“The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche’s fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other’s bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer-an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:

“Up in our country we are human!” said the hunter. “And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.”

The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began “comparing power with power, measuring, calculating” and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.

It’s not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn’t aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization. If Nietzsche’s analysis of debt is helpful to us, then, it is because it reveals that when we start from the assumption that human thought is essentially a matter of commercial calculation, that buying and selling are the basis of human society-then, yes, once we begin to think about our relationship with the cosmos, we will necessarily conceive of it in terms of debt.”

The above passage comes from David Graeber’s amazing book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years which is just so damn good! I’m reading it to prepare for his new book, being published posthumously, that I recently learned about from an article in The Atlantic. I’m totally pumped for this new book because–no surprise–it seems positively extraordinary! Reading ‘Debt’ it occurs to me just how much I still resonate with, and am emotionally stirred by, egalitarian anarcho-socialist schools of thought.

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Painting above: Water Color on Paper, Two Very Rare Watercolor Depictions Of The Greenland Inuit Hunters Poq And Qiperoq During A Missionary Tour Of Copenhagen Circa 1724. Danish School.

“Communotheism is a divine communalism. “Divine communalism is the position that the Divine is a community of gods who are fundamentally related to one another and ontologically equal while at the same time distinct from one another by their personhood and functions”. In communotheism, there is immanence in that there is radical relationality among the members of the divine community and between the divine community and the world, and there is transcendence because geographic distance and “physiological decarnation” (death) cannot destroy the radical relationality. While there is distinction (eroding any real classification of pantheism), there is no idea of a separation between the human and the divine.”

The above passage comes form an essay by process-womanist theologian, Monica Coleman. The essay is titled From Models of God to a Model of Gods: How Whiteheadian Metaphysics Facilitates Western Language Discussion of Divine Multiplicity. Coleman is citing A. Okechukwu Ogbonnaya’s concept of “communotheism” and I quite like the idea.

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Painting above: Prince Twins Seven-Seven, Yoruba, Nigeria, West Africa, 1944–2011

“It’s what I like to call ‘retrospective induction.’ Working backward from your experience all the way down in nature. So [the question is] can you find dimensions of your experience spread out through the natural world all the way down to the lowest level of things, whatever they are? […] And the answer is, yes, in some sense we have to do that. That doesn’t mean a bacterium is some sort of human. It means that the principles of human experience are dimly exemplified throughout a continuum of nature. And that’s a beautiful thing because it means that we belong here. In some sense, we exemplify nature and nature exemplifies dimensions of our own experience.” –Andrew Davis

Great interview with Andrew Davis over at Homebrewed Christianity. Tripp and Andrew discuss lots of fun Whitehead stuff, which also happens to be the subject of his book, Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy.

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Illustration above by Katie Scott

“The basic outline of Hartshorne’s aesthetic theory is the first task…The basic insight is that beauty is a mean among four intersecting poles of relation. On the x axis is the relation of depth, sublimity at one extreme and superficiality at the other, while on the y axis the relations of total unity and utter diversity are the extremes. Beauty is where these crossing concerns come into balance, where “harmony or unity-in-variety” is balanced by “intensity.” On the x axis, if an experience is too profound or deep for the experiencer, it will tend toward the sublime and away from the beautiful; if an experience is not deep enough, it tends toward the trivial and also away from beauty. Balanced intensity is a mean of depth and superficiality. Similarly, on the y axis, if an experience is characterized by too much order, it becomes merely tidy or neat, or even monotonous, at the extreme, while too much diversity in a single experience renders it chaotic. Beauty exists when an experience is adapted to the capacities and history of the experiencing being in such a way that the experience has both intensity and unity-in-variety in just the right proportion. This insight is key to Hartshorne’s aesthetics.”

The above passage comes from Randall Auxier’s review of Daniel Dombrowski’s book Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Harshorne. I’m not very familiar with Hartshorne’s aesthetics but much of it seems familiar since I wager he got a lot of it from Whitehead. Hat tip to Leon Niemoczynski for turning me on to the review.

“As the philosopher Rae Langton argues, we can also ‘undo’ hateful speech from the inside, by dismantling the conditions needed for the speech act to have its force in the first place. As we saw, some speech acts require the speaker to have authority. And some presuppose content that gets smuggled into the ‘conversational score’. For instance, saying: ‘Even George could win’ presupposes that George is not a promising candidate, signalled by the ‘even’. According to Langton, this serves as a ‘back-door’ speech act that, if left unchallenged, gets accommodated and added to the ‘common ground’, changing what’s permissible to think and infer about the discussed subject. It becomes accepted that George is *ranked* as inferior.

We undo such speech by being active hearers. Langton observes how we can ‘block’ presuppositions and their back-door speech acts: ‘Whaddya mean – even George could win?’ Calling out presuppositions spotlights the content that might otherwise have gone under the radar. Once exposed, this content can then be challenged or rejected, preventing it from entering the common ground.”

I’ve encountered two really good pieces of media recently that both, for the most part, deal with the related topics of censorship and “cancel culture.” These are topics that interest me and ones in which I’ve blogged a bit about before (here, here, here).

The quote above comes from an Aeon article written by philosopher of art, Daisy Dixon, and it offers some ways to deal with offensive art; ways that I am definitely liking, for sure! Dixon begins by framing art as a form of visual speech and then discusses a couple of tactics that essentially block and undo hateful speech. She writes:

“Instead of censorship, some have opted for an alternative response to hate speech. We can challenge, refute or even undo the harms of hate speech with more speech. Speaking back presents counternarratives and counterevidence to the falsehoods expressed. This might involve publicly denouncing instances of hate speech and affirming the dignity of the groups targeted, or refuting transphobic speech in social media forums, or challenging racist speech on public transport or at home.”

I really like the idea mentioned in Dixon’s article of “undoing” bad art with better art and, additionally, I’m also keen on the idea of transparent curation, or curation that that gives an accurate and true narrative surrounding the art. This doesn’t sound far off from trigger warnings to me which are also sometimes necessary because I still think Roland Barthes has a point when he inidicates that the artist’s intention (whether it be positive or negative) has little to nothing to do with how a work is received by a viewer. We all have our own histories, our own experiences, our own traumas, and ways of perceiving that we bring to a work of art. So even though the artist’s intent it’s really just another piece of interesting information that gets mixed in with everything else for the viewer, I would imagine that it’s still best for one to seek the most comprehensive understanding.

The second related piece of media I enjoyed recently was an episode of You’re Wrong About (YWA), which is a podcast that features two really smart journalists, Sarah Marshal and Mike Hobbes, discussing people or events that have been miscast in the public imagination. This particular YWA episode focussed on cancel culture and the hosts did a fantastic amount of research for the episode. They trace the origins of the phrase and make some pretty great observations, for instance Hobbes indicates at one point that:

“The entire concept of cancellation is, in part, counterfeit. Because to cancel someone you have to take away something that they had. Whereas a much larger problem in society is people never being given something in the first place. Like it’s basically impossible to cancel a transgender executive of a Fortune 500 company because there are no transgender executives of Fortune 500 companies…part of me feels like, structurally, the entire construction of the cancel culture moral panic is [coming from] people in power who are afraid of losing that power.”

Mike and Sarah also make the astute observation that a significant contributing factor in the manifestation of “cancel culture” is the incredible shift in collective consciousness occurring due to our adoption of the communication medium generated by html and flickering pixels which we collectively call the internet. Interestingly, this paradigm shift is akin in many ways to the one that seemed to occur in tandem with the advent of movable type and the printing press. The printing press allowed people access to information on a far greater scale and so does the internet. Not just that but cancel culture, the YWA episode points out, is closely tied to Twitter which has allowed marginal voices that were previously complaining about injustice in virtual isolation to organize and band together to begin movements with more force, speed, and efficiency. In other words cancel culture isn’t new, it’s been around for at least as long as the Gutenberg Bible and Martin Luther’s sola fide cancellation of the Catholic Church.

“The problem of precarious survival helps us see what is wrong. Precarity is a state of acknowledgment of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another, with or without intent. When I sprain my ankle, a stout stick may help me walk, and I enlist its assistance. I am now an encounter in motion, a woman-and-stick. It is hard for me to think of any challenge I might face without soliciting the assistance of others, human and not human. It is unselfconscious privilege that allows us to fantasize—counter-factually—that we each survive alone.

If survival always involves others, it is also necessarily subject to the indeterminacy of self-and-other transformations. We change through our collaborations both within and across species. The important stuff for life on earth happens in those transformations, not in the decision trees of self-contained individuals. Rather than seeing only the expansion-and-conquest strategies of relentless individuals, we must look for histories that develop through contamination.”

A wonderful expert above from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. I’m really loving the ANT framework she’s employing here, which is deeply harmonious with Whiteheadian process-relational cosmology. Also, reading this passage reminded me of a fantastic essay, by Matthew Sitman, about how how precarious our lives can be, and how much we need each other.

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Collage above: Magic Carpet Ride by Amy Wilson Faville, from her mixed-media series based on actual shopping carts of the homeless in San Francisco’s Mission District.

“Fungi are famous for changing shape in relation to their encounters and environments. Many are “potentially immortal,” meaning they die from disease, injury, or lack of resources, but not from old age. Even this little fact can alert us to how much our thoughts about knowledge and existence just assume determinate life form and old age. We rarely imagine life without such limits—and when we do we stray into magic. [Mycologist] Alan Rayner challenges us to think with mushrooms, otherwise. Some aspects of our lives are more comparable to fungal indeterminacy, he points out. Our daily habits are repetitive, but they are also open-ended, responding to opportunity and encounter. What if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of our motions over time? Such indeterminacy expand our concept of human life, showing us how we are transformed by encounter.”

The above passage comes from anthropologist, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s, fungallly fantastic book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Tsing suggest that mushrooms, particularly Matsutake mushrooms, can teach us how to better cohabitate with non-human species in a time of massive human destruction. It’s a great book!

Interestingly for me the above passage, specifically the part about how “our indeterminate life form being not our bodies but the shape of our motions over time,” reminded me of how some Whitehead scholars have described the pattern of the process of prehension and concrescence in Whitehead’s work. Some describe it as a snake-like trail of dead datum. Others, like Richard Lubbock, who references something else that many people think could be “potentially immortal,” describes it this way:

“Whitehead groups his occasions into ‘societies’. The most typical ‘society’ of his occasions is the human soul, as it grows in time. One pulse of enjoyment follows another, and, as their number grows, all the pulses form the serial society we call the soul. It is like a growing pile of coins. Each pulse takes in all the frozen data from its predecessors and adds novel feelings of its own. The occasion does not passively copy the past: in the act of self-creation it refreshes the design of the past, thereby inventing its novel present, and preparing for its possible futures. Whitehead calls these takeovers ‘prehensions’. The verb ‘to prehend’ means to engulf, perceive and transform […] So the soul of a human, or of an electron, or of a bacillus, is a sequence of prehensions, or takeovers, each of which prehends all its predecessors. As it grows in time the sequence defines the society called the soul. Your soul–your ‘Self’–is a pathway of dead occasions, with one living occasion at the very tip, the growth point. Whitehead calls this kind of sequence a ‘personal society’.”

This, to me, sounds somewhat similar to the “fungal indeterminacy” described by Tsing above. And that pathway of occasions with one growth occasion at the tip sounds a lot like a mycelial network with a fruiting mushroom at the end… Well it’s one way to potentially visualize it anyway I suppose.

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Image above: Mycelium Rhizome by Richard Giblett

“Brightness and illumination are forces which can be equally as hostile to humankind as blinding darkness, under the correct circumstances. The fear and power of God’s Kingdom is revealed in hideous, brutal light, a ray of harshness which reveals ugliness, impurity, and dirt without concern for the results of such unkind exposure. Light, in Western literature, music and religion, has long been associated with God, Truth, and the divine. Harsh light unerring is the Logos eternal, revealing the imperfections of all Earthly things.

The Western obsession with light is criticized upfront by Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki, who wrote a brief book on aesthetics titled In Praise of Shadows. In the book, an aging curmudgeon and defender of the traditional Japanese style chronicles the rise of electricity and the Western style in Japan, replacing his treasured darkness with bright, non-negotiable light. “I suppose I shall sound terribly defensive if I say that Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it, while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealize it. Yet for better or for worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.” Tanizaki uses the example of Western hospitals, kitchens and dentist’s offices as places where light exposes what might be better off hidden, rendering garish what should be “somber, refined, dignified”.”

Nice essay here by Alexander Bloom on the (ever changing) conceptions of lightness and darkness in Eastern and Western cultures.

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Painting above by Jan Anstoot

“To threaten the primacy of meat in the American diet is to threaten a pillar of what it means to be a free American.”

The above quote comes from a great article in The Nation by Eamon Whalen titled How Red Meat Became the Red Pill for the Alt-Right. The article gives a fantastic history of the politics at play behind what we eat, and specifically exposes how eating meat in the West became synonymous with manliness. If there is one thing the article gets exactly right it’s that dietary proclivities are nothing if not political and/or religious in nature; We eat what we eat because of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Taking into account non-human and environmental rights, plus the fact that “Industrial beef is the most polluting, the most carbon-emitting, and the most resource-intensive form of protein,” this is why I consider myself what philosopher, Dominique Lestal, terms a political vegetarian. I make no bones about it. The rugged American, masculine, meat-eating mythos is horribly pernicious and toxic and I would not be sad at all if it was completely squashed and forgotten.

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Painting above: Claude Monet, Still Life The Joint Of Meat

“Like all misers he had a constant need to pit his wits against those of other men, to mulct them of their crowns by fair legal means. To get the better of others, was that not exercising power, giving oneself with each new victim the right to despise those weaklings of the earth who were unable to save themselves from being devoured? Oh! Has anyone properly understood the meaning of the lamb lying peacefully at God’s feet – that most touching symbol of all the victims of this world – and of their future, the symbol of which is suffering and weakness glorified? The miser lets the lamb grow fat, then he pens, kills, cooks, eats and despises it. Misers thrive on money and contempt.”” – Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet

The above passage comes from Honoré de Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet. I came upon the quote through Matthew Sitman’s and Sam Adler-Bell’s great podcast Know Your Enemy. It’s definitely worth checking out both the novel and the show. And by they way, it’s also worth doing all you can to not become a miser!

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Painting above: Hieronymus-Bosch, Death and The Miser

“An old monk on Mount Athos in Greece once told me that people rejoice in the thought of hell to the precise degree that they harbor hell within themselves. By which he meant, I believe, that heaven and hell alike are both within us all, in varying degrees, and that, for some, the idea of hell is the treasury of their most secret, most cherished hopes — the hope of being proved right when so many were wrong, of being admired when so many are despised, of being envied when so many have been scorned.

And as Jesus said (Matthew 6:21), “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

The above passage comes from an article written by philosophical theologian, David Bently Hart (DBH), and was recently published in the New York Times. The title of the article succinctly sums up its contents: “Why Do People Believe in Hell?”

DBH and the old monk he spoke with are not wrong here. I’ll just also add that, for many folks I’ve encountered (Calvinists in particular), the concepts of heaven and hell as expressed in conservative versions of white Evangelicalism are perfect examples of the Nietzschean will to power. Explicit first person cruelty, for Nietzsche, is often a sign that someone lacks power. It’s much more preferable to have someone indebted to us; having power over someone in this way extends our power (picture a military dictator or mob boss who has loyal, indebted followers).

So yeah, what better way to satisfy the desire for domination or mastery over others, oneself, or the environment then to project this will onto God? It seems natural that humans who feel powerless, small, scared, and weak (consciously or unconsciously; and in the case of the people I’m thinking of ((i.e. white Euro-American men who can’t identify or talk about their feelings)) it’s mostly unconscious) would create an all-powerful, authoritarian God who can dominate and punish others so they themselves don’t have to. Adherents to this conception of God can have their cake and eat it too: they get the crude satisfaction of hurting people directly by causing them psychological and emotional strife while also feeling a smug sense of fulfillment knowing that these unbelievers would of course be indebted to them for the kind act of helping to bring them closer to understanding the one and only “Truth.”

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Art above: Coppo di Marcovaldo, Hell (ca 1225 – 1274, Mosaic, Baptistry, Florence)

“Our species’ ability to understand and respond to the planetary ecological crisis may be aided by a truly ecological media ecology, that is, by the idea that there is not just an analogical resonance between natural ecologies and media ecologies but a cosmological community. Whitehead’s panexperientialist cosmology allows us to generalize media ecology’s focus on the medium instead of the message, such that the world itself is brought into view as a medium of communication. Perhaps such an imaginative generalization of media ecology into an ecological metaphysics or metaphysics of the medium can sensitize us to the primal logos of the cosmos. […] Recognizing that humans represent only one of the cosmos’ many forms of communicative being, and that the storage, transmission, and transformation of meaning occur at every scale—from the quantum to the geological to the galactic—new theoretical perspectives on and practical interventions into the study of media as environment and environment as media open up. Becoming conscious of a communicative cosmos has profound technological, ecological, and theological implications.”

The above passage is from the introduction of an essay written by process philosopher, Matthew T. Segall, titled “Whitehead and Media Ecology: Toward a Communicative Cosmos” which was written for the journal Process Studies. It’s definitely worth a look!

I’ve been interested in media ecology for a while but have only ever really studied Marshall McLuhan and some various contemporary folks, like his famous successor, Niel Postman, and I think Matthew is right that media ecology has typically had an anthropocentric orientation. So yeah I’m happy to be reading a bit more about contemporary media ecology and very happy to see Whitehead’s philosophy of organism being utilized.

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Painting above by Boston-based artist Bethany Noël

“What often slips away in our quests to out-think the problems in our environments is that thinking itself is an ecological habit, a shared vocation between humans and non-humans. We have inherited the sticky myth that thinking happens in our heads, that creativity is a mental thing, and that if we pushed ourselves a bit further than usual we will suddenly discover new ideas. This unfortunately leaves out the surprising materiality of ideas, and leaves us with a view of cognition that doesn’t take into consideration the shocking porosity of humans. In other words, we think-with the contexts we are in. We think-in assemblages that always includes others, human and non-human.

Thinking is such an entangled affair that it really shouldn’t appear as a single word, but as a hyphenated portmanteau of words to illustrate the fragility of what goes on. As such, the solutions we are creating to counter the creeping effects of climate chaos are products of not just “human minds” but sticky and largely unexamined concepts, myths, and nonconscious material networks that includes an assortment of apparently non-related ‘things’ like bacteria, memes, phone towers, and electrical currents. If thinking isn’t as independent as we suppose, if we are always caught in webs that stretch beyond intelligibility, if the prized ‘thinking subject’ of modern lore is dead, and if the “thought-about” are not passive objects of our thinking, then we face a significantly different challenge than the one that is curtly subsumed in the exhausted invitation to think outside the box. It’s obvious now: we can’t think outside the ‘box’. The dream to think outside the box is exactly how boxes think.”

The above passage comes from a facebook post by Nigerian-born clinical psychologist, lecturer, eco-philosopher, and mystic, Bayo Akomolafe. In my book group we’re currently reading his book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, in which he lays out his fantastically unique blend of indigenous cosmology, eco-philosophy, and spirituality while also memoiring, framing it all as endearing and flowery prose filled letters to his daughter, Alethea. In the book Akomolafe describes an encounter with ecofeminist philosopher of science, Karen Barad, who is also famously associated with the new-materialism movement (and she’s a fan Whitehead!); this new-materialism influence definitely comes through in Akomolafe’s work and I just devour it like candy!

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Photograph above by Synchrodogs

“Whitehead’s theme, begun in the first chapter and maintained throughout the book and, in our judgment, for the rest of his philosophy, is that mathematics begins in experience and as abstracted becomes separated from experience to become utterly general. “We see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel hot and cold, and push, and rub, and ache, and tingle” (IM 4). These feelings belong to us individually. “My toothache cannot be your toothache” (IM 4). Yet we can objectify the tooth from the toothache and so can a dentist who “extracts not the toothache but the tooth,” (IM 4) which is the same tooth for both dentist and patient. Whitehead would give later in Process and Reality a metaphysical explanation of how we may objectify precisely an individual thing from vague feelings by his description of indicative feelings (PR 260).

Abstraction is objectification; that is, the activity of abstraction from our experiences produces ideal objects. In the process we “put aside our immediate sensations” and recognize that “what is left is composed of our general ideas of the abstract formal properties of things; . . . the abstract mathematical ideas” (IM 5). Mathematics applies to the physical world because of its abstraction. By abstraction we get to mere things. The configuration of abstract things in abstract space at different (abstract) times is the mathematical science of mechanics, “the great basal idea of modern science” (IM 31). “The laws of motion . . . are the ultimate laws of physical science” (IM 32). Mechanics is the foundation of science. How strange to hear these words from the philosophical anti-mechanist of Process and Reality.”

The above passage comes from an essay titled “Whitehead’s Early Philosophy of Mathematics” by Granville C. Henry and Robert J. Valenza. Knowing what I know about Whithead’s philosophical influences—his affinity for Plato and for empiricism—I always sort of assumed this carried over to his philosophy of mathematics, and it was nice to have this confirmed; Henry and Valenza, while discussing Whitehead’s book An Introduction to Mathematics, describe Whitehead as “an empiricist with a romantic streak of Platonism.” Sounds about right. And now there is certainly no way I can resist describing myself that way too 😁

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Painting above by Gudrun Åsling

“Not all propositions, religions, or sciences are equally true. But any of them that may be communicating something, not nothing, we need to hear. Any, therefore, may enrich the fabulous multiplicity of the creation itself. If our truths, even truths about “the creation,” matter now—then they may materialize carefully, not from nothing but from the depths of our shared becoming. A profundity of nonsense? Or perhaps a sense of the profound that precedes and exceeds what human knowledge can master. We have here no neon certainty but—no matter what chaos we face—a darkly luminous faith” – Catherine Keller, Theologies of Creation

A facebook friend recently posed a fun question in the Process Studies facebook group: Can process metaphysics explain why there is something rather than nothing? Such a classic philosophical/theological quandary! It’s almost impossible to catch the metaphysical assumptions…

My initial response was this:

“…doesn’t the question of “why is there something rather than nothing?” assume an adherence to a creatio ex nihilo type of doctrine? In a process framework this doctrine makes no sense because there’s always been something, or that is, there has never been nothing… Keller’s tehomic creatio ex profundis makes more sense for process thinkers like myself probably”

My interlocutor responded:

“No, this question does not necessarily assume an adherence to creatio ex nihilo. But it does assume an adherence to the principle of sufficient reason.”

I went on to elaborate a bit more:

“This response won’t explain your question to your satisfaction of course because the question doesn’t make sense in a process framework. For me I guess it’s kinda like asking a windows user a question about a Mac only game; the Mac only game question is probably a good question about a good game but it makes zero sense to people using other systems, ya know?”

After this comment I was accused of circular reasoning and the same substance metaphysics question was posed again:

“That’s begging the question. Why should it be the case that only an eternal process should exist rather than nothing at all?”

My final two responses follow:

“Yeah again, that’s just one of the premises assumed by a process framework, as far as I understand things… And since eternal process is axiomatic in the system we’re talking about (process metaphysics) it’s not fallacious to respond to the question of “why is there something rather than nothing ” (which again is usually a question that arises out of a substance based creatio ex nihilo mindset) by saying “I don’t adhere to creatio ex nihilo” haha! It’s not circular reasoning just like the statement “people like to eat because we are biologically influenced to eat” is not begging the question since the premise is generally reasonable to assume; i.e. being biologically influenced to eat is indeed one legitimate explanation/response (it’s a scientific materialistic response) to the question “why do humans like to eat?”. Eternal process is a reasonable assumption to make about the nature of things. Likewise, assuming that there was once nothing and then there was something is also reasonable to assume I suppose but, if one is a prone to thinking deeply about things, making this assumption gets you stuck with difficult questions like “why is there something rather than nothing,” lol!”

“With regard to your comment about sufficient reason, a tehomic creatio ex profundis type of panentheism like I’ve been describing here would be consistent with both a self-subsisting cosmos and a self-subsisting deity, both possibly explicable without reference to transcending causes, intelligible simply by understanding their respective components. All good metaphysical systems are going to have some type of non-logical axiomatic statement, dictum or postulate, so all I’ve really been saying here is that because of the starting place of (my version of) process metaphysics the problem/question you pose is not really as meaningful to a process thinker, perhaps, as the questions of how things appear to endure through time or how many experiences combine to form one unified experience (the combination problem) might be; i.e. I know in mathematics that if one starts with different axioms they get a different kind of mathematics, so it seems reasonable to assume different starting places in philosophy would lead folks in different directions and generate different problems/questions.”

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Painting above by Betony Coons

“In the Bible we find two major images of God, one, monarchical, and the other, familial. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is most often imaged as “King”; whereas in the New Testament “Father” is dominant…Jesus is never depicted as addressing God as King, and there is no indication that he spoke about God in that way. He always spoke to and of his, or our, Father (Abba)…The Greek phrase that we translate as “kingdom of God” is basileia theou. A basileia is a politically defined region. It could be a kingdom, and indeed most of them were, but the term does not include that as part of its meaning. If you suppose in advance that God is like a king, then the basileia of God will certainly be a kingdom. But if God is like a father, then his region or land will not be a kingdom. We might describe a father’s basileia better as the family estate. Depending on the kind of father we are talking about, that might be governed in various ways. When we consider how Jesus talked about God, the answer is that it would be managed for the sake of all who lived there with special concern for the weak and needy. We have no word for this, but my proposal is “commonwealth.”” –John Cobb, Jr., Process Theologian

The above passage comes from John Cobb’s book, Jesus’ Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed. The book came to mind recently while I was viewing an episode of the Ben Shapiro Show that a friend had sent to me and asked me to watch (we were involved in an online political discussion). I reluctantly agreed to watch the episode. But after watching it and reflecting on it a bit it’s reminded me once again that there really is a strong connection between conservatism (political and religious) and a fascination (conscious or unconscious) with kings and kingdoms.

The episode featured guest Jonah Goldberg (apparently another alt-lite hero like Shapiro; I’d never heard of him before…) talking about his new book (which seems to have gotten horrible reviews) and also treated the viewing audience to Shapiro and him discussing things like nationalism, how Trump is doing, and the Enlightenment. At one point Goldberg does make a good point with regard to the difference between the French enlightenment and the Scottish/British enlightenment; he points out how the French developed a more aggressive approach to separation of church and state, which is true. Instead of merely keeping religion out of state affairs, French secularism did condemned religion’s influence on political culture in general as pernicious. In doing this secularism essentially became a new religion. Famously, Carl Schmidt perhaps makes this most clear with his observation that “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver – but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.” It’s for this reason that I think studying theology is critical (I do credit my amateur study of theology and religion for allowing me to clearly see the parallels between politics and theology).

Immediately after this Goldberg goes into a whole spiel about the benefits of religion and how humans are homo religio (which I totally agree with) and naturally engage in acts of reciprocity. He then even goes so far as to say that “we are far closer to communists in our own families” (around the 24:30 mark), sharing resources and taking care of each other: each according to their need and each according to their ability. I was very surprised to hear him admit this and was really on board with him at this point! Societies all the way down, baby! He then references Hayek’s concept of the microcosm and explains that the values of the microcosm are not based on contracts and rationality or anything related to the market, but that they’re based on powerful notions of solidarity and mutual obligation. So far so good.

Goldberg then goes on to talk about Hayek’s notion of the macrocosm. This is where he starts to go off the rails!

The macrocosm, Goldberg insists (again, channeling Hayek ((I think he cited Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit, which I have not read so it’s hard to say if he’s getting Hayek right))), is the domain of the market, the world where you deal with strangers (as opposed to kin, family, and friends). Goldberg says that “one of the beautiful things about capitalism is that it turns strangers from existential threats into customers.” I seriously laughed out loud when he said this. Wtf! I mean, first of all where is the cutoff?!? Seriously, where does the microcosm end and the macrocosm begin? That’s not at all clear to me and never will be.

Earlier in the interview, while discussing the enlightenment, Goldberg began making this really contrived comparison between Rousseauian and Lockean philosophy favored in France and England respectively during the enlightenment (Locke apparently being more rational and Rousseu appealing more to passion/emotion ((a simplistic summation that I’m not really buying btw))), and he eventually says this: “there is something very Rousseauian about being an Orthodox Jew who is part of a larger community, no criticism of that whatsoever. What I have a problem with is when you take that Rousseauian religious spirit, that affiliation, and you try to get out of politics what is only rightly reserved for religion.” Goldberg’s point is that the microcosm (reserved for close kin, family, friends, and religious community) must be kept separate from the macrocosm (strangers and customers and politics); he insists that one cannot take the values of the microcosm and impose them on the macrocosm without destroying liberty. He also says that one cannot take the values of the macrocosm and apply them to the microcosm “without destroying the values and moral creating engine that is the family and civil society.” In other words, “we would destroy our family if we treated it like a business enterprise,” says Goldberg. “On the other hand,” he continues, “if you treat the extended order of liberty like it’s a family, where the president is our father, you’re gonna destroy liberty.”

First off, I actually kind of agree with Goldberg’s assessment here. I’ve used the family before as a practical way to think about the abstract concept of a society. I think it works really well. And Hayek’s concept of microcosm and macrocosm can be pretty useful. I even agree that applying the values of the market/macrocosm (e.g. cold, contractual, meritocratic rationality) to your family would no doubt destroy it. And get ready: I also agree that applying the values of the family/microcosm may somewhat inhibit liberty/freedom.

But here is where I differ with Hayek and Goldberg:

we have different understandings of liberty/freedom

we have different understandings of the role government can and should play

perhaps most important, we have very different understandings of God

One of the long standing and unanswered responses to Hayek’s criticism of socialism is that he has a very minimalist, anemic, and parochial definition of freedom; specifically, for Hayek (and Goldberg I assume) “freedom” means freedom from coercion, i.e. conservatives like Goldberg don’t want “big government” interference in their private economic affairs. The idea of “free will” is closely associated to the conservative notion of freedom and, as philosopher Chenyang Li points out in his paper The Confucian Conception of Freedom, it “has a specific cultural origin” that “came into prominence in the West largely due to the work of Saint Augustine, who Hannah Arendt has called the ‘first philosopher of the will.'” In his paper Li describes how Augustine adapted Epictetus’ concept of the “will” for his theological purposes. Apparently, for Epictetus, the will is “an independent power and is naturally free.” Li conintues:

“When Epictetus stated that the good is within the power of the will and that nothing is good or bad besides the will, he came close to the view that only the will is capable of committing evil. Nevertheless, it was Augustine who drove the notion to prominence.”

And if it’s not completely obvious, Augustine drove this notion of “free will” to prominence because he wanted to get God off the hook for evil. Augustine’s goal was to show how human wrong doings do not affect the goodness of God. He did this by developing a very strong and abstract concept of human free will. Consequentially, Li explains that “by developing his theory this way, Augustine has given free will a life of its own; no longer the soul, not even the intellect or reason, it is the free will that is ultimately responsible for human action.” Li goes on to say that “In the ways in which the concept has been discussed, free will is like a little man stuck in a person’s head making all decisions for the person. This little man cannot be shut off from outside. But, then, you wonder whether there is an even smaller man in the head of this little man, so on and so forth. The notion of free will has been infested with a world of problems with determinism. These problems cannot be resolved. An alternative is to get out of the trap set out by Augustine and his followers. We should not think of human agency in terms of free will, but to look for a holistic notion of human freedom.”

Li cites feminist philosophers, Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, and their concept of relational autonomy, and I agree that it can be very helpful for us. Autonomy and freedom are very closely related concepts. Autonomy generally means self-ruling, but it emphasizes a person’s internal capacity to make decisions for oneself. Freedom is often associated with the environment of action and with action itself. So a free environment is a precondition for autonomy. A person cannot be autonomous without a free environment, even though a free environment does not necessitate personal autonomy. Mackenzie and Stoljar explain that relational autonomy is built on

“the conviction that persons are socially embedded and that agents’ identities are formed within the context of social relationships and shaped by a complex of intersecting social determinants, such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Thus the focus of relational approaches is to analyze the implications of the intersubjective and social dimensions of selfhood and identity for conceptions of individual autonomy and moral and political agency.”

This is very similar to Whiteheadian and Confucian ideas (which is the direction Li goes in his paper) of freedom. As Whitehead says in Process and Reality: “But there is no society in isolation…The environment, together with the society in question, must form a larger society in respect to more general characters than those defining the society from which we started. Thus we arrive at the principle that every society requires a social background, of which it is itself a part.” In other words, personal autonomy is NOT free from socialization. As Li puts it: “The relevant question here is not how persons can be free of socialization, but rather what kind of socialization is conducive to personal autonomy.”

Once again, the simple question to ask here is where does the microcosm end and the macrocosm begin? Someone please show me because I seriously can’t tell. An attempt to keep them separate (like conservatives and libertarians say they want to do) seems to  run up against the problem of philosophical vagueness very quickly (when does a pile of sand become a heap?). Why should we not expand our scope of concern to include those beyond our tiny bubbles? Why should we not take Jesus’s and Paul’s teachings about welcoming strangers seriously (“Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”) and think about our fellow citizens (strangers or not) as part of our fellow human family? I know the answer Goldberg gave is that imposing the values of the microcosm onto the macrocosm inhibits liberty, but as we can hopefully now understand our liberties, our autonomy, have already always been inhibited; we self-sacrifice for the ones we love, don’t we? We’re not completely free because we’ve always had social obligations and responsibilities. Always. This doesn’t stop at the edge of our little bubbles either (wherever those edges are…). Goldberg is right that the President shouldn’t be thought of as our authoritarian father (trust me, when it comes to anti-authoritarianism and egalitarianism I’m as hardcore as the come). So let me say this very simply:

No one wants an abusive, authoritarian government,  just like no one wants an abusive, authoritarian parent! So why would anyone worship an abusive, authoritarian God?

Here we go, people. As above, so below:

God is not a king with great power. God is a loving, relational, sensitive, caring, parent who has a special concern for the weak, vulnerable, marginalized, and needy. Because God is not an all powerful monarch in the sky, God does not have all the power, God is NOT an omnipotent coercive dictator. God does not impose God’s will upon us. As John Cobb says, “The normal relation of the father to the infant is one of tenderness and unconditional love. It was unconditional love rather than controlling power that dominated Jesus’ understanding of God.” God relates to us, provides us with possibilities, and then persuasively lures us, beckons us, and implores us to make good decisions, like a good parent should. Because God is a good parent God self-sacrifices so all of God’s children can be more free (God demonstrates that our freedom is found in being last).

Likewise, our various levels of democratic government should be a reflection of God’s commonwealth. Governments are not abstract entities but unions of real people created by the people for the people, and their goal is not to violate or torture or rule or oppress, but to increase freedom, to increase personal autonomy, by providing new possibilities and expanding social goods: better social conditions, better education, more just distribution of resources, higher overall quality of life, etc. Our governments should be like God’s commonwealth in that they should defend the liberty of non-elites against the coercions of well-­organized local power brokers, e.g. a government making it illegal to own slaves can be viewed as a loss of some freedom from the perspective of slave owners, but it is simultaneously an expansion of freedom/liberty from the slave’s point of view.

Families are small societies. And Goldberg is right: we are far closer to communists in our own families, and it should stay this way. Small children are dependent on their parents; they’re weak and vulnerable and require parents to self-sacrificially care for them. Good parents take care of their children, they are the parent’s beneficiaries and parents provide them with social goods by sharing resources with their children, regardless of if that child is able to reciprocate or work to pay back their parents or to contribute to the household. The parent does this, sacrifices without question, out of unconditional love for the child. And yes, perhaps one day, the child will grow up to be a healthy human and a good citizen who does reciprocate by becoming the benefactor of the parent and who ultimately contributes to the larger society in amazingly beneficial ways.

Conservatives are communists in their own families, like Goldberg says, but they stop there. Political conservatives seem to insist on democracy in every aspect of their lives (personal, familial, political) except the workplace. Likewise, conservative religious people seem to despise abusive authoritarianism in every aspect of their lives (personal, familial, political) expect their religious and economic lives. Both political and religious conservatives seem content submitting to and defending a king in their economic lives (their boss or Little Lord) and religious conservatives go a step further and seem content defending and worshiping a God who is their cosmic king and powerful authoritarian ruler; this is nothing if not obvious. It’s also confusing, painfully subjugating, and awfully sad.

“Perhaps the most eloquent contemporary statement of Pelagian freedom appears in an opinion from the United States Supreme Court, in a passage written by former Justice Anthony Kennedy. In 1992, in a case called Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, he wrote this: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

It’s the Pelagian vision. Liberty is the right to choose your own meaning, define your own values, emancipate yourself from God by creating your own self. Indeed, this notion of freedom says you can emancipate yourself not just from God but from society, family, and tradition.

The Pelagian view says the individual is most free when he is most alone, able to choose his own way without interference. Family and tradition, neighborhood and church—these things get in the way of uninhibited free choice. And this Pelagian idea of freedom is one our cultural leaders have embraced for decades now.

But here’s the paradox. For all the big talk about individual freedom, Pelagian philosophy has made American society more hierarchical, and it has made it more elitist.

This is no accident. Pelagius himself was most popular with the old senatorial families of Rome—the wealthy, the well-connected. The aristocrats. They were his patrons. And why? He validated their privilege and their power.

Because if freedom means choice among options, then the people with the most choices are the most free. And that means the rich. And if salvation is about achievement, then those with the most accolades are righteous, and that means the elite and the strong. A Pelagian society is one that celebrates the wealthy, prioritizes the powerful, rewards the privileged. And for too long now, that has described modern America.”

There is a seriously good essay by Joshua Hawley on modern-day American Pelagianism in Christianity Today; the above passage is an excerpt.

For those who don’t know, Pelagius was a heretic condemned by the Church at the Council of Ephesus (but, as pointed out above, he was supported by Roman elites probably because his philosophy validated their privilege and power) for his teachings that one could emancipate themself from familial, societal, ecological, and ecclesial relationships (and even from God!), through ones own personal, liberatory, and meritocratic deeds. As much as I do tend to argue with…Calvinists, for instance…about how Orthodoxy has always been a wide stream with multifarious and diverse beliefs when they throw around the H-word willy nilly and accuse people from different flavors of Christianity of not being “Christian,” cases like this make it extremely hard to not be sympathetic with the Othodox council.

The parallels Hawley makes between Pelagianism and modern-day, rugged, rapacious, American individualism and meritocracy (e.g. Ayn Rand style libertarianism), and the subsequent implications of the warped philosophy, are eye-opening to say the least. Even the whole notion of individual salvation apart from the Church, famously espoused by Evangelical Christianity (a personal relationship with Jesus) is quite a deviation from the Orthodox teaching of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (apart from the Church there is no salvation). It does seem reasonable to consider the idea of “individual salvation” apart from the Church as a heretical and uniquely Modern and American Evengelical invention…the doctrine of “all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is His Body” is still in the Catholic and Orthodox catechism I believe, as well as in many mainline protestant catechisms, and it seems to imply that Christian salvation is fundamentally social in nature. Obviously, I as an ecumenical Christian, and religious naturalist (a panentheist), interpret “His Body” to mean the natural world and everything in it, but this still puts me at odds with an atomist individualist mindset.

Anyway, I completely agree with Hawley that Pelagius fundamentally misunderstood the Cross. “The Cross,” Hawley writes, “announces the weakness and need of every person. And that means it excludes the boasting and the pride of the few. […] The Cross says the talented, the well-born, the well-educated do not deserve special privileges. They are not more valuable than anyone else. The call of God comes to every person and the power of God is poured out on all who believe.” Amen.