The final weeks of a class always have a valedictory feel and today was no exception. "Religion and the Anthropocene" meets twice more (and there's much work students might or might not turn in), but it's clear things are drawing to a close. A satisfying one, though! Things are coming together.
Today's class covered an insane amount of material - that documentary about Lynn Margulis, a gnarly piece of Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble, and Deborah Bird Rose's lovely essay "Shimmer" - but we'd also decided to skip our scheduled session on Daoism, and I became possessed of the idea of somehow squeezing that in too. Somehow, though, going from Daoist considerations of reality as liquid, all forms (including you and me) merely temporary congealings, we got to Haraway's "tentacular" thinking and Rose's commendation of practices of bir'yun. The hinge was some footage from the documentary - here's my new iPhone's recording of a subscription website's screening of the documentary's sharing of a video from a class in which Margulis was showing videos, our astonishment joining that of layers of other viewers!
With these images in mind, everything made a different kind of sense - and that's even before you get to the sym- part of the story (symbiosis, symbiogenesis, sympoiesis). If this is what's going on, then selves are not in but expressions of environments and relationships, rising and falling, hardening and softening, wiggling and entwining. Individualism crumbles, but so does anthropocentrism - though selves, including human ones, are among the forms the Dao takes. We were at the threshold of rediscovering, in Rose's words, that the shimmer of life does indeed include us. (G61) (The image at top is a recent example of the kind of Yolngu bark painting whose cross-hatching evokes bir'yun - the "brilliance" or "shimmer" of sunlight on moving water, or firelight on painted bodies in motion.) And that, as Haraway shows, we need new (or perhaps very old) ways of thinking.
What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? ... What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only histories? Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene! (30-31)
Today's readings only tangentially touched "religion." (Haraway blames our estrangement from and despoliation of the symbiotic world on the "sky gods" and their votaries.) But it was all over our discussion! It felt - I hope students would agree - like we've arrived at a point where "religion and the Anthropocene [sic!]" makes sense as a project.
I'm a little giddy that things congealed in this way, and it tempts me to try to articulate just how these things hold together for me. This is something I've felt, intuitively and inchoately, at least since seeing that documentary for the first time, but not had occasion, nor confidence, to try. Emergence and sympoiesis are the reality of life (and perhaps not just life), a reality closer to what Daoism describes than monotheism and the cascade of deadly dualisms which follow from it assert. And yet, despite the truth in the critique of sky gods, I don't feel that this is incompatible with my faith as a Christian. Just beneath the shimmer, the layers of atmosphere-regulating bacteria, in the tangle and trouble, I sense the face of God, happy to be discovered.
John Feldman, “Symbiotic Earth: How Lynn Margulis Rocked the Boat and Started a Scientific Revolution” (Bullfrog Films, 2017)
Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene,” ch. 2 of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke, 2016), 31-57
Deborah Bird Rose, “Shimmer: when all you have is being trashed,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (Minnesota, 2017), G51-63
