SubscribeMarch 16th, 2011
“goats to be gardeners” part 3b, Bron Taylor and Dark Green Religion
“Goats to be gardeners” is a phrase that comes from James Lovelock. The full thing:
Our religions have not yet given us the rules and guidance for our relationship with Gaia. The humanist concept of sustainable development and the Christian concept of stewardship are flawed by unconscious hubris. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve them. We are no more qualified to be the stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners.
Taylor quotes the passage in an early section called “living examples of dark green religion.” I love the phrase “goats to be gardeners”. It so simply portrays a situation where our natural inclination, our very talents and physicality, makes it all but impossible for us to do certain things. Goats have the talent of surviving nearly anywhere and they do that by getting every ounce of flora that is to be had in an area. Of course that means they denude a landscape. Very much like us. I’ve always thought the Jesus metaphor should have portrayed him as the shepherd who walked along behind his goats. It would have been so much more metaphorically accurate.
Anyway, whatever you belief about the existence of Gaia, Lovelock’s analogy is apt. We are very goat-like with respect to our talents for environmental transformation. Now you may say that we are much more aware than goats—the existence of National Parks is evidence that we can control ourselves.
I’d say that is both true and trivial.
The areas where we cannot control ourselves seem to me to be far more ultimately destructive and one of those is our need to reason from what it is like to be human to what it must be like to be non-human. It’s a bit like the is→ought fallacy: I feel I have a “self” therefore there must be a “self” as part of any complex, or living, organism. Bullshit, of course.
What I’m talking about here is the process of embodied cognition and its rational consequences. The fact that reasoning for human beings is something we cannot help but do, just as goats cannot stop before they uproot the plant and destroy its ability to return, makes the process of reasoning something critical to understand if we are to figure out when it misleads us and when it doesn’t.
We are such spectacular successes as technological animals that it seems impossible to argue that our brand of reasoning doesn’t work. We were, after all, evolved inside the environment in which our embodied reasoning takes place, so of course it fits. When we reason about distance and the control of objects based on our bodily experience of extending our arms and legs and picking up things from the ground, such extensions work so well they are essentially invisible. It just seems obvious, all of a piece, natural. We don’t think about it at all. To reach for things, is to grasp them, to understand. It seems so very clear that this is the way to handle the world. It works. We reach out with our minds and grasp a situation. We must, therefore, have it in hand. It’s such a horrible surprise to find that what we thought we had grasped, what we are so very sure we had understood, turns out to vanish while we watch. A phantasm.
And how we experience things is vitally important and horrifically strong. We have built-in images of which we are profoundly sure. It is most disconcerting to have these disconfirmed. Like an apotemnophiliac or a somatoparaphreniac we can sometimes refuse the evidence of our eyes and hands and insist that the evidence of error is not there, or insist that it be removed at once so that our inner sense of what is true remains unchallenged.
Some bits of our embodied reasoning are less sure than our assumptions about understanding and directly grasping the world or the ones that work like body image and body integrity. Like why is “up” associated with “good,” why “black” with “evil”, these kinds of metaphorical reasoning have long bothered. Religious and moral reasoning is of this sort. Still, like the concept of “grasping” as “understanding”, moral thinking is also a metaphorical extension of our bodily experience. We are deeply (largely, but not completely, unconsciously) aware of the dangers of being “down” and “in the dark.” Another example: that there must be a being to which we turn is a natural extension for a species that is fundamentally dependent on other existent, and more powerful, members of the same species to enable individual existence. Nothing in our evolution or our individual development leads us to bodily experience radical individualism. We are all dependent on the existence of others.
We can do nothing about this capacity to think through bodily metaphor except pay attention to our doing of it. We think through our body’s experience of life. Yet by paying attention to a limitation we can become conscious of doing it and try to circumvent the worst of its effects. I doubt we’ll ever be able to forgo the feeling that there must be a “self” like ours out there but we can recognize that it is an illusion of the sort that confuses us—as do all those wonderful optical illusions. Like the Müller-Lyer illusion, we are built to work with a specific kind of environment, to enable us to survive its demands. We are not built to perceive accurately; we are built to perceive effectively.
The concept of “self” is something that corresponds to the “error” in our reading the length of the arrows in the Müller-Lyer illusion through our bodily knowledge of depth perception. The “self” provides a perceptual tool akin to reading a 3D world. A “self” is something that is meant to interpret a social situation that has immense importance to human survival. Just as we see those line segments as being of different lengths because normally in a 3D world they would be, so reading the “self” onto others works for us because in the case of human society the other will have an experience of self like our own.The problem is that we don’t stop at other humans. We read everything that way, especially anything that triggers “other” like a feeling of awe, or the appearance of a big head and big eyes. Of course outside human society such a reading is almost certainly not true.
So? Well let me give you an example of how this kind of misapplied thinking can create more problems than it solves. For a long time women were thought to be misproportioned men, missing a vital bit of anatomy. Need I say more?
I think saving the earth is rather important; our lives probably depend upon it. And while it is true that the feelings of awe, reverence, wonder and the like that Taylor construes as Dark Green Religion can be seen as a new religion, is this the most useful way of doing so? Will it accomplish what Taylor wants—the change of our behaviour to reduce our goat-like destructiveness? Probably not if we keep using the same kind of logical patterns that created much of the problem in the first place. The thing is that those nasties seem to be tied up with the inherent bodily logic of the human religious impulse, tied as it is to seeing echoes of ourselves in the world around us. What I think we need to do is see that this is an illusion, and not despise it, but just recognize that it is not a true representation of the non-human other.
If we can do that, then maybe we can get down to the business of finding a more accurate metaphor for what is in fact the case in all things non-human, i.e. that they are not human. That they are something quite else.
March 13th, 2011
“goats to be gardeners” part 3a, Bron Taylor vs Richard Dawkins
Taylor talks a bit about Dawkins and his atheism in Dark Green Religion. He does that primarily because Dawkins thinks it’s a bad idea to use religious terminology to describe the non-supernatural awe that many people (especially deeply materially trained persons, e.g. natural scientists) feel when faced with the wondrous complexity and/or simplicity of the material universe. A case in point, the phrase from Dawkins’ God Delusion “intellectual high treason”:
Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.
Here’s how Taylor brings this into his discussion in Dark Green Religion:
Dawkins contended that it is “destructively misleading” when scientists label as religious their aesthetic and affective experiences when contemplating nature because “for the vast majority of people, ‘religious’ implies “supernatural.’ ” Dawkins even declared that it is “intellectual high treason” when atheists and others who do not really believe in the “interventionist, miracle wreaking…prayer answering God” confuse people with pantheistic or other religious language.
Do you see the twist? It made me mad, I must admit. But then I thought, what is this evidence of?
I mean, does Taylor think it’s OK to confuse readers with terminology? Of course not. Taylor is a scholar so terminology is important to him. I mean what is scholarship except the careful increase of epistemological clarity? That’s why Taylor spent so much time defining “religion.” He’s trying to be clear about why it is OK to call “religious” those persons who don’t believe in anything apart from the material world. Of course Dawkins’ argument is that this isn’t good enough. His reason? That to mix terms that sound alike / religion and religion or god and god / but mean radically different things is guaranteed to confuse the issue.
Revisit Wittgenstein’s language games and my earlier post on the term “evidence.” Why do that? What is it about religious terminology that Taylor really needs for his project? What about it makes it worth the confusion such religious terminology brings with it?
That’s a question I wish he would answer for me, because I don’t think it is necessary. That’s why I posted the underlying framework that gets beyond religious terminology.
Finally, what Dawkins said in that quote above is that the pantheistic god of the scientists does not equate with the personal god of most Western religious practitioners and that he is not criticizing the pantheistic god of the scientists with the same criteria as he does the idea and consequence of a belief in a personal god. Taylor seems to misread the passage as Dawkins inveighing against pantheism as he does against those religions with a personal god. Based on the quote above, this is simply not true. Bad, Taylor, bad.
March 12th, 2011
what’s in a number
I’ve been reading a book called When Prophecy Fails. It was published in 1956 by the University of Minnesota, the study being completed by three social scientists. I read the foreward, and was immediately amused because they sign off with the date – December 21, 1956 – exactly two years after the date on which the flying saucers were to come and rescue the prophet and her group from the flood.
I suppose so many people choose the 21st as a date because it’s also the usual date of the solstices. That’s almost certainly unconscious, but it is a date that sticks with us and of which we are reminded twice a year, every year. I mean currently there is Camping and May 21, 2010 and then there is next year’s end-of-the-world thing set for December 21. Then there were the Millerites in the mid-19th century. The authors of When Prophecy Fails talk about this group and even quote Miller saying
I believe the time can be known by all who desire to understand and the be ready for His coming. And I am fully convinced that sometime between March 21st, 1843, and March 21st, 1844, according to the Jewish mode of computation of time, Christ will come, and bring all His Saints with Him; and that then He will reward every man as his work shall be.
Their day of “great disappointment” ended up being October 22, 1844. The end of a season, the beginning of another, the position and movement of the sun, these events seem to trigger a kind of metaphorically related logic: If it is so for the earth, it must be so for the non-earthly.
It would be interesting to know how long the 21st has been looming as the date-to-be.
I finished Taylor‘s book several days ago now, but I haven’t been able to let it go. I liked the book, but…
The next “goat” posts are the but.
In my thinking about Dark Green Religion (dgr), there seem to be some aspects of Taylor’s theory which I can’t reconcile with the intent of the book. As I read it, the author is compelled by the idea that dgr could be an even greater social force for adjusting our wants to a more sustainable level than it is now and thereby helping balance our species’ impact on planetary resources and health with the planet’s ability to keep producing said resources, remaining healthy while it does so.
A laudable goal and a question I would like answered as well, hence my fascination with the book. The thing is that there are a few places in the framework Taylor sets up that seem to me to work against answering such a question with any real explanatory power.
First I should say that I think he is quite right that one can read the all the recent emphasis on “our Mother Earth” as religious, and certainly these trends are experienced by many as at least parareligious. I don’t think there’s really any question that anything that evokes such awe, loyalty, reverence and a sense of kinship can be the seed of a human religion. It is quite clear that the Earth can and does evoke such; Taylor demonstrates just how widespread such feelings have become. The question is really will such feelings become normative. That possibility, Taylor seems to think, might give humanity a more sustainable attitude and might help ensure our survival. So a second question: is that link—between a sense of the earth as “Mother” and sustainable behaviours—true?
Understand that I’m still thinking this through, and this writing is part of the process of doing so, but there seems to me to be at least two problematic areas. The first is the conceptual/ethical frame Taylor sets up doesn’t seem to me to go deep enough and the second is his apparent bias toward the answer he clearly wants to be the case, that should such feelings become normative this will cause a correlative shift in behaviours. This second is exemplified in the book by Taylor’s problems with Richard Dawkins and D’s brand of atheism. This post is about the first. The second will be in “goats” part 3.
The ethical/conceptual framework
Taylor lays out the ethical frame for dark green religion (dgr) early in the book. In the same section he also lays out the conceptual or metaphysical frame which allows for his four different (overlapping) kinds of dgr. While I agree that there do seem to be four kinds of approaches to the “religious” phenomena he is discussing, what underlies the reason for those four approaches (or cognitive expressions) seems to me important to acknowledge. In other words, a mere description of the phenomena he has observed is not enough. What is needed is an analysis that goes deeper into the workings of the human mind.
It is only by understanding what it is about us that makes us think the way we do that we can begin to answer the question of change. If a new kind of thinking/understanding can become normative and whether such a change in attitude will make our behaviours more sustainable (goats part 3) is a question only understandable through a historical evaluation of a similarly rooted processes. An exploration of the basic frame that underlies our current dgr expressions can be useful here, and through historical analysis, understanding similar expressions of such cognitive and ethical change.
Taylor’s ethical frame:
This value system is generally (1) based on a felt kinship with the rest of life, often derived from a common ancestor and are therefore related; (2) accompanied by feelings of humility and a corresponding critique of human moral superiority, often inspired or reinforced by a science-based cosmology that reveals how tiny human beings are in the universe; and (3) reinforced by metaphysics of interconnection and the idea of interdependence (mutual influence and reciprocal dependence) found in the sciences, especially in ecology and physics.
I have no problem with this, nor with the conceptual frame that follows below. Part of my problem is the presumed connection between the two. It’s as if he is saying I’ve noticed this new ethic. And I’ve noticed this new metaphysical sense and I’ve noticed this four-fold way of expressing parareligious feeling about the earth and then leaves it up to the reader to connect them—and of course these trends do seem to be connected since they are part of the same section of text, and part of the definition of his book’s intent and scope. What happens is that the reader is lead to make a presumed causal connection: the ethical frame leads to this four-fold distinction. But I rather think it doesn’t necessarily; that it might be more a correlation than a causal chain. And if that’s the case, then the deeper motive Taylor seems to have for the book—to make clear the dynamics of dgr to foster human respect for environment—may need rethinking.
The conceptual frame:
Taylor considers dgr to fall into four types: “Spiritual Animism,” “Naturalistic Animism, “Gaian Spirituality” and “Gaian Naturalism.” These types represent the breadth of the conceptual frame in which the ethical frame (above) can be enacted in daily life. He tabulates it with the categories “Animism,” “Gaian Earth Religion,” “Supernaturalism” and “Naturalism.” (See table below.) He then gives exemplars of each type, showing the resultant category’s inherent mutability. He uses well known cases, for example, Jane Goodall and Gary Snyder; it makes it easier for the reader to connect with the sometimes subtle differences between the four types. The green text blocks in the diagram below represent Taylor’s categories. The rest is a recasting of Taylor’s observations on a set of known cognitive properties extant in the human mind, the purpose being to show the deeper relationship between the changes Taylor has noticed and the long-term tendencies expressed by the cognitive structures of the human mind.
The vertical axis:
What I am calling figure-ground in the diagram below represents a key cognitive choice humans make when seeing things. We are structured so that we can perceive either figure or ground, and can rapidly switch between them, but we cannot perceive both at the same time. This innate capacity allows for but also constrains our perceptions of the world around us. The capacity for figure-ground observations is projected (so to speak) onto our environments and translates into our perception of objects and relationships between objects. In fact, almost certainly, our evolved figure-ground perceptual mode came to be as it is because as a species we need to be able to concentrate on both objects and the relationship between them, but still have the ability to intensely focus on one or the other.
We all live in world that requires us to distinguish between bounded objects and the space between, but we also live in a culture that tends to focus on one more than the other. In cultures that have a noun-centered language (such as English) you also have a culture that is “object” oriented. Not that language precedes or is the cause of the cultural bias. In fact it’s probably the other way around. Focus on objects more than relationships between objects and all the cultural communication and symbolic systems will all participate in this bias. This includes religion. Animism is an example, but so are the three Middle Eastern/Western monotheisms.
It’s important to remember that when a culture or person focuses on objects, it’s not that they are unaware of the relationship between things, but that the conceptual systems and ethics they develop as a society tend to preference objects. So you get noun-centered languages, cultures that prize individual rights over individual responsibilities and the like. But history shows that this emphasis, while normally quite sturdy, can change. Social transformation has happened, and will happen again.
Animism…commonly refers to perceptions that natural entities, forces, and nonhuman life forms have one or more of the following: a soul or vital lifeforce or spirit, personhood (an affective life and personal intentions), and consciousness, often but not always including special spiritual intelligence or powers.
If the cultural focus is on relationship you get verb-centered languages and societies that prize the group, the family, or the nation. Salish is one such language group, a Native American language and culture belonging to what in the U.S. is called the Pacific Northwest. Again, open to change under the right conditions. Here one would see Taylor’s Gaian, organicist forms.
Gaian Earth Religion, in my lexicon, stands firmly in the organicist tradition. It understands the biosphere (universe or cosmos) to be alive or conscious, or at least by metaphor and analogy to resemble organisms with the many interdependent parts. Moreover, this energetic, interdependent, living system is understood to be the fundamental thing to understand and venerate.
One fundamental point is that our current reading of our world as either filled with “natural entities” or as an “organism” is part of the fabric of our mind and has nothing really to do with a new trend in human beings, or even a return to a pattern of earthly reverence. Animism/Gaian perceptions represent an expression of the normal human mind that is as much cultural fad as it is new insight. Could it become culturally revolutionary as perspective did in the Renaissance? Sure. Will it? That probably depends on how useful this new form of figure-ground expression is to us in understanding ourselves.
Another fundamental point, such a cognitive “axis” is really only useful if understood in context with those other cognitive abilities that constrain or develop its potential expressions. An example: the horizontal axis.
The horizontal axis:
What I am calling the “metaphysical stance” in the chart above covers the cognitive spectrum between non-material (e.g. idealism, dualism or pluralism) and material-only ideas about the nature of the “real” world. I want to be clear here about what I mean by materialism, because Taylor seems to hold it in disrepute, which, I think is rather unfair—even silly—given the book is about a religion revering the material earth.
Materialism is just the idea that all that exists is matter. This means that all phenomena are a function of the material universe. Consciousness, mind, awe, love, hate, energy, heat, pain, all of these things are functions of the operation and organization of matter. Sure we don’t yet understand just what matter might “really” be, nevertheless, materialism would seem to me to be a sensible understanding of the world for someone who is (justifiably) in awe of the earth and its processes—and of someone not looking to unconsciously (or not) impose human phenomenology on non-human entities.
The horizontal axis on the chart below represents the human range of assessing “reality” as either in the physical world (Taylor’s naturalism) or in some postulated non-physical realm that, in some way, lies parallel to the physical (Taylor’s supernaturalism). Why do we assess “reality” this way and is it necessary?
Whilst the vertical axis fundamentally grounds itself in a hard-wired cognitive ability developed through eons of evolutionary necessity, the horizontal axis is a bit different. Not that it didn’t evolve, but rather it is different because it appears to be a “secondary” ability.
What I mean by this is that the fundamental ability that underlies the range of ideal to material, is the human ability to project our phenomenological sense of what it is like to be us onto the world outside us. We move about our days, from infancy on, learning to control ourselves, to make distinctions between needs and desires. An instance: we feel a wave of hunger but social or cultural conditions make that physically available food not socially or morally available. We must wait to eat.
Both the hunger and the need to recognize conditions where that hunger should not be immediately obeyed are quintessentially human. What it feels like internally, phenomenologically, is something like my body wants to eat but I know I must wait. The initial and primary phenomenological experience of being human posits two entities, my body and my mind. Of course the fact that this is what it feels like, does not make it so, but it does make it the simplest way to construe our reality. Dualism is just such a construal. Idealism is that same kind of thinking—the postulation of a universal “I” of the sort that we feel internally.
So where does materialism come from? Because we can extend our bodily metaphors, we can reason with them, and since we have many of them, we can try out different phenomenological logics (e.g. I feel like there are two of me, body and mind, so I’m going to think about the world that way and see how that works out) on our environment. We also have singular bodily metaphors, experiences of unification, very, very often stimulated, as Taylor points out, by some aspect of our natural environment. Imagine you are Wordsworth on Mount Snowdon and that sense of unity he expresses in his poetry overwhelms you. From that it is easy to move to a monistic metaphysical stance, whether Idealism or Materialism. Which expression one takes up depends greatly on one’s cultural milieu and probably on one’s practical experience with the things of the earth.
The advent and roaring success of science in the last few hundred years has made us much more alert to the things and processes of the earth. We also know a great deal more about the earth than we did, and can no longer function as a society without the resultant technologies. That combination would motivate continued change in the same direction. This correlative (not causal) linkage between the growth and science and our dependency upon its products is almost certainly what has moved us toward the materialist end of the axis, or to Taylor’s naturalism.
The Four Types of Dark Green Religion and what underlies them
Taylor categorizes his concepts with this chart.
Animism Gaian Earth Religion Supernaturalism Spiritual Animism Gaian Spirituality Naturalism Naturalistic Animism Gaian Naturalism
So Spiritual Animism is that conceptual framework that tends to notice “objects” and to explain them using a bifurcated universe, one where there is a material universe as well as a non-material one. Gaian Naturalism is a conceptual framework that notices the relationships between things, the “family” rather than the “individual”, whilst maintaining that all effects can be attributed to the material world.
What I would suggest is that his system is more understandable, and has better explanatory power if seen against the constituent cognitive abilities which ultimately enable the four kinds of dgr that Taylor has identified.
Here “Spiritual Animism” locates its “heart” in the center of the upper-left quadrant. “Gaian Naturalism” is located in the lower-right sector. For one thing, this kind of diagrammatic understanding helps explain the mutability of individual expressions of the types of dgr. Since a person is cognitively constituted to flip when necessary between figure and ground, the diagram would suggest that under the right circumstances (such as a change in cultural conditions), an individual can shift focus, thereby moving along the vertical axis and (presumably) exhibiting a different perception of what is perceptually important.
It seems to me that even Taylor’s own evidence, and his repeated examination of the mutability of individual’s expression of dgr sentiments, support this reading of the deeper cognitive structures that underlie the four types of dgr he has examined.
There’s more here to be examined. For example, is it cognitively possible for a human being to be in the center of this chart, and if not does that imply a kind of blind spot in our perceptual system? Another interesting way of examining this would be to place long-gone cultures on the axis and read them forward through massive social change. For example, Classical Greece and its Platonic and Aristotelian battle over the Ideal-Material axis and how that worked out given they were a culture that resided far into the ground/relationship/Gaian portion of the chart. Their overwhelming focus on philosophical issues and their nearly absent sense of material, physical, evidence-based experimentation drove their culture to great heights, just as our overwhelming focus on experimentation has driven ours. So does what happened to them presage what will happen to us? Does the millenia-long influence Greek ideas have had on us (I mean we are still arguing with Plato and Aristotle about what is “really” real!) mean that our materialism will be just as influential?
Anyway, questions for another time, but ones I think explorable by moving Taylor’s analysis of what we are doing now in our dgr expressions onto a deeper cognitive framework for analysis.
Coming in goats part 3, Richard Dawkins’ “militant” atheism and the question of a link between attitude and sustainable behaviours.
February 5th, 2011
taboo to think about
There is a brief article at Eideard asking the question, why isn’t the paranormal a valid topic of research within the widely embracing arms of the American Academy of Religion?
It’s a good question, because it suggests answers that get to the root of intellectual bias. I suspect part of the answer lies in the fact that contemporary paranormal claims are often so outrageous, so non-sensical that it makes a mockery of religion in toto. And academics often have very little sense of humor about their topical areas.
Is that what taboo is then? A way of protecting an untenable, but dearly held, belief from examination? An interesting thought when one considers taboo subjects like incest. When I was an undergraduate anthropologist I remember thinking about the universal incest taboo and realizing that meant that it was also universal behaviour. The question is do we make it taboo to stop it or to hide it?
Thanks to Letter from Hardscrabble Creek for including the link to Eideard.
January 27th, 2011
“goats to be gardeners” part 1
I’ve started reading Dark Green Religion by Bron Taylor and have a few things to say about the first couple of chapters, but because all together they will take more than a few words I am going to split this post into parts. Here be part 1.
So far I like the book, appreciate its scholarship and its purpose—the subtitle of the book, Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future should make that last one clear. The book seems to intend to work toward a rubric by which methods of bringing more people into contact with the ethical frame of mind that will allow us to avert ecological disaster and our own subsequent demise can become clear and practicable. In other words, figuring out how to foster an appreciation of that which allows our existence by figuring out what is actually taking place in what Taylor calls dark green religion. This I applaud but I do think basic conceptual frameworks need to be very clear if such an intent is to be workable.
One of the things he does to facilitate this is define terms right at the beginning. He makes it clear that he is defining terms for the purpose of setting up this study, so problematic terms like “religion” and “spirituality” can take on meaning, can also be mutable, and still be useful terms. What I find odd is that he left out the term “sacred.” This is especially so since much depends upon it. Dark green religion (dgr) as opposed to green religion is defined by the fact that nature is held as sacred. He does have a parenthetical remark: “in which nature is sacred, has intrinsic value, and is therefore due reverent care.” I think this is meant as the definition of “sacred.” Really what this definition amounts to is the normal use of the term stripped of it’s “god’ component.
My question, and it is in fact a question, can such a definition be enough?
One of the reasons it is called into question for me is the same reason Taylor defines all the other terms. Our society is built on a conceptual system that fosters a disconnect from material nature in order to “point” us toward some other reality usually constructed as to be external to nature. This other is normally the divine.
So I suspect a rethinking of what “sacred” actually means about human experience, human mind, human body would be an important part of the bones of what this book is trying to accomplish. Where such a thing might come from is most likely embodied cognition since it is grounded in nature and an understanding of the world that has “green” at its bottom.
That’s it for part 1. Part 2 is going to be a look at the (absent) link between Taylor’s account of dgr’s ethical and metaphysical stances.
January 19th, 2011
humor or logic?
I was in a sour mood last evening so I pulled out one of my new books because I thought it might make me laugh. The book I chose is called Real Magic by Isaac Bonewits.
So this is not as callous as it might seem. Sure there is the standard logical horror show but Bonewits is funny because he is clearly intelligent, educated and loves to play with words. I’m sure the guy was part coyote because he managed to get a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in magic and thaumaturgy. I am not kidding; he got his real-life B.A. in the practice of wonder working and magic in 1970 from UC Berkeley. Jeez, I bet they regret that one.
Real Magic is a version of his thesis, I believe. Here’s what he says of the work:
The thing that makes me unique then and entitles me to be called an “expert” is that I am the first to put occultism under the interdisciplinary microscope, dissecting and examining it in a scientific but flexible way, and reporting my results in plain language. (emphasis his)
So this is a scientific examination of the practice of wonder working. Now that I think he was serious about, but listen to this:
If in avoiding seventeen-syllable words I should accidentally simplify matters to the point of outright error, I rest assured that someone will gently bring it to my attention. I also reserve the right to make horrible puns, mangle my metaphors, exaggerate or understate things for irony, and even to ignore the great god Proper Grammar, if in doing so I manage to get my pint across.
The book is full of bits like that, so you can hear the hippie, and personally, I like that. My age, I suppose. And to some extent it makes up for the logical horrors. (More on those another time.)
Sometimes it is good to let one’s need for logic slip just a bit, but never to the point where one can no longer discern one’s actual life with the imagined one. Still, I suppose there lies the possibility of just getting enough people to back up the imagined one that the other one just doesn’t seem quite as necessary. That is a common human activity I believe.
January 13th, 2011
more books for one of the stacks
I was outside with the dog when the postman drove up in his natty truck bearing gifts. I get so excited when books arrive!
(in order of their probable opening)
January 5th, 2011
belief and scholarship
I have finished reading Her Hidden Children: The rise of Wicca and Paganism in America by Chas S. Clifton and I have to say I am glad I read the book. It’s a solid piece of scholarship.
That may not seem much in the way of praise, but it is really. Not that there aren’t things about the book that I find “interesting,” there are and I will tell you about them shortly but let me digress just a bit before I do.
There is another author the I have have spoken of here, Arthur Versluis. While I find his subject area fascinating, what I could never get past is the fact that his books read like apologetics while taking the shape of a scholarly examination. These are not the same thing at all. I don’t care at all what the beliefs of the scholar are about his subject area. I do care if he or she is able to think past them for the purposes of a clear examination of what is in fact the case. Versluis doesn’t seem to be able to do that very well and Clifton can.
Still (and here is where I find “interesting things” in the text), Clifton’s personality and personal beliefs do pop up occasionally throughout the book and, I should say, I was delighted by the appearance of those because otherwise the book, while good research, is written with a rather dry style. But I think there is a reason for that. Whether conscious or unconscious, I suspect Clifton is compensating for the somewhat precarious position pagan studies has in the academic world, and the even more delicate position out-pagans have in most academic departments. It’s like the first woman doctor – I bet she had to really work hard to prove she was as good as her male colleagues. It’s not rational, but change stirs up some deep wells of irrationality and taking pagans and paganism seriously is asking for a pretty big change for most academics. It’s this, I think, that explains Clifton’s writing style.
So here’s one of the twinkly bits. In chapter five (West Coast Wicca) there is this:
Two other legacies of the feminist Witchcraft of the 1970s are the concept of consensus-based decision making and, as noted above, a free-form approach to history and mythology that valued “empowerment” over documentation. The consensus decision-making process, already familiar to Quakers and to political anarchists, and modeled in some instances on tribal practices, offered a challenge to hierarchical coven structure and lineages. (On the other hand, people who have studied with famous feminist Witches such as Starhawk and Budapest usually manage to work that fact into their conversation.) Occasional critics of the consensus process will note that strong individuals seem to get their way even through consensus-based decision making, but the model of more egalitarian, fluid leadership is now firmly in place in many Wiccan circles. (emphasis mine)
A moment please: snort, giggle…OK
There’s Clifton the community member and participant. It speaks to his experience as a believer and adds an evaluative touch to the work really only possible for those who are both insiders and academics. And while such a tone transgresses the cautious scholarly (dry) tone he has so carefully established, it does no harm at all the the value of the study. This, I think, is because while his personality shows through (his insider status appears at these moments) what never happens — his belief never overshadows his scholarship. This is what Versluis does (over and over), why I think of his work as apologetics, and what irks me when reading his books, since I see the facts of the subject area as important.
Another brief digression: one of my favourite books is Awash in a Sea of Faith by Jon Butler. The chapter in there on the occult in American religion is both important and very well done. Partly this is the scholarship (very good), but partly this is the fact that Butler is there as a person while never straying from his choice to place facts in precedence to whatever his personal beliefs may be. His writing style allows for the natural assimilation of personality and a dedication to a factually-based reality.
This balance of a personality-based style and scholarship is what Clifton misses, but I suspect this has nothing to do with his capacities as a writer and everything to do with the position pagan studies holds in the larger academic world—and Clifton’s ideas about how to compensate for that tenuousness. And you know this isn’t a problem, because as I said, I am glad I read the book. I have a couple of new things to think about and a couple of resources that were brought to my attention that I now want to check out. But it is interesting, this example of how belief and scholarship resonate in the larger culture and how one can work past the obstacle that an unfortunate conjunction of those forces can become.
It reminds me of some advice a professor gave me once. He said a PhD isn’t the place for outrageous things. It’s the time to prove yourself. Once you’ve done that then be as out-there as you want. Good, solid advice given the nature of the academic world. And I suppose pagan studies (especially by pagans) is there still, still proving itself.