Generational syncopation

Covering familiar materials in an unfamiliar way, some cool things came out. The readings were Diana Eck's classic "'Is our God listening?': Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism" (1993) and How We Gather (2015), a proposal for finding religion-like benefits in non-religious organizations and practices both volunteer and for profit. I usually assign these on different days - the former with some Karl Barth, the latter with Pew surveys on the religiously unaffiliated - but in this year's syllabus they wound up together. Interesting issues arose from the juxtaposition, perhaps most pointedly when we considered the affront of millennials told they were were being religious without knowing it, and, on the other hand, how someone identified with a world religion might feel take to being described in the religion-less terms of How We Gather ("that's what inclusivism feels like on the receiving end!").

But the really fun part came as a result of my introducing the two texts as representing the experiences of different generations. Eck reports on the changed religious landscapes of boomer pluralists, largely raised in monolithic religious worlds progressively enriched and complicated by America's growing religious diversity. Angie Thurston and Casper ter Kuile, authors of How We Gather, speak to and for the millennial "nones" living in the aftermath of this pluralizing transformation, largely raised without affective bonds to any religion at all. Really fun, though, was realizing that none of us quite resonated with either. Not surprising, perhaps, since two of us are Gen X and the rest are Gen Z!

Last splash of Fall color!

人类世学！

It's a long shot for lots of reasons, but my hosts at Renmin have asked if I'd be willing to teach there again this coming summer. Indeed I would be, committed as I am to civil society dialogue even between strategically competitive countries. I even proposed a new course!

Anthropocene Humanities

The Anthropocene names the new reality – and awareness – that humanity has become a planetary agent, the single most important factor in current earth history. The term was coined by natural scientists but has increasingly been taken up by thinkers in the human sciences. This course surveys anglophone debates about the meaning and significance of humanity’s new status within the earth system from historical, philosophical, literary and comparative, as well as feminist, postcolonial and postsecular perspectives. Conducted in English, the course employs the tools of the humanities to make sense of the Anthropocene, and uses the challenge of the Anthropocene to reimagine the work of the humanities.

1. Introduction: What is the Anthropocene?

Steve Bradshaw, “Anthropocene: A Documentary” 

Jill Schneiderman, “Awake in the Anthropocene” 

2. The Anthropocene and the environmental humanities 

Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses” 

Jeremy Davies, Birth of the Anthropocene 

3. Philosophical challenges of the Anthropocene 

Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene

Roy Scranton, “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene” 

4. Queering the Anthropocene 

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “A Feminist Approach to the Anthropocene: Earth Stalked by Man” 

Whitney A. Bauman, “Climate Weirding and Queering Nature: Getting Beyond the Anthropocene 

5. Decolonizing the Anthropocene 

Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene”

Françoise Vergès, “Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene Racial?” 

6. Desecularizing the Anthropocene 

Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-Spiritual Formations in the Earth’s New Epoch”

Fabrice Monteiro, “The Prophet” (photo series)

7. A Chinese antidote to the Anthropocene? 

James Miller, China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future 

8. Writing Anthropocene futures 

Donna Haraway, “The Camille Stories”

Precolombian

Imagine discovering this! Extinct animals suggest 12,500 years old...

Well Met

First expedition to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in almost a year!

The "aura" of artworks made every work veritably leap off the walls.

Disbelief and dread

Oak Flat

That book I started reading, Lauren Redniss' Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West, couldn't, alas, be more timely. Or out-of-timely. Among the outgoing (fingers crossed!) Trump administration's efforts to rush or jam through changes the Biden administration won't be able to change are assorted moves of environmental plunder. You've heard about their proposed sale of rights to the Arctic national wildlife refuge, but the news just broke today (for me at least) that they're trying to do in Oak Flat, sacred to the Apache in Arizona, too.

Last month tribes discovered that the date for the completion of a crucial environmental review process has suddenly been moved forward by a full year, to December 2020, even as the tribes are struggling with a Covid outbreak that has stifled their ability to respond. If the environmental review is completed before Trump leaves office, the tribes may be unable to stop the mine.

“The Trump administration is cutting corners and doing a rushed job just to take care of Rio Tinto,” said the Democratic Arizona representative Raúl Grijalva. “And the fact they are doing it during Covid makes it even more disgusting. Trump and Rio Tinto know the tribes’ reaction would be very strong and public under normal circumstances but the tribes are trying to save their people right now.”

Changing views

 

A few days ago - it was November 19th - we noticed some strange objects parked on the street below. What the? You couldn't see them

when I snapped a picture of nightfall for a friend the following day... But by the next day it became clear what was going on. Union's tower!

Reading pleasure

It's not quite Thanksgiving break but some of my leisure reading for the holiday has arrived and I couldn't resist diving in.

North Woods, Central Park

 

Stay home for Thanksgiving

Covid is out of control in the United States (almost 200,000 new infections in the last day!), affecting people who know its danger and - perhaps even more - those who don't. One of my students told me about an interview they saw with a nurse in South Dakota describing tense conversations with gravely ill patients about to be intubated who refuse to believe Covid is real and that they are dying. “It’s not one particular patient; it’s just a culmination of so many people and their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening, it’s not real.' And when they should be spending time FaceTime-ing their families, they’re just filled with anger and hatred. I just can’t believe those are their last words.” 

Anger and, yes, hatred is what I feel towards those who have filled these heads with misinformation, but for these victims an aching compassion and mute sorrow. Denial is understandable. People they trusted lied to them about the danger, endangered them. And part of denying they have Covid - the nurse told of people who wanted to believe it was flu or even lung cancer - is denying that they caught it from someone, and that they may have passed it on to someone else.

I've thought a lot about about the loneliness and terror of those dying, in pain and isolation with no chance of the touch or even the presence of those they love, and about the grieving that hasn't been able fully to take place in response to these deaths, on every level from the personal (Joe Biden's empty chairs at the kitchen table) to the national. But another deep existential wound this pandemic will leave is the horror and shame of having potentially exposed another to a death-dealing virus. Too many of those who refuse masks and other measures don't know these feelings, but, sadly, will.

Hot spots

Death cult

 250,000  

are dead and this moral midget thinks he's entitled to another term

image chart

Something subtracted

We're in the final third of a long semester. My students aren't the only ones to tell of being overwhelmed - zoom keeps on sucking your energy even when you've learned to call it "zoom fatigue," and coursework just keeps coming, week after week. Many students are slipping behind, and adding self-reproach to exhaustion, heartbreak, isolation, and dread about the future.

Since I am meeting students in "Religion and the Anthropocene" one-on-one this week already, I let them persuade me to take take this week off. That means there's no assigned reading, no reading response. I'll still be signing into zoom during our regularly scheduled meeting time Friday morning, but nobody else has to.

The only problem is what to do with the originally assigned material for this week. Do we drop it, or bump the readings of one of our subsequent weeks? The syllabus is already chockablock. Fortuitiously the topic was/is Daoism, and one of the readings the Dao De Jing. If there's anything one might be able to do better by not doing it, it's studying Daoism. I've sent the students a few passages from the Dao De Jing, and told them that I don't expect them to read any more.

XIX
Eliminate the ‘sage’: forget ‘wisdom’
People will be a hundred times better off.
Eliminate ‘benevolence’: forget ‘rectitude’,
And people will have filial piety.
Eliminate cleverness: forget profit,
And there’ll be less thieves and rogues.
Superficial things are insufficient,
What is needed is all-embracing.
Exhibit the unadorned.
Hold fast to the un-carved block.
Avoid the thought of Self.
Eliminate desire.

XLVII
You can know the universe
Without leaving your house.
You can see the ways of heaven
Without looking out of your window.
The further you go
The less you know.
That’s why the wise achieve without moving,
Name what is, without needing to see it,
Accomplish great things without action.

XLVIII
In pursuing one’s studies
Something’s added each day.
In practising the Way
Something’s subtracted each day.
It grows less and less
Until one reaches non-action.
When one reaches non-action
Nothing is left undone.
It’s always through not interfering
That one can control the realm.
Whoever loves to interfere
Will never control the people.

Translation

Unchosen choice

Fun class in "Theorizing Religion" today - one which ended up in a different place than students expected, with things relevant and complicated in ways they hadn't anticipated. Our reading was a chapter in Elizabeth Pérez's Religion in the Kitchen analyzing the stories Lucumí initiates told of themselves. Unlike what other scholars of Afro-Cuban traditions report (perhaps because many of them chose to become initiated themselves), Pérez finds the the members of the community she's studying go to great lengths to explain that they did not seek initiation out, rather "initiation was thrust upon the narrator" (149). Becoming priests of Lucumí was an "unchosen choice" (144).

We spent some time looking at antecedents, sources and parallels of such self-narration. Pérez mentions Christian stories of conversion like Paul on the road to Damascus, the Bantu practices of claiming authority through suffering called ngoma, specific 19th century Cuban contexts where expressing "a desire for Lucumí initiation" would be "tantamount to rejecting God as well as science" (159), and finally the practices of "testifying" in Protestant American churches. For these and other reasons, the story is one of struggle, resistance and ultimate surrender. But similar story structures happen in many religious traditions. I mentioned the dhami we met on our way to Kailas, who had done his darndest not to be a spirit medium, his resistance proving futile. 

The idea of "unchosen choice" took us to the roots of the word "conviction" - to be "convicted" is to submit to a law whether one will or no - and so to the reality that religious identity is rarely experienced as a free choice. I explained that this was the reason Locke and other early modern Europeans argued for religious toleration (I suppose I was thinking of Bayle): we cannot choose to believe or disbelieve, and any demand that I believe or disbelieve something is nothing but an invitation to hypocrisy. Of course this goes against the easy subjectivism of many of my students, who think about religion is something people somehow choose to believe. Of course we saw Winnifred Fallers Sullivan argue that One of the lies modernity peddles is that you can and should choose your own religion in our very first class session but that was long ago and far away. I think it started to make sense today.

But it's disturbing sense. If religious freedom is respecting people's deepest unchosen commitments, what about that baker in Colorado? (I didn't have to bring him up: a student did.) His refusal to design a wedding cake for a gay couple seemed to most people I know a religious rationalization of a non- or prereligious prejudice. I could see students struggling with unexpected empathy for the baker, for whom his own preferences had nothing to do with it but God's will (as he knew it) was God's will. Can a sincere religious argument be made for some forms of discrimination? Bringing in the case where a Native American successfully defended his consumption of peyote as a religious obligation didn't get the bitter taste from our mouths. In America today "religious freedom" is experienced as a weapon of the dominant culture, not a protection of pluralism and minority cultures, but here our liberal deference to individual self-determination seemed to morph into an argument for the other side. 

I didn't observe that this slippery slope takes you quickly to perdition, especially if you follow recent arguments that accord vague "moral" objections the status of unchosen choices (or rather, shows you need a Millian and not just a Lockian liberalism), nor did I recapitulate Sullivan's argument that the "impossibility of religious freedom" demands that we own our understandings of the relation of church and state as themselves theological. I'll get to that Monday, when we read about a less threatening mobilization of religious freedom from a century ago. Instead I remarked on the strange fact that many who claim protection of their "unchosen" convictions regarding gender insist on regarding homosexuality as a choice - what Amy Coney Barrett in her confirmation hearing persisted in calling "sexual preference." What's up with that?

It was late and we had to end class, but I could see synapses popping. Perhaps "fun" is the wrong word for our learning. This was not where students expected a discussion of an exotic minority community on the south side of Chicago to lead us!

Ice chandelier jellies

How do these stunning ice forms happen? They appeared above one Woniu Lake near the Russian border of Heilongjiang, in Northeast China.

Good news

Allow a proud big brother to brag a little. My sister's the editor of the Gisborne Gazette, which just won a big prize: the Community News-paper Association of Victoria's top award: Best Community Newspaper!

Forest floor

 

The forest floor's moment

 

Foliage

Rain has collaged the leaves of many trees on the ground,

but a few leaves are holding out still...

Rainbow nature

Looking around for a suitable picture for another blogpost (the "Religion and Anthropocene" class has a blog too), I found these glorious lichen.

Left behind

I mentioned yesterday that an article in the Times had claimed Biden's victory for religious people who were convinced to turn away from Trump. This was reassuring after someone in a webinar of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion I attended on Friday claimed that, contrary to what people may wish, statistics suggest there is no religious left in America. While most Democrats are indeed religious by SSSR measures, their political and ecological values aren't articulated in religious terms. Indeed, we don't think these values need to be articulated in such terms, and perhaps shouldn't be either. As my erstwhile adviser Jeffrey Stout has argued, this pluralistic commitment to secular democratic discourse thins and weakens the arguments of progressive religious folk, who downplay the deeper roots of their convictions even to themselves. Meanwhile the shrill religious voices which dominate the public square, disdainful of complexity, increasingly reject the value of democracy as a shared project. Perhaps having a truly religious person in the White House will change this but it's hard to be optimistic.

Up and up

I remember when the first hump seemed unbearably high, then the second. Now they seem but foothills.

Annihilated?

Our class discussion of religion and the election, framed by ideas of Clifford Geertz and Talal Asad, did not go as planned. I suppose that's some sort of success? Students were very happy to hear each other.

We spent the first half of the class trying to reconstruct Geertz' famous definition of religion, finding none of us could remember how its parts fit together, and exploring Asad's critique of the definition for just this evanescent quality: Geertz universalizes the role religion had in the west once it had become marginal and subjective. "Bland" Geertzian religion floats free of life, politics, social relations, even culture, barely even a ghost of what it was in earlier centuries of western history, when Christianity was the main source of disciplinary knowledge and the formation of selves. The early Church Fathers would be "horrified" by the Geertzian understanding of religion as no more than "a matter of having a positive attitude to the problem of disorder, of affirming simply that in some sense or other the world as a whole is explicable, justifiable, bearable" (246). The point of religion, one might say, isn't to interpret the world but to change it!

I thought our discussion of the election might pick up on both Geertz and Asad: perhaps how the Trump faithful find in the system of symbols of "America First" an aura of factuality which makes their moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic as ways of facing an unnervingly uncertain present and future, and how the weaponization of this system showed religion to be more politically charged than Geertz imagined. Or how the religious nationalism which conflates America and Christianity refuses the modern marginalization of religion which Asad describes (at least in this article), endorsing an understanding of the need for discipline in forming selves closer to earlier periods in Christian history. But I just opened the (zoom) floor to let everyone speak who wanted, and religion barely came into up.

What the students instead said confirmed something one of my faculty colleagues mentioned in a discussion last week: our students may have more exposure to the worlds which supported Trump than we do. More, the world of the Trump faithful strikes them as so coherent that they can't imagine anyone leaving it. The rural and suburban cultures of unreconstructed racism and sexism they described, amplified by social media, seemed hermetically sealed. One observed that the "melding of Christianity, the American civil religion and the religion of capitalism" had been going on for decades. Keenly aware of the 71 million who voted for Trump - 8 million more than 2016, one reminded us - they lamented that Biden generated none of the enthusiasm of Trump. Some folks think we're out of the woods, one reflected, but we're not, and the "performative allyship" of the summer's demonstrations has gone. Distressingly, Harris seemed to them only a token ("idolized"), as they shared discredited (well, clearly not discredited, but unfounded) claims that she's transphobic. None had any real hope for change, but sharing this dejection evidently offered a kind of solace.

One student owned that he had himself "drunk the Kool-Aid" as a Trump supporting sixteen-year-old in 2016, but conversations with a friend in 2018 had opened his mind, eventually leading him to where he is now, a proud New School progressive indignant at those who hold on to Trumpian ideas without the excuse of being immature teenagers. The story of his change of view was the only hopeful thing anyone mentioned (we hear instead about impasses and ruptured friendships) so I asked him to tell us more about what the friend had said to change his mind. It's hard to describe, he said, it was very gradual... Eventually he told us that in 2018 he'd also done acid for the first time, which "made him open to any and all ideas" and "annihilated all his preconceptions and prejudices" for weeks. That's what this conversion took?

I'd been ready to share a new Op-Ed from the Times claiming that it was a progressive swing of religious voters which handed Biden victory but instead I just listened. How thoroughly Trump has demoralized us...

Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973), 87-125: Talal Asad, “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man, New Series 18/2 (Jun., 1983): 237-59

Unseasonal

It's a little hard to know what season it is - in this view of the winter lights starting to be put up at Columbia with the leaves just starting to turn, and a student dressed for summer... but also in this moment of political transition. Didn't we just have an election? Didn't we just have a winner? Didn't our vice president-elect invoke the spirits of past and future, and the president-elect the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and of his grandmother? Hasn't he started to form a government, and taken calls from the leaders of our allied nations? The outgoing ogres are up to their old tricks and are likely to make more noise as the spotlight moves decisively from them - but this time their efforts to shock and awe us are doomed to fail. You can lawyer your way to a real estate settlement but you can't stonewall your way to a second elected political term. That said, the inmates are still running the asylum and they're armed. Desperation will only make them more dangerous. Be vigilant.

Aura of factuality

In "Theorizing Religion" today we worked our way through Clifford Geertz's famous definition of religion in "Religion as a Cultural System" with its squishy "moods and motivations," "aura of factuality," etc.,

but the election was on everyone's mind, and we decided to devote part of Wednesday's class to the 2020 election and religion. Geertz and Talal Asad's appreciative critique (Wednesday's reading) will make for a rich and complicated discussion. 

It's by turns heartbreaking and terrifying to see the refusal of Trump and his supporters to accept defeat. Not him - we long ago stopped expecting anything but bad behavior from him and his immediate Four Seasons Total Landscaping cronies. And Mitch McConnell deserves no kind thought. But what about the great majority of Trump voters who reportedly believe that the election was actually an attempted coup? I feel only contempt and fear for those who know that Biden won but think they can win on a technicality. (They must know they've been coasting on technicalities for a while, starting long before the Electoral College victory of their hero in 2016; maybe that's why they think they could get away with it again.) But many others may genuinely believe that the election was stolen - didn't their man tell them this was going to happen, and their media, and their pundits, and their... religion?

Geertz emphasizes the role of symbols and rituals in religion - they're what sustain the precarious sense of a "general order of existence" - so I've told students to bring in images. I'm bringing this one, screen-capped from an SSRC webinar I watched Friday. It's not a parody.

R&R

A glorious late Fall day, if unseasonably warm. My camera picks up the yellowish oranges (with some editing help) but not the reddish ones, which are making the New Jersey side of the Hudson look like fireworks. And not a cloud in the clear blue Sunday sky... 

It's fitting weather for the way everyone I know is feeling, a relief we didn't even realize how much we needed. There remains much to be done, with many a countervailing wind, but we're refreshed and giddy at the feeling that our story is not over, that our story is in our hands.

D e m o c r a c y   w i n s !

Whenever righteousness decays

"Religion and the Anthropocene" met this morning, just as reports of Biden "inching" his way to a slim majority in swing states Georgia and then Pennsylvania were trickling in. Looks like we might have a winner, if barely a mandate, but I'll happily take it. We're a long way from knowing when or how this will happen, of course, and half of our small-group discussions were about the sense of vertigo and fear which these next days and weeks of uncertainty induce in us. In the larger class, though, students were eager to lose themselves in coursework. 

Our reading for the week? The Bhagavad Gita, which I'd scheduled for this week half expecting us not to have class. It might seem to speak to a similar moment of calm before a storm, as the assembled armies of the Pandavas and Kauravas - a family divided against itself by a series of foolish and unfair episodes - face each other for battle. The god Krishna has offered his counsel to one side and his army to the other, and the Kauravas chose the army. Arjuna, leading the Pandavas but recoiling at the thought of entering battle against his own kin, is advised by Krishna, who has taken the form of his charioteer, why he must do his duty as a warrior. Arjuna must fight, and eventually does, vanquishing his misguided relatives as was foreordained.

It's a little frightening a spectacle to contemplate at a time when so many of us are breathless with worry that violence awaits our fractured national family. But we also read from Gandhi's interpretation of the Gita, which argued that it is only superficially about war. The message is really about the transformative potential of "selfless action" and ahimsa (non-violence), just as the Mahabharata, of which the Gita is a part, is really about the futility of conflict. We'll be reading more Gandhi next week, and his understanding of how the right kind of selfless action can break cycles of violence. To bridge the two weeks I shared a recording of the final scene of Philip Glass' Gandhi opera, "Satyagraha," whose text is all taken from the Bhagavad Gita.

            ‘Arjuna, you and I have had 

many births which have passed away;

I know all of these births, but you 

do not, O Scorcher of the Foe.

 

            ‘Though I am unborn and deathless,

and the Lord of All Creation,

superior to my own nature, 

I create myself by magic.

 

            ‘Indeed, whenever righteousness 

decays, O Son of Bharata, 

and unrighteousness increases, 

then do I manifest myself.

 

            ‘In order to project the good, 

and to destroy evildoers, 

and to establish righteousness, 

age after age, I come to be.' (IV.5-8)

There's some kind of hope in these words, and comfort in Glass' music gently, nonviolently changing the world. Have a listen; you'll feel it too. 

trans. Gavin Flood and Charles Martin in The Bhagavad Gita: A Norton Critical Edition (2015), 24-25

Unacceptable losses

 

Among the outrages to decency that this election represents is the fact that it happened in the middle of a pandemic which half the electorate was willing to accept as the natural order of things. Of course a once every four years choice between two personalities provides far too little information about what complicated sets of concerns animate even the most single-minded voters, and presidential tallies somehow remain uncannily close to 50-50 cycle after cycle. Still. How could it not matter?  Covid marked the election with 100,000 new infections !

Prince of darkness

Awoke to find that the national nightmare continues, and nearly sixty-six million people voted for it - more than voted for either candidate in 2016 (or any candidate in a presidential election but Barack Obama in 2008). Of course our man received even more votes, with many more yet to be tallied, but oh what fierce headwinds he faces.

Keep counting, and keep praying: May God help us to become the nation we were meant to be: a nation of hope and justice and peace. Help us to emerge from the darkness into the light.

Election prayer

From one of the priests of our church:

If you believe in the power of prayer or you used to believe in the power of prayer or you have some sort of faith--any kind of faith--that God or some Higher Power or some Positive Energy can help us, this is the moment to say such prayers. If you do not know what to say, then just repeat the words, "May God help us to become the nation we were meant to be: a nation of hope and justice and peace. Help us to emerge from the darkness into the light."

 

If you are a religious person of any sort, then here is a prayer from The Book of Common Prayer that you might want to say:

 

"Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart and especially the people of this land, that by faithful administration and wise laws, the barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions may be healed, and that we may live in justice and peace. Amen."

 

Amen.

Spun out

Part of the wickedness of Trump era spin is that it so brazenly mirrors. (RealClearPolitics' effort to give voice to both sides accentuates this.) You say we're planning on stealing an election? We say you're planning on stealing an election. You say we lie? We say you lie. You say we're undermining the constitution? We say you're undermining the constitution. You say we're repressing votes? We say you're repressing votes. You say you're bound to win? We say we're bound to win. Part of its brilliance is that once Putinist whataboutism poisons the air, the other side thinks we're the ones turning reality on its head. Which way is up? Is there even an up any more? They have erased the horizon! I pray this war of attrition begins to lose force this week in the face of Biden's unfeigned and unspinnable blandness. Give decency a chance, for all our sakes.

And one requst: Vote out the maniac

Tom Toles, my favorite political cartoonist, whose incisive wit I have often shared in this blog, is retiring - after a career of fifty years! Thanks for everything.