It’s interesting to watch a phrase transform over time. Usage often indicates the function of the phrase in the context of a community’s current relationship with the rest of the culture. A meme, such as “The Burning Times” can serve, among other functions, to increase or decrease the distance the individual employing it intends to create between a subculture and its parent.
The idea of the “Burning Times” seems to excite less solidarity these days as it does animosity toward the people who reference it. It has become one of the several tropes that will have the “anti-fluffy” crowd (who spend an inordinate amount of time evaluating others’ practice, to the extent that I often wonder if they’re doing much of anything else) target one for the sort of viciousness once reserved for heretics. The stated reason for this is that historical inaccuracy causes the mainstream to look down on Pagans.
There are a number of reasons why I find this debatable. What I really think is going on is a generational shift from the counterculture pose of the mid-seventies through the early nineties to the more (for lack of a better term) integrationist bent of the current decades. Very early uses of the phrase (in the works of Gardner) seem to be mainly aimed at giving a pedigree and also of justifying the secrecy and obscurity of the teaching. The Wiccans of that period were arguably bohemian, at least some of them, but not counterculture. Gardner was, after, a postal worker. In the seventies, we see the Craft develop into a spiritual path for radicals, and as an adjunct to the women’s movement. The usage of “The Burning Times” changed accordingly: into a narrative of past persecution that formed the template for all future persecutions of women and indigenous peoples.
The years through which we currently pass are of a different character entirely. Whether we like to admit it or not, the conservative backlash against the counterculture has marked our thinking. In some ways, this was a good thing, in others bad. One of the more detrimental outgrowths was the Neoconservative movement, which began as an internal reaction to some of the New Left’s more “radical” aspects and drifted steadily rightward. The early core of the Neoconservative movement was heavily academic, and brought with it both a sense of being part of an empowered elite (mostly through the influence of Leo Strauss, who is far less egregious than the movement created by his “followers”) and the new disciplines of postmodernism such as Deconstruction.
It was this latter that allowed them to “reframe” many policies, such as international interventionism, that were extremely unpopular at the time. They also became masters of co-opting the language of the oppressed, much in the same way that Ayn Rand attempted to with her insistence that the wealthy were the most oppressed group in the world. One would hear a Neocon referring to “prejudice” against the wealthy or “bigotry” against those who stood for “traditional values.”
The Neocons understood the media better than the Left, because they either owned them or were part of “think tanks” who conducted studies on how to use media and language to maximum effect. The furor over “political correctness” was almost entirely orchestrated by media moguls connected to the Neoconservative movement. In many cases they outright lied, insisting that people were being fired for not employing the most ridiculous linguistic spaghetti to describe simple differences between people. There is absolutely no proof that the term “political correctness” was used in the specific sense that it is used to day before the Neocons used it that way in the 1990s. Before that, it was an ironic term used by some sectors of the New Left. Regardless, the stigma of being thought “PC” can be quite difficult to remove.
This is just many of the ways in which our current culture has been marked by the Neoconservative movement. Long after the actual political clout of the New Right fades, we will still be hearing the phrase “PC” as a snarl word, with all the unexamined assumptions that it brings to the table.
Bringing it back down to the micro level of the relationship of Modern Paganism to the broader culture, I think the current reaction to the “Burning Times” meme is a manifestation of the overall tendency to deradicalize and identify with the mainstream. We saw early, but still quasi-radical in praxis, movement in this direction with the attempt to disidentify with Satanism. This was, it must be noted, almost never attempted simply by pointing out that Pagans don’t (generally) believe in Satan. The point was not distinction but self defense. Thus the image of Satanism promoted in the mainstream was tacitly accepted and made the target of sometimes open hostility. That this was also helping to criminalize a religion, something should never occur in a country with a separation of church and state, didn’t seem that important at the time. Twenty years on, the damage is clear.
Personally, I think courting or even expecting the respect of the average secular/agnostic zombie is a waste of time at best. I think we will primarily receive a kind smile and a damnation by faint praise. But, given that Modern Pagans emerge from the same cultural stew as others in our society, the shift seems inevitable. Our use of language and our attitude toward memes such as “The Burning Times” will adjust accordingly. I can only hope that sacrificing our distance will not prove to be a mistake. We can only know what the change will look like after its done happening.
It is often the case that foundational ideas go unexamined, for the simple fact that looking too closely might mean major changes in the way people engage with a particular system. In the mundane world, for example, the entire edifice of the pseudo-science of “economics” would crumble if the majority of its practitioners were to come to a real understanding of the how the concepts they take to be axiomatic are actually informed by archaic, religiously inspired ideologies. The case with the concept of “Immanence” in the Pagan community is, I think, a good deal less severe. However, it is not a good idea to keep promoting a concept without exploring its full implications.
As a first step, I think it would be fruitful to look at how the concept is generally understood in the context of Modern Paganism. The term “Immanence” also appears in classical theism, but with a rather different implication than in our community. In classical theism, God Himself is a transcendent being. He is conceived of as larger than, more powerful than, more wise and compassionate than, any other being in the Cosmos. Yet He is also immanent in that He is close to us, and to an extent present in everything. It is important to point out that a doctrine espousing a totally transcendent God existing outside of an utterly corrupt material universe is very rare. There is a tension in Christianity on which is more important, but most accept that God is both transcendent and immanent. I bring this up because the manner in which immanence is presented in many Modern Pagan contexts could lead one to believe that all Christians are Manichean Gnostics. This latter belief was, in fact, considered heresy from the beginning.
The main contrast here is that, generally speaking in Modern Paganism, rather than a property of an essentially transcendent being, immanence is taken to be the entire story. It is often simply explained away as “everything is divine.”
Which leaves us with an interesting quandary: if “everything is divine”, why bother having a religion at all? Indeed, how does this statement, taken on its own, even have meaning? If I say that everything is purple, this is easily refuted by pointing out that my own skin is conspicuously not. The primary way to determine a quality is to note its absence.
This is not so much an issue of a bad idea as it is an oversimplification of a good one. The actual literature on the subject is a bit more detailed, and gives us the picture of the Cosmos, particularly “Nature,” as a complete being in and of Herself. Where the published matter on the subject fails is in determining how we could get “out of harmony” with this being, or even how anything ultimately harmful to Her could actually occur. It fails because many of the writers on the subject are opposed to hierarchy of any kind, seeing metaphysical hierarchy as a justification, in all cases, for oppressive political hierarchies.
But, if we are to actually address the problems of oppression and environmental degradation, we will need to understand that establishing a value of any kind necessarily involves a hierarchy. One cannot value something without devaluing that which would harm, degrade, or lessen that which they value. Otherwise, we are simply saying that it is a nice thing to have, but other people’s ideas of what is nice are also… nice. This leaves us with absolutely no room for any activism whatsoever. The values of the person who would put us all in jail for even caring about restoring wetlands or protecting a woman’s biological freedom are, if “everything is divine” just as much a holy prerogative as the desire to protect them. This is, of course, unacceptable to most if not all Pagans.
Of course, the concept of the Cosmos as a living entity is not new. It is, when you get right down to it, the conclusion that nearly every wisdom tradition has come to over time. It is the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalah and the Buddha Nature in Vajrayana. What is new is the sociopolitical overlay. And what that lacks is what I would argue is the necessary polarity of transcendence against which immanence gains its meaning. Without that, we are left with a platitude that bites its own tail if followed to its logical end.
It’s really an example of how context creates meaning. Context transcends the particular words or symbols used in a communication. It determines their import, provides the ground from which their meaning is intended to grow. But those words and symbols, by virtue of being embedded in that context, are imbued with that meaning. Take them out, and they are just words, mere scribbles. The word “love” for instance means something very different in a letter to ones beloved than it does in a nationalist screed. But there are those, I suppose, who will say that it’s “good” no matter where it is.
If we understand the context of over-arching (ergo transcendent, since determinant and of greater importance than any single part) values, the idea that “everything is divine” becomes intelligible. It merely needs the caveat that we don’t always see that divinity, or don’t always honor it. We fail in this respect because we have lost the vision of the whole, or “the golden thread that leads you to the heart of Eleusis.” Without that vision, all our grand assertions are little more than words which, while they may make us feel good, do little to improve ourselves or the world we live in.
We live in a beautiful, divine Cosmos. Modern Paganism is one of the few religions to make a point of valuing this world, for itself, rather than as an “illusion” or a testing ground for souls. Historically, I think this may actually be unique. While our ancient forbearers certainly had a this-worldly focus, there was also much that could be considered “transcendent” and “otherworldly” in the cosmologies of these older traditions. We make a mistake if we project our own ideology into the past.
Nearly every Paleopagan tradition that we know of divided the Cosmos into at least three Worlds, Upper, Middle and Lower. The relationship between these Worlds depended largely on the culture, but nearly all placed some kind of determinant agency on a realm that existed apart from the strictly material aspects of reality. While the manifest universe in which we dwell may have been considered valuable and holy, this holiness depended on some Outside in which our world was a partaker.
The question then becomes: what do we mean when we say “the world is holy”? If we simply worship “Nature” we are left with a confusing heap of different approaches, all of which begin to seem like shouting at our own psychological projections. The idea of “Nature” is largely a Romantic construct that depends on several metaphysical assumptions that must also be unlocked before we are actually speaking about anything intelligible rather than simply emotive.
Doing so is beyond the scope of what I really want to talk about, which is the more immediate origins of the idea of Immanence as it is conceived in Modern Paganism. It is important to remember the general background of the majority of us, and to contrast this with the people’s of the past, and indeed the rest of the world. Generally speaking, Modern Pagans come from middle to upper middle class backgrounds in industrialized, Western cultures. These cultures enjoy a very high standard of living compared with less “advanced” nations, and the lives of those living in them are generally free of the extreme privations of those living in the “developing” world. (The discussion of the ideology behind the words in quotes is, again, much too involved to enter into here.)
For most of human history, life, we must be frank, sucked. Life expectancy was incredibly short. Most people were either slaves, serfs, or soldiers. There was no such thing as “credit” for the majority of individuals. You either had the money for what you needed, or you went without. A plethora of diseases awaited you, and people died of maladies that today require a single visit to a doctor and a course of antibiotics. One could expect to die relatively young, with a great deal of pain, after a difficult struggle to survive.
We should remember this when we criticize the “otherworldly” religions of the past. These were not just arbitrary abstractions created to manipulate gullible populations. They were, in part, very honest responses to existence as most people experienced it. In this context, Gnostic hatred of materiality becomes a little more understandable.
It is uncertain exactly how Paleopagans viewed the relationship between the different realms of existence they conceived. This is mainly because many of these cultures were oral, and generally didn’t have time to sit around and philosophize about cosmology. The exception, of course, being Greece. And Plato could hardly be characterized as a philosopher of Immanence, at least in the sense we tend to use the term. Iamblichus, on the other hand, arguably could.
I would conjecture that most Paleopagans simply took their place in the Cosmos for granted. Somewhere in the middle. They were embedded in the thick of existence, and simply assumed a continuity between this world and the next.
Modern Pagans, however, do not and will never have this kind of relationship to the world. We have both Christianity and the Industrial Revolution between us and that world-view. The Romantic movement grew out of a response to the latter, and created the pastoral, somewhat saccharine concept we think of as “Nature.” (The answer to this was “nature red with tooth and claw” and the corruption of Darwinism to serve the needs of the industrial elite.)
What we have inherited, then, is a more refined sort of separation between “natural” and “unnatural.” Things human society creates are, from this perspective, inherently bad. The only “good” is the unspoiled, wide open fields and forests. Very few Modern Pagans talk about the divine being Immanent in a sewer drain, though this is what one would be led to if they took the idea of everything being holy to its logical conclusion.
We are embedded in a different set of contexts than Paleopagans, including Indigenous survivals that could be considered late examples of such. I feel it is important to recognize this, because failure to do so renders much of our theology meaningless. If we are simply regurgitating Romantic notions about “Nature,” that makes us an historical curiosity, not a living tradition.
I bring this up because it is quite likely that the socioeconomic context which created Modern Paganism is on its way out the door. The energy sources which power our technologies, which in turn provide our abnormally high standard of living, are running dry. As the people in control of the centralized systems of distribution play politics, it becomes increasingly unlikely that viable alternatives will be coming soon enough to stave off the collapse of industrial civilization.
What will a post-collapse Paganism look like? Will our theology adapt to the circumstances, or dig in its heels and become the kind of dogma we tend to shun? The latter possibility may seen unthinkable right now, but remember what happened to Neoplatonism when it met with Jewish Apocalyptic sects at the fall of Classical civilization. No one would have imagined then that a doctrine based on communal love and voluntary simplicity could become the Church of the Inquisition.
In later posts I will go deeper into the concept of Immanence. This post was mainly necessary as an acknowledgment of the context, which I have seen little of.
Modern Pagans have a long standing dislike of dogma, for very good reason. In spite of the comfort inherited beliefs might offer, ultimately they stifle personal growth and tend to linger long after the world around them has rendered them moot. Examples from history are numerous, and to cite them would be to belabor the point. Paganism is a religion about life, and dogma, in the final analysis, is a kind of death.
In place of orthodoxy, or common belief, Pagans have orthopraxis, or common practices. Doctrines are sparse, rituals are many. But there is a general skeleton and a basic trajectory that nearly all Pagan rituals share. A Pagan visiting another’s Circle will usually only need to ask which direction the Circle is cast from and which Tool is used for Fire. Beyond that, the multiplicity of Gods and Traditions tends toward an “it’s all good” approach.
For the most part, this is a good thing. But, like all good things, it has its downside. It is also possible for someone to have a good grasp of the mechanics of ritual and to subscribe to the most utterly absurd notions concerning those rituals. I do not intend to indicate any particular model or approach, but rather, a lack of any coherent example of either.
Animism, for instance, is a perfectly viable perspective. As Chaos Magicians know, when you approach the Universe from a particular perspective, it tends to oblige with examples. But one should understand Animism inside and out, not just adhere to a perspective because they “like it.” Very few things grate on my ears than people saying they “like” a particular philosophy or metaphysical system. A system is not like soda or cigarettes. Brand loyalty doesn’t enter into the picture. The question is does one grasp their chosen viewpoint to the extent that they could explain it clearly to someone who hasn’t heard of it before?
“Significance” is slippery. To a certain degree we are always a step behind the reality curve, since our minds are conditioned by past habits. Orthopraxis gives us an anchor in the phenomenal Universe while we sort out our relations with the Causal. But not being able to give real arguments for our current outdated (even by an hour) model will ensure that we never truly understand.
In a sense, this is a deeper challenge to dogma. Superficially we can all agree that holding beliefs “just because” they are part of their religious tradition is at best lazy, at worst a recipe for irrelevance. However, it is often the case that we hold core assumptions that are unexpressed and inform our choices without our knowing it.
A common thread is a good thing. But, like a dogma, the motions of ritual can become just motions. To go beyond this, we need to look at what we do, and our assumptions about it. The drama of “significance” is ever changing, and we don’t want to get stuck in the third act when the Universe is working on the climax.
The Word, and the rational intellect, can be credited with creating human civilization. This is not only because reason is necessary to communicate important facts such as where a building’s foundation should be or how many swords are available for “N” number of warriors. The Word, in the Hermetic sense, creates a story that a civilization then embodies. This story determines what can and cannot be conceptualized until a new Word is uttered by a Magus to come.
Given the great power of the rational intellect, one would easily understand that it is crafting the world as well as describing it. This is generally not the case. The Word is in the hands of both Tahuti and his Ape. Tradition has it that the Magus is followed by the Ape of Thoth, who ensures that all his words will be misunderstood. The Word, once the pure expression of a Cosmic Mystery, has now become trapped in a thicket of its own ramifications and reifications. Like all contingent phenomena, it is ultimately impermanent and unsatisfactory.
Which brings me, as usual, to Ken Wilber. (Really this obsession is unhealthy. I should get help.) In his AQAL map, intellectual development is said to be “necessary but not sufficient” for spiritual development. This is, I feel, like most things which are spoken, both true and untrue. Wilber’s teleology demands that the monkey learn to speak before it can climb to the heights of the Non-dual.
But what if it learns to speak lies? Can it ultimately learn anything else?
One gets the feeling that it wouldn’t matter. The development of the cognitive faculty would, in itself, be the sole requirement. As the Cosmos is in process, every statement we make can be considered true, false, and meaningless, depending on what point in time we are discussing. The mind can be thought of as a great spoon, dipping again into a boiling soup of events, concepts, wars, famines, movie premiers, and pornographic ice cream wrappers. The spoonful it brings out of this chaos it calls “reality.” But it tends to go for the same kinds of food each time, since it has now defined that which it has not picked out before “not food.”
Even so, we must learn to use the spoon. To simply sit on the edge, trying to make sense of the swirling chaos, will not serve us. And we must learn to discriminate, since there are poisons in that stew as well as nourishment. Knowing it is all temporary, we can enjoy the meal without expecting it to be the same every time.
The Ape of Thoth is both our adversary and ally. His jokes are annoying, and he always makes us look like fools. But he also helps us by showing us that the universe doesn’t play by our rules. We only have a certain degree of control over anything, and the Ape is there to help us laugh when we try too hard.
Eventually, when we have learned how to work with the Ape, we can even begin to ignore those poisons we had to avoid. The mind is capable, if developed beyond mere analysis, of transmuting these poisons into wisdom. But it takes time, and we must pay our dues to the Ape before Tahuti will speak to us in plain english.
When I first encountered Neopaganism, it was fairly common to see a harsh assessment of Christianity in much of the material. On an interpersonal level this was even more pronounced. Christianity was said to be misogynist, hierarchical, and generally everything that Pagans were against. As Paganism has become more prevalent, I have noted a change in the public attitude (though not generally amongst Pagans when encountered face to face). The approach seems to have shifted toward “playing nice.”
A sentiment I hear expressed so often I can’t help wondering if people are thinking when they say it is “If you want to be respected, you have to show respect.” Which is fine, as far as it goes. It just misses the point of talking about religious beliefs and their implications. The question is not whether one can relate socially to another human being without insulting them. This is basic courtesy. Most, if not all, Christians are ultimately caring individuals who want what they see as the best for their fellow human beings. What really needs to be asked is whether religious beliefs have social and ethical impacts, and whether these impacts can be evaluated as generally beneficial or generally harmful. In other words, is what a Christian sees as “the best” really the best, or a collection of insane nonsense that leads people to hurt one another.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I think the answer is a little bit of both, depending on the individual and the sect. “Christianity” as such is only identifiable by generalities. Some of these generalities are problematic on their own, but don’t become actual issues until someone decides to put a particularly pathological spin on them. For instance, focusing on an episode of extreme pain and mutilation as the center of ones religious beliefs seems, from where I sit, psychologically unhealthy. But it only becomes an ethical issue when people start actually nailing themselves to crosses in an effort to emulate it. We are, in such cases, a little too squeamish about saying “Moron, don’t nail yourself to a cross.” But then I’m of the “it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye” school of cultural relativism.
But it’s not as if Christianity is a foreign belief system for most of us. Even those who grew up in more “secular” environments still assimilated the assumptions that our collective metaphysic inherited from the dominant belief system. Atheism is basically addressed at those assumptions, as much as it would like to generalize its critique. Which is the main reason why I think we, as Pagans, still need to look critically at Christianity. Forget about what Christians think about us, or even what one type of Christianity teaches. We are the future and they, in the final analysis, are the past.
If we are to move forward into something like a civilization, we need to start looking at the mistakes our ancestors made. These mistakes generally arose from a Christian viewpoint. Yes, to a certain degree this does cast the religion in a negative light. But it is the light shone by their own actions, over centuries. The cumulative, historical effects of the religion and its God do not reflect well upon it.
“What’s done is done,” as they say. To blame modern Christians for these things is only partly just. To the extent that they maintain a literal belief in the Bible and an adherence to doctrines that denigrate the material world, sexuality, women, and the various cultural others, I think it fair to point this out. In the end, however, it is largely beside the point. It is very difficult to maintain beliefs which run counter to the evidence of ones senses and the prevailing tendencies of the age. These things are slowly being sloughed off, even if those holding on to the detritus are especially tenacious and bombastic about it.
What is really important is to look inside, and see how many of the old ghosts are still in our own machine. It is even possible that some may still be worth keeping around. But we’ll never know if we place ourselves in a corner where saying anything even remotely critical of Christianity is considered out of bounds and cause not to take someone seriously. That is simply silencing for political convenience. Something we have had a great deal too much of in the past, and which is beneath us.
It’s always interesting to run into ethical debates in the Pagan community. I have a distinct feeling that the most common form in which Pagan ethics are expressed, the Wiccan Rede suffers from the same predicament that many rules of thumb do when they move from a very small population of intimates to a larger group without the same group dynamic and unspoken mutual understanding. The first Gardnarians probably had relatively similar notions about what “harm none” meant, and what it could reasonably include. When the Rede hit the shelves of the local big box bookstore, however, it encountered a much more diverse audience.
One thing I’ve seen relatively little of is a discussion of what sorts of occupations can be considered more logically appropriate for modern Pagans. I would think the way we spend eight hours of our day would be something of a major concern. Often, what I see is off hand remarks along the lines of “it’s not what you do, it’s who you are.”
I can see how this would be a way to resolve a conflict. And, of course, it is incredibly difficult to find any work right now, let alone work that aligns with ones values. But it introduces an interesting set of philosophical concerns that ache for some anal retentive bastard like myself to examine. I have an idea where this division between what one believes and what one does for a living might come from. If we start the phenomena of “Modern Paganism” at the point where we have documentation, this puts our origins in England. England, as we all know, is a Protestant country, and the “Protestant Work Ethic” generally followed the early colonizers of the Americas and Australia. (Yes, I’m aware that Australia was a penal colony. But I’m not talking about individuals. I’m talking about established cultural patterns.) This ethic, which in its extreme, Calvinist form actually takes material wealth, however gained, to be a sign of grace, relies heavily on the doctrine of Sola Fide or “Faith Alone.” The most dramatic verse used to hammer the irrelevancy of “good works” is found in Isaiah 64,6: “All your righteous acts are as filthy rags.”
Sola Fide is a response to the Catholic notion of salvation through good works. This is actually a complex debate between the two groups of Christians, and is generally beyond the scope of this blog. (Not to mention the ability of the current author to delve too deeply into the waters of Christian theology.) The general idea, however, is that “good works” as such are likely to give one a big ego. You start thinking you’re better than other Christians (as a Christian you’re automatically assumed better than non-Christians) who are born in sin just as you are. No matter how good you do, you’re always going to fall short. So, it’s better to cultivate a love of God, which should lead to your actions being pleasing to Him.
Whether we like it or not, we as Modern Pagans have inherited at least the broadest implications of this ethos. It’s more than just a religious dogma. It forms a huge part of the cultural matrix of our society. I think it no accident that its adoption on a broad scale roughly coincides with the ascension of the mercantile bourgeoisie in the early modern period. Neither did Max Weber.
Examining this outlook, I think, is important for Pagans to do. The underpinning of it involves something that we are theologically opposed to: the idea that the world we live in is a fallen creation. That subsequent generations of Puritans have, by their grace-filled lives, contributed to the self fulfillment of their own views, need not concern us.
An interesting contrast to the doctrine of Sola Fide is the Buddhist concept of Sila or moral training. Buddhism, like existentialism, does not separate a person’s identity from who they are. Rather, it explicitly denies a permanent “self” that could be “good” or “bad” and focuses on the relationship between ones thoughts and actions. The world itself (contrary to popular understandings of Buddhism) is taken in many cases to already be enlightened. We just have to catch up. The way we catch up is to refrain from harmful actions and engage in positive ones. This pretty much covers the Eightfold Path in toto. The Precepts are basically commentary on that one idea.
It’s important to remember that Buddhism doesn’t really consist of “dogmas” in the theological sense. It consists mostly of advice. Very pragmatic advice that actually tends to work. One doesn’t decide to practice Right Livelihood because it’s a religious doctrine. They undertake Sila because they view it as inseparable from the Path to Enlightenment.
Pagans may or may not be interested in “Enlightenment” by one definition or another. But I do think we should look at the question of intention and its relationship to action. What kind of world do we want to live in? What do we value? Is the way we spend our forty (or more) hours a week likely to preserve what we value and contribute to the sort of world we want to live in, or destroy our treasured world and our hope for the future?
In the end, the question of “what we really want our world to be” may be more important that the specific instance of what we get paid to do. If we really find that out, we may be able to figure out the rest without much effort.
We are aware of something called a “past.” In the realm of common human experience, at least, we find ourselves remembering something which happened “before” the current moment. Leaving aside the metaphysical questions around this, our human brains require that some kind of pattern or story be imposed on this collection of memories. On the personal scale, we are all familiar with how we create a personal narrative around the events of our lives. Likewise, on the larger scale of human societies, we craft what are known as “histories.”
Part of Industrial Civilization’s story concerns the notion that there can be some “objective” account of the world, and this includes the idea of “history” as a scientific pursuit rather than an art form. Despite the long erosion of the modern progressivist notions concerning objectivity, most of us tend to approach the study of history as though it were the impartial uncovering of fact. I think that when we reflect on how difficult it can be to get two married people to come to agreement on something that happened to both of them years before, we can understand how this notion of an “objective” history is little more than a conceit. The events of the past, like those of today, did not occur at all in the neatly packaged, definite way that we are accustomed to thinking. True, one can find undisputed commonalities. Wars, for instance, would be tough to mistake for something else. (Unless they’re call “police actions…”) We are sometimes fortunate enough to have the diary of someone in power, or other writings. And large scale undertakings leave a definite paper trail. But the assemblage of these items into a coherent story is the job of historians.
Which is where what I call the psychic balkanization of our society comes in. While many are aware that the evaluation of facts is largely guided by social programming, there is still pressure to find a “true” story. This is largely the province of amateur historians who are intent on proving some pet theory, or worse “debunking” someone else’s. These individuals will largely rely on secondary sources, and these sources will be of a particular “school” within various history departments. Thus, you have numerous groups of individuals all reading from their pet clique’s historical material, and creating what amounts to propaganda for the viewpoint that attracted them to that school in the first place. The result of this is the nauseating circle jerk mentality found in internet forums, where those not initiated will be mocked, abused, or condescended to depending on how polite the person they encounter happens to be.
This is important for Pagans, since we are often embroiled in historical controversy, generally centered around the assertions of non-professionals. So we hear that so and so has “debunked” the Burning Times “myth,” for instance. To begin with, the word “debunk” is almost exclusively used by that odious group of reductionist materialists who have the audacity to call themselves “skeptics.” It means nothing more than arranging facts in a way that suits certain a priory assumptions and then be unusually snarky about it. Second, the use of the word “myth” in this way is denigrating to Paganism. It simply means “fiction” or a “lie.” The allied assumption then, is that there is some generally agreed upon, uncontroversial “true story” when such a story will never be found. Because history isn’t an account of facts but an interpretation of them.
I could belabor the particular example, but I won’t. The specifics are far less important than the general tendency. Quite often, when we approach history, we don’t realize that there is a kind ideology behind the way the facts are being presented. It’s premature to jump on a particular book or article and say that this has, once and for all, proven or disproven this or that idea. No discipline actually works this way, and I think it’s important to remember that. It might, at the very least, increase the general level of comity in our community, which I feel is something we need.
I still find this whole “blogging” enterprise a very strange habit. My suspicion is that it helps relieve some repressed graphophilia, akin to what the Marquis De Sade is said to have suffered. The amount of material I have started to write and aborted about halfway through far exceeds the actual published content. There is one simple reason for this: I don’t want to add noise to the collective psyche that doesn’t need to be there. So, when I realize that I’m just creating some kind of sermon or venting, I don’t post it.
Truthfully, I’m at a loss as to why people seem to care what I think. The possession of a vocabulary, the ability to string words together, and an ISP (the only things a given stranger could know about me) do not constitute a reason for paying attention to what I have to say. But since people apparently find some value in my musings, I’m careful about what I send into the world. (Usually. I am far from a saint when it comes to Right Speech.)
The written word as power, and usually this power is abused. We live in a semantic environment made up of “earworms” and bumper sticker philosophies. “Less government.” “Family values.” “Pro-life.” “Pro-choice.” “Visualize whirled peas.” These slogans and incantations trap us in the spell we are most predisposed to fall under. That there may be some alternative view, totally unrelated to the parameters laid down by the Spectacle, rarely enters into most of our minds.
With the wide availability of internet access, almost anyone can create a blog. While this could mean a rich discourse, quite often what gets circulated are viral memes and recycled talking points. This is true across the political spectrum. And one finds that ideologies are “package deals” that require one to buy the whole shebang, and that one must simply settle for the least onerous rather than critically choosing what makes sense and what doesn’t.
What I’d like to do, what I’ve been groping for and sometimes coming close to, is a more reflective mental space. One where nothing is taken for granted, but also where firm lines may be drawn in the sand when the desire for a more open society runs up against the hard limits imposed by circumstance and logic. Ultimately, I think all political ideologies are based in the delusion that we can “plan” our society in a certain way and have the real world behave the way our scientifically arrived at abstractions tell us it will. It hasn’t worked yet. But what we can do is decide what kind of world we want to live in, and act accordingly, on our own.
So, when I make political statements, it should always be understood to include the caveat that I am posting something which is only partially true. In fact, everything I write should be understood to include that caveat, along with everything else you ever read. The sort of psychic Balkanization one finds on the internet, where you’ll find nearly everyone acting as though they know the Deep Truth about Everything and anyone who disagrees is obviously deluded, is I think detrimental to our mental health. It’s noise. And it keeps us from hearing the Voice deep within us that can help cut through the confusion.
Every now and then, it is a good idea to get out of ones accustomed ideological space and try to assess the pros and cons of their system from a different and possibly hostile point of view. In my own case, ideological commitment is difficult in the first place. There are so many ways in which I could simply be wrong that claiming adherence to any one perspective feels premature to me. But there also comes a point where one has to “shit or get off the pot” and go where the evidence of their senses leads them.
In a very real sense, I have been an Anarchist since childhood. Without going into detail, I was made aware at a very young age that figures of authority are simply bullies that have a good story behind them. Recently, however, I have begun to question whether or not I really want to identify with a movement that tends toward praxis I find somewhat irrelevant and in certain cases counterproductive. The concept of “class warfare” in my opinion, needs to be rethought. The “working class” of 2009 is very different from when the labor movement had its heyday in the 1930s. What has happened, I think, is that the unions opted for negotiating the terms under which they will be exploited rather than taking full ownership of the factories. The result was that many large corporations simply moved much of their manufacturing offshore, into countries like China where slavery isn’t considered politically incorrect. The unionized labor in the United States, consequently, tends to be middle class in aspiration and standard of living. Which means it also tends to be uninterested in revolution. (Though this is by no means universally true. The Longshoremen in California have a long history of strikes in protest of wars and other capitalist atrocities.)
But these are largely secondary concerns. I am still an Anarchist because I cannot ignore the raw fact that our society is managed by criminal syndicates whose only legitimacy comes from age and the ability to open schools that propagandize children into accepting their benevolent despotism. The modern Nation State (henceforth “the State”) is no more and no less than the result of theft, genocide, and exploitation. This is true of every State, worldwide. That some are less overt, or grant certain privileges to particular classes, is totally beside the point.
I would even argue that Capitalist Democracy (and by “capitalism” I mean to indicate the actual economic system we endure in the real world today, not some Libertarian’s Platonic wet dream) is worse that open dictatorship. In an overtly totalitarian State, you know that you are oppressed. It is a conscious fact of life. Capitalist Democracy buries the exploitation and violence, justifies it through sophistry, and makes indentured servitude to a bank a badge of honor. Actually addressing the egregious criminality of the sociopolitical environment requires one to act in some cases against rather than with ones neighbors, simply because these neighbors, like oneself, are implicated in the crime and enjoy the few scraps of its fruit granted them by the Capitalist wishing tree.
Reactionaries of many stripes are fond of pointing out the ethical corruption of our age. But they focus on personal ephemera, such as sexuality and styles of dress. While they bemoan something that a rational person would not consider an issue, such as the fact that there are homosexuals who dare to assert their humanity, they are fine with third world sweatshops, lack of access to healthcare by all but the privileged consumer class, and even torture. They fail to see the obvious: that a society based on avarice, selfishness, and violence will tend to produce greedy, selfish, and violent people. And when children see their parents lives disintegrate because they were based on possession of their spouse rather than love, and all the other personal violence of the middle class family, they will tend to become bitter, cynical, and nihilistic because the hypocrisy surrounds them utterly.
I don’t wonder how we would get along without the State. I wonder how we’ve managed to survive as a species with it. The authoritarian paradigm reduces ethics to a matter of not getting punished. The internal voice of “conscience” is generally nothing more than the dim memory of moderate to severe child abuse. Eventually, the moral corruption bred by this fear grows to the point where it is obvious. And the State then becomes what it always was: a dictatorship. Every authoritarian society is a holocaust in the making.
This happens because people “play the game” no matter how odious it becomes to them. They fear losing their jobs, their security. They fear outside enemies and enemies inside. The entire structure is based on fear and motivation from above. It is the ethics of a rabid animal kept on a leash.
Which is why Anarchism appeals to me. It is not just a matter of changing the faces and language used by the ruling class. It is not about creating another set of laws to bind others. It is also a social revolution. An Anarchist society comes about through direct action. Not only the sorts of protest associated with that word, but action taken on ones own, without permission from any authority. It is a society of individuals, cooperating to create and sustain the kind of world they want to live in, not one imposed by history and circumstance.
And we will have to do that very soon. It is no longer a matter of whether there will be a massive upheaval in our society. It is a matter of when things begin to fracture so severely that the equilibrium of iniquities can no be maintained. We can choose at that moment between barbarity and further oppression on the one hand, and self determination and freedom on the other.
In short, I am an Anarchist because I see no other option that matches the evidence of my senses and my experience. We will either learn to work together, without corporations and cops, or we will die. This death may be one of spirit, rather than flesh. If given the choice between dying the latter in a perhaps futile attempt to see the world change for the better, it would be preferable to the former. I hope for the day that we call all stand on the smoldering embers of Church and State and begin to “build a new world from the rotting corpse of the old.”
