started to be widely used, we invented whole new ways to eff up the biosphere, and we continue to do so since then. Always, corrective actions have been taken against particular symptoms of human greed and overreaching, not against the core disease itself. It is like a patient having serious disease symptoms for decades, and the doctor's response to this grave condition is to keep buying his patient boxes of kleenex. It is our way of life that is the disease, not ultimately Fukushima. It is the willingness of our people and governments to turn a blind eye to danger as long as profit is involved, that is the disease.

Somewhere along the line we humans got the idea that money was more important than life; power more important than happiness; displays of ostentation or technological prowess more important than healthy children or healthy forests or clean nutritious food. Whatever we say we are doing, what we are actually doing is valuing money, status, progress, and false pride over life itself. That is what human civilization is based on now. And no piecemeal or incremental change is going to correct that, it is going to require exponential change in the fundamental values of worldwide civilization. Until that happens, expect more of the same. New government regulations particularly in the case of nuclear power can slow the fool's march to oblivion, but it cannot stop it so long as Mankind is developing new powers and new and profitable ways to destroy the planet every day. We can and should try to convince people to take human and environmental safety as the first order of business whenever a corporation introduces a new product or technology, but even that is still a finger in the dike of a human-made disaster.

Playing devil's advocate, even a complete cultural paradigm shift away from consumerism and the cult of progress and towards sustainability and biosystem health still leaves us with billions who know no other way to live, even if they intellectually agree with such a change. Were such an uncanny miracle to take place, that everyone suddenly agrees with us... well they might agree with us but they still have to eat. I can imagine one such worker saying, "You're totally right Bob, I agree with you 100%, but I still have to work at Tasty Pollution Biscuits Ltd. in order to feed myself, and I know no other work." More and more people opting out of this destructive way of life might gradually start mutating planetary society in a safer direction over the course of centuries, but what new horrors will occur in those intervening centuries? It's a bit of a pickle.

But in any case, it is past time to start having the conversation about this. Our whole way of life is sinking and dragging us down with it. Drive the stake into the vampire's cold black heart, either it will kill us or we will kill it. It's just that simple. And the first and most needful thing on the way to killing the vampire is to actually start talking about the vampire, which people are very loath to do. That is why I posted this, ultimately, to start conversation. We are passengers on the Titanic and it is past time to start talking about the hole in the ship and what we are going to do about it, if we can do anything...

"Cocktails will now be served on the after deck, please watch your footing..."

No, not if we can. We CAN do something. Start talking about what we are going to do differently from now on, now that we can no longer ignore the hole in the ship. Maybe we can change the course of the world and maybe we can't, but we can change the course of our denial about the world and start living more honestly with ourselves. Honesty, decency, courage and integrity may not patch hulls, but even on the decks of the sinking Titanic they are still good things. And who knows what good may come from such good things.

It's a start.