Tendrils connecting

Our new provost Renee White sent around some "Reflections on the Start of a New Academic Year" that mark a wonderful difference from her drily technocratic predecessors in the position. When she was first introduced to the university community in the after a big national search, she mentioned that she was interested in how black feminism could shape academic leadership. This is what that looks like:

... I am sure we have grown tired of having this moment characterized as historic, unprecedented, requiring a pivot, unpredictable, challenging, and so much more. While those descriptors are accurate, to be sure, what should we all embrace and invoke in the next few months? As I have reflected on the lessons I am learning, and the ways I want to enter into our working relationships with one another, I keep returning to these notions, which are ways I center myself. 

Patience and Grace: We always endeavor to do our best. But we are human and imperfect. That will challenge us to exercise understanding as new systems and practices are put in place, as people are trying new modes of thinking and working, and as we learn from our missteps. 

Interdependence and collectivism: We are all part of a complex organism with many tendrils connecting us to one another in ways both visible and invisible. As such it seems wise to remember how decisions and actions may have an impact on our friends and colleagues in ways unknown to us. Are opportunities we seek likely to cause challenges for others? Can we make decisions that advance us as a collective? 

Creative Engagement (AKA Yes… and): As we make mistakes and learn, we also are inviting ourselves to think in new and challenging ways. When you have been operating in a moment of unease, questioning, and unpredictability, it makes sense to approach the new with yes... but. What if, instead, we acted from the vantage point of yes… and? What would that open up for us and invite us to consider? 

Celebration, Rejuvenation, and Recognition: Let’s make sure we take time to embrace beauty and joy and celebrate one another. To see and be seen is a powerful commitment we can make.

I'm inspired!

A kind of memoir

In our one on one meetings on Thursday, two of my first year students mentioned John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed, a title I'd seen but not followed up, so I took advantage of Amazon Prime and got myself a copy I could brandish when class officially begins Tuesday. (It's even signed!) 

Green, Wikipedia helpfully informs me, is "an American author and YouTube content creator." He's written bestselling books, several of them for young adults, and with his brother Hank created a small menagerie of more than a little hyperactive geeky YouTube programs. (I've seen some.) More recently he created a monthly podcast for WNYC called "The Anthropocene Reviewed," with a much more laconic style, and it's a condensation of these podcasts which appeared in book form a few months ago. I'm a latecomer to his prolific multi-platform oeuvre, and arrive just in time for something of a shift.

This latest project, Green tells us, was an attempt to share more of himself. The project riffs on a remark made by his wife Sarah about the reviews which have become ubiquitous online.

She explained that when people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir - here's what my experience was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop. (6)

One of Green's first jobs was writing 175-word reviews for BookList, so this is a kind of return. Also from BookList, but in conversration with all those online reviewers, he's ended each of his brief chapters with a score from 1 to 5. But unlike in his BookList days, these judgments are explicitly personal: memoir. Sarah also observed that in the Anthropocene there are no detached observers, as the earlier kinds of reviews like BookList's imagined, just participants. The score isn't intended to decide for us but to invite us to experience things for ourselves. 

You get a sense of the sorts of things reviewed from the first few - "You'll never walk alone," Humanity's Temporal Range, Halley's Comet, Our Capacity for Wonder, Lascaux Cave Paintings, Scratch 'n; Sniff Stickers, Diet Dr Pepper, Velociraptors, Canada Geese - but not for the little ruminations they inspire, which include personal anecdotes, unexpected histories, quirky factoids, and perfectly placed nuggets of wisdom from luminaries. How poignant is the thought that our young species is wiping out species many times its age? That, having discovered that our breathing damages them, we agreed to close the Lascaux caves and created a simulacrum next door? That Canada geese are thriving, in part because the seeds of Kentucky bluegrass we cultivate in all our lawns are a favorite food for them? That Scratch ' n' Sniff stickers, which never quite smelled like what they claimed to, might outlast the things they don't quite smell like? "Canada Geese," by the way, was the start of the project. He'd written a "review of Canada geese" as a lark and told his brother about it. "Hank said, 'The Anthropocene . . . REVIEWED.'" (5) And John was off. His working definition of Anthropocene, incidentally, is a lived paradox. 

I wanted to understand the contradiction of human power: We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to reshape Earth's climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them. We are so powerful that we have escaped our planet's atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering. (6) 

But as an individual I don't feel that power. I can't decide whether a species lives or dies. I can't even get my kids to eat breakfast. (58)

The essays - I've only read the ones I mentioned and a few near the end - are essentially personal essays. Green marshals considerable erudition but wears his knowledge lightly. When a great insight appears, it's always credited to someone else - like Sarah or Hank - and the modesty seems genuine. He has a good eye for suggestive and resonant images and anecdotes. And, so far at least, he likes what he writes about. The scores of those first chapters, respectively, are 4.5, 4, 4.5, 3.5, 4.5, 3.5, 4, 3 and 2. At the book's end he makes clear that what he's exploring and sharing is his love for the world, something he tells us he came to only reccently. Also at work is what he calls radical hope. Overwhelmed though we are we mustn't despair. 

For most of my life, I've beleived that we're in the fourth quarter of human history, and perhaps even the last days of it. But lately, I've come to believe that such despair only worsen our already slim chance at long-term survival. We must gifght like there is something to fight for, like we are something worth figfhting for, because we are. And so I choose to believe that we are not approaching the apocalypse, that the end is not coming, and that we weill find a way to survive the coming changes. 

"Change," Octavia Butler wrote, "is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe." And who am I to say that we are done changing? (20-21)

In a postscript he mentions that the title of the German translation of the book is Wie hat Ihenen das Antrhopzän bis jetzt gefallen? (How have you enjoyed the Anthropocene so far?) and runs with it. That the book appeared in translation first is the sort of chronology-defying twist he specializes in.

How have I enjoyed the Anthropocene so far? It is wondrous! In high school, my best friend, Todd, and I went to the dollar movie theater every Wednesday. We watched whatever movie was playing on the frigid theater's single screen. Once, a werewolf movie staring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer played at the theater for eight straight Wednesdays, so we watched it eight times The movie, which was terrible, got better and better the more we watched it. ...

How have I enjoyed the Anthropocene so far? It's awful! I feel that I am not evolved enough for this. I have only been here for a little while, but already I have seen my kind extinguish the last remaining member of many other kinds ... "I smell the wound and it smells me," Terry Tempest Williams writes in Erosion. I live in a wounded world, and I now I am the wound: Earth destroying Earth with Earth. (273)

You get a sense of his wry style, tenderness and unassuming eloquence.

But I had to see how the German edition of The Anthropocene Reviewed - it's been out longer than the English one - was reviewed. What would German book reviewers make of this scattershot essayistic episodic project? After initial misgivings at the seeming crassness of the scoring at each chapter's end, the reviewers seem all to have been won over by the profundity of the book's lightness. Many play along and give it a score, 4 or even 5.

I'll need to read more, but for now I find myself intrigued by something I haven't encountered before: an engagement with the Anthropocene that's entirely outside the world of academia (or art or religion). The materials I'm familiar with are urgent and impassioned, high-minded debates about what the Anthropocene is, what it means, who is responsible and what is to be done. This is something entirely different. The 1 to 5 scoring seems like a bemused, even consumerist stance detached from the world, but in Green's use is really an effort at sustaining a grounded and hopeful participation in it.

Vitrail

 

Day trip to see our friends in Ossining. Before feasting together we went to Union Chapel of Pocantico Hills, an austere stone church built by the art-loving Rockefellers and filled, over the ensuing decades, with memorial stained glass windows, most by Marc Chagall. Photography inside isn't permitted, but their website has images of a few of the windows which capture some of the glowing depth of Chagall's colors. Here's Ezekiel receiving a scroll glowing like embers to eat. My picture above shows this same window from the outside.

Springs eternal

American teenagers, a Washington Post - Ipsos poll has found, are hopeful about the future! This optimism confounds me. I see entrenched and widening inequality, precarity, and political stalemate in the face of existential challenges like the climate crisis. Are their hopes symptoms of dysfunction or advanced reports of new worlds already coming to be? 

Back to school

It happened, it really happened: I was in a room with fifteen students and it was fine. More than fine, it was festive. I was worried students wouldn't make it through the COVID safety gauntlet or, if they made it, would cower in the corners maximizing their distance from everyone else, but the worries proved unfounded. A few students were awol, and one was still waiting on a COVID test, but fifteen of my nineteen first years were there, and they were raring to go. They barely needed prompting to engage each other. What a happy din!

After the group discussion I met with each of them for 15 minutes and, if at the start I looked like the perky spiffed up Gnarls (above), by the end of it I was wiped out. Part of it, undoubtedly, was the effort of communicating through masks - speaking as well as listening. But it dawned on me that another part was the information overload of all of the students which wasn't masked, all those bodies in space, clothes, bags, shoes, movements... I've always been bemused by the specious specificity of the claim that it's "93% of communication" but I guess I'm intoxicated by the rush of the nonverbal.

Transitions

Though the semester doesn't officially begin until next week, I meet the students in my first year seminar tomorrow as part of their orientation. It'll be my first in person meeting with students in ages. This is also my first first year seminar in a long time, so I'm thinking about what in the biz is known as "college transition" - one of the objects of a first year seminar - in new ways. Almost all us, faculty as well as students, are transitioning back to campus life this time! What is it we do together in a classroom? How do we get the most out of it?

Book binding

Back in my office again, after more than a year - and not just for a fleeting visit! This panorama makes the walls of books seem a little more oppressive than they were... It might just be that the trees in the courtyard have grown to fill the window? But I admit it was a vertiginous experience. I realized I've not been in the presence of so many books in a long time, not to mention books I once knew!

Drenched

Up the Hudson a bit we missed the worst of Henri. But patches of wet and dry and even sun punctuated the day, as in this view from the train. And a sudden soaking squall ambushed us just as we got home.

Precipitous

We'd planned a final quick Hudson Valley getaway from the City before the fall - Beacon! - but didn't reckon with Henri! Yesterday was lovely but today Henri, downgraded to a tropical storm but still full of water, brought various versions of soaking. We've quickly become regulars at Bank Square Coffeehouse.

Chez Henri

 Some excitement coming to town, well perhaps a little east of town.

Cleared to enter

I headed down to school today thinking there was a chance our building might be open. It wasn't, but I was able to confirm my vaccination and testing permissions were in order and enter the University Center, where I had the Faculty Lounge all to myself. It's a little overwhelming to think about all the spaces that have stood empty for more than a year filling up again with voices and bodies.

Flood flash

My enthusiasm over Jeremy Davies' take on Noah's dove led me to an exciting new study of the importance of Noah's flood to emergent western thinking about humanity's place in the planetary environment. 

After the Flood confirms something I'd ambiently known - that the Flood was understood by many European thinkers in the early modern period to have been the cause of great natural devastation - and spells out its new salience for the challenges of our own time. 16th-18th century debates about the Flood make it a kind of precursor to the Anthropocene discovery of the human species as a geological, planetary agent. The "age-old humanist distinction between human history and natural history" which Dipesh Chakrabarty thinks the Anthropocene disrupts isn't that old; in Flood narratives, the two are closely entwined, natural disorder the consequence of human acts.

But Lydia Barnett goes further. The idea of humanity as a planetary force emerged as a by-product of debates between and among Protestants and Catholics over questions about sin, salvation, and free will. (4) The story of the Flood makes necessary (and possible) a "universal history" of all of humanity and its spread over the whole earth - a history haunted by sin and the degenerative consequences of its punishment. The resulting accounts, speculating about what human bodies were like in Eden, about how the world was resettled after the Flood, and about the great Apocalypse denouement when this story ends served the interests of mission as well as imperialism, and fed fateful ideas of racial difference (the "curse of Ham"?!) and climatic determinism. Discussing the Flood this way was largely abandoned for the three centuries leading to our own time but, Barnett argues, it leaves an imprint on the ways we now fumble to make sense of the Anthropocene. It is perhaps no accident, she suggests, that diluvian language remains pervasive, as in Laudato Si´ description of a world "flooded" with human-caused disturbance. Further,

the images that tend to predominate, at least in popular and public-focused portrayals of anthropogenic climate change, are all of water: of icebergs melting, sea levels rising, waves lapping at the coast, and cities being inundated. This language and imagery, I suspect, derives considerable force from its recollection and reactivation of deep cultural myths about the awesome power of floods to ruin the world as the unintended result of human behavior. (19)

Human beings have not actually been planetary agents before (speaking non-biblically...), but in the "long seventeenth century" some relatively cosmopolitan Europeans imagined such agency. Since some of today's thinking about about our species' new status is probably subliminally guided by the Flood template, we'd do well to be aware of its "baggage."

There's so much to enjoy in After the Flood, not least the vindication of the excitement of early modern history (once my stomping ground) and of the possibility that religious and scientific thinking might be able to work together: when modern thought is ignorantly and ahistorically secularized it becomes brittle and proud. 

But Barnett's argument is a little different from what I find myself wanting to argue about pre-Anthropocene imaginings of the entwinement of human and natural history. Naturally the kind of agency the Flood narrative imagines really has nothing to do with the actual agency IPCC reports confront us with; ours is not triggered by some extramundane force putting the kibosh on us, though there are ways its insidious and unintended effect resonates with earlier understandings of sin, and the richer Aristotelian understandings of causality of premodern Europe. Barnett would have us notice both the unexpected parallels and deeper differences such as this as ways of learning to free ourselves from the power of these "deep cultural myths," engaging though they may be.

I'm more inclined to want to reclaim early and pre-modern ideas. We were not "planetary agents" in the Anthropocene sense, but we knew we lived in dynamic exchange and relation with the more than human world. Stories like the Flood were extrapolations from more local experiences of entwinement and the unsuspected consequences of our cupidity. The Flood itself grounds a shared history of humanity in relationship with the rest of life if not the Earth, elaborated in well-intentioned ways by irenic early modern scholars, but it may not be one to reclaim for the reasons Barnett makes clear, and others too: I can't help seeing the post-Flood resettlement of the world as a template for a settler colonial understanding of human (read: European) history reclaiming terra nulls, for instance. 

Gratte-ciel

Happened to find myself at Columbus Circle this evening, seeing the new crop of super slender luxury towers disappear in the clouds.

Full house

Despite anxious concerns from faculty and staff emerging from over a year of homebound contingency planning and worst case scenario-ing, it's all systems go for the new semester, which begins in two weeks. At webinars on safety and on teaching last week, administrative committees confidently addressed all our questions, breezily zipping over the space between questions of whether and answers of how. "Is teaching on campus the safest option given delta etc?" "This is how we'll all return to campus." Students are ready to press play, too. Apparently there's been so little summer melt (accepted students who say they'll come in June but have changed their plans by August) that we're scrambling to find spaces in classes for them all.

PoGitA

The payoff of my "Problem of Good in the Anthropocene" is that something like a problem of evil mindset is among the problems we need to confront, and a problem of good mindset would be not only a good alternative but useful for facing Anthropocene challenges.

What's the problem of evil mindset and what are is problems? It expects order and even takes it for granted and is indignant at its breaching. When disorder arises, it seems an exception either explicable in the particular case or not - in which case it escalates to a systemic question. That abstract description doesn't do it justice but it has the same structure as the mindset I'm calling in question. I don't want to say that at a particular heartbreak people are somehow mistaken to ask broader questions about what's going on, indeed to find their confidence in the whole shaken. Going through the crucible of loss people might change their understanding of the whole... but it won't be through grappling with the problem of evil. More likely will be finding some echo of their grief beyond themselves, in other people or in the more than human world, a discovery more likely to come through lament than through the prissiness of the problem of evil. Fixation on the problem of evil separates the mourner from the affronting world, also separating the lost from the world which it had been part of, a talisman of the untrustworthiness of the world.

What is the problem of good mindset? Amazed and grateful it tries not to take good for granted, something it knows requires some effort. We take order and good for granted not just through habit but because they invite us to. The problem of good mindset knows that breaches in order will arrive, but thinks that focusing only on those moments of rupture is incomplete. Pain and betrayal should make us appreciate shattered blessings even more. The problem is not that a good order is assailed by something outside it, but that good is fragile - and it is fragile because it is good. (I'll parse the relationship with the idea that true good is invulnerable some other time.) Evil is able to compromise and pervert it because of something like the same invitation that leads us to take it for granted. This doesn't make evil any less evil, but it should change our response to evils as well as goods. Greater awareness of the porosity of the good should help us commit more effectively to helping it persist, and may make us more compassionate when it fails. And where the problem of evil cauterizes the wound, separating us and the victims of evil from the world, the attention of the problem of good mindset is drawn to particulars in the miracle of their becomings, becomings which are, given the porosity of the good, always relational.

It is not inured to the pain of evil, nor does it accept it. But it is impatient with a fixation on disappointed expectations and ruptures rather than connections and the discovery of new affinities. To use language from Donna Haraway, the problem of good is about sympoietic ongoingness. And it demands we stay with the trouble.

Dipesh mode

In the book-length elaboration of his influential 2009 essay "The Climate of History: Four Theses," Dipesh Chakrabarty reproduces the original essay, "revised and renamed." Some changes are larger and some smaller, but one of the smaller seeming is large indeed. It involves the very first "Thesis":

Anthropogenic Explanations of Climate Change Spell the Collapse of the Age-old Humanist Distinction between Natural History and Human History 

This was the original formulation (2009: 201). Revised (2021: 26), it omits the phrase "Age-old." It might seem no more than a rounding error, it but it betokens Chakrabarty's discovery, over a decade of criticisms and debates, that the "humanist distinction between natural history and human history" isn't perhaps so very old at all. Unchanged is a more cautious claim to long-standing status:

In unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honored distinction between natural and human histories, climate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been. Humans now wield a geological force. (206/30)

Chakrabarty's concern is the discipline of history as it developed in Europe, and he traces the distinction to Vico (1668-1744), although he notes Vico's ideas didn't really shape historiography until the 20th century with Croce and Collingwood. Still, it's significant that he casually referred to the distinction as "age-old" in 2009 and then reconsidered. 

The much-cited line "Humans now wield a geological force" can be taken in two ways. One, that of the "climate scientists," claims to describe a very recent development: while human beings have shaped our biological environments for thousands of years, we haven't affected the biogeochemical earth system until now. The other way of taking the claim, Chakrabarty's own, asserts that this new status - once recognized - ust scramble all our inherited ways of understanding our place in nature. Never before have we even imagined that the human species might be a "geological agent."

This latter claim turns out not to be true - and the "time-honored" distinction may be no older than, well, the age of the Anthropocene! When did we imagine humanity might be a geological agent before?

A common myth among moderns (who think we make do without myths!) is that premodern people were incurious about the world, chalking everything up to some generic divine plan. But this is how modern people understand divine plans. Early modern and premodern Europeans knew that the divine plan was multifaceted, came in several steps, and had encountered obstacles - and one of these was human. We all know the story that God sent a flood because human sin was too great, and wonder what ancient inundation is recorded in this memory-become-myth. But we have forgotten that the mass of the floodwaters was thought to have reshaped the earth, whose contours and history premoderns, too, used their best available resources to try to understand. It looked disordered to them, and they came to understand it in relation to the human penchant for disorder. 

Then as now human beings confronted in geology the sign and effect of their sinfulness. This geological agency was indirect or unintended, of course, but that makes it more, not less, like the agency of which the Anthropocene makes us aware. Perhaps one of the stories we need to tell is how (western) people forgot their potential for wielding geological force! The "age" of this not-so "time-honored" distinction may be that which Bonneuil and Fressoz in ch. 9 of Shock of the Anthropocene provocatively call the Agnotocene, a recent era of produced "zones of ignorance."

Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History: Four Theses," Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197-222; The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, 2021)

Dry and not so high

The first official water shortage in the Colorado River system has been announced, with rolling consequences for states dependent on its waters. Here's a surreal view from what remains of Lake Powell.

Graveyard of empires

Far faster than expected, but how different an outcome from what our policy makers had reconciled themselves to? The rest of us, too? I see this picture and think Saigon ("manifestly," Secretary Blinken), but also can't help assuming the view of those in and with access to helicopters. Even in panicked disarray, "we" are the ones who get away, who have somewhere to get away to. Not so the Afghans...

Who counts?

Some of the results of the 2020 census have been released, producing banner headlines and maps galore about the changing racial composition of the US - putting paid to the promise to be a nation representative (albeit through settlement...) of the whole world, not just Europe. But we know that these results will be used by Republicans to gerrymander continued white dominance in state and probably national elections. Indeed, several such states will have more representatives because of their growing diverse populations, even as cynical redistricting will keep their congressional delegations disproportionately white. Depressing - and depressingly consistent with a history which began with the infamous "three-fifths clause" of the US Constitution. Counting enslaved persons as less than fully human was horrendous. So was the presumption of their enslavers, whose political voice was enhanced by usurping the mandates of those who could not vote - and the acquiescence of their white confrères. (Constitutional literalists, especially those who think the Constitution immaculately conceived, are as poor readers of this as of other scriptures they revere; the three-fifths clause appears in the very first article of the Constitution, and wasn't touched by amendment for most of a century.) Such usurpation seems to be business as usual still. Critical race theorist, me?

Fire and ice

I tore through this book - a new Anthropocene novel which happens also to be authored by a colleague - last week but didn't have a chance to tell you about it. It's terrific, incredibly well written and often outrageously fun. (I wouldn't have throught a "California noir" about the making of a movie, one of whose stars is inspired by Lindsay Lohan, could have captured my interest but I was hooked.) But it also left me devastated in ways I couldn't quite articulate. I can't say much now either without spoilers, but let me say this much. Kleeman doesn't just write snappy dialogue interspersed with pitch-perfect set pieces but has an amazing gift for describing sensory experiences, from sights and sounds to smells and textures - so precise and apposite you realize that we share a sensory world. So when some people in the novel come down with an (of course anthropogenic) illness which destroys their capacity to name and even distinguish their experiences, you mourn the loss of every detail of the shared world her language has illuminated for us.

Weather

These days of Excessive Heat Warnings all end in dramatic storms!

Through the roof

A fascinating new article by Jeremy Davies, whose work on deep time I already commend whenever I can,  offers the story of Noah's Ark as a framework for Anthropocene thinking - but not the Noah's Ark you think you know. Like several other important things, the story of the Flood appears doubled in the Hebrew Bible, and Davies concentrates on the one scholars trace to "J," the "Yahwist." Unlike the other one by the later priestly "P," J's God doesn't undo the very process of creation through the Flood but merely "sterilised" the earth of all life, while saving its essence in the Ark as a sort of seed bank. While P provides details on how the animals will be fed, etc., J's story provides no such detail: time stands still. With Davies' help we understand that being in the Ark was no picnic, but an experience of literally suspended animation. And where P's has a window, J's is just a box with a small hatch on the roof - the one through which Noah, utilizing an ancient navigational technique, eventually lets a dove out to see if land is near. Without even a window, the passengers had no way of seeing what was going on, no horizon.

In order for life to continue, it can't watch from the safety of distance but has to risk part of itself. Davies' article is called "Noah's Dove," because the reconnection to the world comes with the dove's three flights - first, returning with nothing; then, after a week of Noah's care, returning with an olive branch - proof that plants had survived or recovered; and finally, after another week on the Ark, flying away not to return. He makes beautiful poetic sense of this.

A venerable exegetical tradition treats the dove as an archetype of faithfulness. It twice returns to Noah and its mate, in the same way that, as Matthew Henry put it, ‘a Gracious Soul [. . .] returns to Christ as to its Ark’ (1707, s. v. Gen. 8:6–12). And yet on its third flight the dove departs, never to look back. That third flight bears witness to a fidelity deeper than faithfulness: to an affect that penetrates the dove’s being even more deeply, like the fidelity of water to the pull of gravity. The dove is the first creature to fall in love with the postdiluvian world. (344)

Life and the earth belong together, something Anthropocene discussions often bracket or even forget. And our interdependence on other forms of life isn't only about us - the dove, without whose aid we might still be in the box, ultimately finds its own home. We belong to the world, a world greater than us. Davies likens the dove to J's God who, once his rage has assuaged by an offering from Noah, decides "in his heart" not again to destroy life, and restores the cycles which weave our lives and the world's together: seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night (Gen 8:22). But this is "in his heart": unlike P's Noah, J's Noah isn't told. 

The most striking thing of all about his affirmation is that it does not take the form of a promise or a covenant. Yahweh does not say anything to Noah. He is inscrutable, outside of relation or communication. He makes his vow only ‘in His heart.’ This is a musing, ruminative divinity, who lets go of his vengeful anger as a child might. Even as he dedicates himself to sustaining the world, Yahweh withdraws into his own meditations. He is seen at once in the most personal terms – he is susceptible both to fury and to mollification – and as fundamentally impersonal. In this moment, he is less a lawgiver or patriarch than he is the universe’s heartbeat. Just like the dove, he fulfils his purpose through a certain absence. The world that he affirms is the world of the dove: the world of systemic interconnection, experienced first of all through a sense of belonging that precedes any determination of where or how life belongs on the earth. (346)

It's a beautiful reading, and a useful counterweight to environmental humanities readings of Genesis focused on humans being created in the image of an unearthly God and given an analogous "dominion" over the rest of creation. I can't wait to share it with students. But I'll also have to tell them that no readers of the Bible before the 19th century prised apart the "J" and "P" versions as if one could, or should, stand on its own. Still, the "J" vision was there throughout, if often silenced by the less ecologically wise "P" one. And it's enchanting...

Trending up

Burning house

Images of a house burning, and burnt, by the still roaring Dixie Fire two weeks ago - part of a spread of fire pictures from California, Turkey, Greece and Russia... Just in time for the newest IPCC report, released today. The Times' laconic title: A Hotter Future is Certain, Climate Panel Warns. But How Hot Is Up to Us. IPCC's home page features art by Alisa Singer called "Changing."

Don't be that person

As seen on the New York City subway, a message which more parts of the country need to hear. Other slogans in the same series: Masks are like opinions: everyone should have one and I care for you; you care for me and my favorite Save the life of someone you don't even know.

Not named for me

I'm rereading an early classic essay on - against - the Anthropocene, Eileen Crist's 2013 "On the Poverty of our Nomenclature." The essay refuses the name on the basis that it accepts as fact what is really a normative matter: human dominion over the rest of life on earth. What right have we to claim such dominion? "Anthropocene" discourse makes a fact of what should really be challenged, allowing us to imagine only better and worse forms of dominion. It won't even let us consider renouncing dominion for something better. It's a prophetic provocation, and I find I needed its reminder that "Anthropocene" has a fatalistic acquiescence in human (mis)rule built into it. (It redoubled my intention for the upcoming first year seminar on "Anthropocene Humanities" to end with new work on kinship with other than human nature, about which more anon.) I'd forgotten also where Crist's fussy-sounding title comes from - Henry David Thoreau's indignation, in Walden, at the presumption of a man named Flint who proudly named the pond next to his farm after himself.

Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like;—so it [Flints’ Pond] is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, who never thanked God that he had made it.

Environmental Humanities 3 (2013): 129-47, 142

Ghostly

Some spectral sights on a swing downtown: Maya Lin's "Ghost Forest" of dead trees in Madison Square Park, which oblivious New Yorkers took in their stride, dead trees making for better sunbathing. And a play of reflections in the entrance to Lang, unused since last March but re-opening soon!

FISP plus

Busy day of façade work on our building. The co-op board's decided to get ahead of the next round of required inspections, too, so on all sides teams of workers have been taking out and later replacing bricks which might come loose some day. All for the best, no doubt, but it made for a dentist-like experience of drilling... 

Gallery view

This cartoon from the latest New Yorker, by Leise Hook, perfectly names (frames!) the zoomiform world which has become our default.

PoGitA 2

Yesterday I tried to write a refresher on the "problem of evil" - see below if you dare. That's the common name for a set of issues which has exercised me since graduate school in various ways. I had lots to say - more, almost certainly, than my argument about the "problem of good" in the Anthropocene requires. But it was a useful exercise, at least for me. A few things it helped me surface:

1) Evil is a deeper problem than the existence of bad things, bad people, mortality. Once you come down from the abstraction of philosophical questioning, you find in each evil a wrenching mystery. To give some current examples: this life cut short by fleeting exposure to a virus, that willingness to live in lies in order to maintain the only world one can imagine true, this devastation of one population by the heedlessness of another far away, that murderous scapegoating and dehumanization... I've always thought that "evil" is overrated. Whatever its origins, it's interesting only because it is succesful. For me the true horror is the good things that evil destroys, and the scandal is why it succeeds. How is it that charlatans gain a following? Why is good susceptible to becoming the victim of evil - and its agent? Good is corruptible because it is good: open, resonant, available, eager for connection. 

2) Perhaps because evil confronts us with this porousness of the good, it is tempting to distance oneself from both. Modern western thought is focused unsustainably on evil rather than good, but its understanding of the problem of evil draws from hellenistic sources. Like its hellenistic forebears, it works out different ways of coming to terms with a disappointing world without being hurt by it. While religion isn't the only or even perhaps best way to allow oneself to be be heartbroken over evil, the truest response to evil is to let our hearts break.

3) What our hearts break over isn't the existence of evil but the precarious miracle of good - that is, goods. We relate differently to that miracle post-Darwin (goodbye argument from design) and post-Margulis (goodbye indifferent universe of competition), but the precarity and the miraculousness of life are perhaps clearer than they have ever been - or can be, if we can resist the commoditizing consciousness of consumer capitalist culture.

4) Traditions, including those we term "religious," can help us lean into the awareness of the fragile and irreplaceable good. They teach us how to open our hearts to breaking, and not to flee into fantasies of invulnerability, permanence or oblivion.

All this is what I mean by "the problem of good," a problem in an urgent new way in the Anthropocene... 

Yesterday:

So what is the problem of evil again? My musings on a problem of good take for granted that people are familiar with it, but it's been a while since I've had occasion to spell it out.

In its narrowest sense, the problem of evil is a topic in monotheistic philosophy of religion. The classic formulation comes in David Hume, referring back to the hellenistic philosopher Epicurus. 

Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered.

Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent.

Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent.

Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?

(Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)

"Evil," as Aquinas argued, has always been the greatest challenge to faith in God. This articulation of the problem, sometimes referred to as the "trilemma," juxtaposes the reality of evil with the supposed omnipotence and benevolence of God, and seems to leave only unattractive options: an impotent God, a malevolent God, or none at all! This stark "problem of evil" is a perennial favorite of philosophy of religion classes, meeting students struggling with the claims of religious traditions. A friend in graduate school put it succinctly: the problem of evil is the main reason people leave religions - or at least change their affiliation.

Philosophers of religion have teased out a "logical" and "evidential" version of the challenge, but my approach has always been a little different. With William James I've never thought that people believe because of philosophical arguments, though arguments may help some live into beliefs they're already inclined toward. And from Robert Merrihew and Marilyn McCord Adams I know that for theistic believers, the trilemma constitutes not an ultimatum - which of these is false? - but a mystery - how can they all be true? God is for them no less a reality than evil is. How can both be real? It's a different project, which the Adamses called "aporetic." This has inspired my understanding that part of what religious traditions do is let us abide with important questions, especially the ones we can't seem to answer. On the problem of evil they provide things like the Book of Job, which is everything but an answer. Traditions keep difficult questions open (at least some of the time!). It's not that one or more of the trilemma premisses may have to go, but that each seems a squib for more profound, and more existentially involving, realities. The glib atheist who concludes "no God, no problem!" seems out of touch with the true claims of all these realities, including even evil.

One can go in a few directions from here. One is into the other resources which traditions generate and are generated by as they allow us to abide with otherwise overpowering mysteries. These range from narratives to liturgies to contemplative practices - all of which overlap in practice. I've explored this most fully in connection with the Book of Job where I'm always at pains to emphasize that what readers find in Job (already a tangle of stories and ideas) is shaped by what other texts or stories they are committed to. Genesis? Psalms? Ecclesiastes? The Gospels? Oral and apocryphal traditions? Jewish and Christian interpretations of Job differ and should differ. Jewish and Christian traditions aren't "monolithic, impermeable, tightly systematic, and unitary wholes" (to borrow Thatamanil's words) anyway but congeries of overlapping communities, shifting canons of practice and thought and ongoing conversation. Each of these conversations, like the diverse early Christian communities, has its own set of other questions and commitments, its own tools for approaching challenges of various sorts. Until modern times none would have thought to understand the Book of Job by itself - or to understand the mystery of evil through Epicurus' old questions. Evil is no simple reality or, to put it another way, if evil is real then reality is more mysterious than we thought. Traditions marshall all the resources they can find for these challenges, leaving the thin air of philosophical fiddles with the trilemma far behind.

Emboldened by the wealth of materials proffered by biblical traditions, one might go in a second direction and question "Epicurus' old questions." Hume traces them to Epicurus, although (as I argued a long time ago) it makes more sense to see it as Skeptical than Epicurean. In either case, it's a hellenistic question, not only not a part of biblical monotheism but not part of the monotheistic world at all. It's certainly interesting that this philosophical formulation emerged in the space where these different ways of responding to late antique polytheism overlapped. (Stoic responses to it clearly shaped emerging Christian thought.) We'll see in the next paragraph that it suggests this may be a general or generalizable problem. But for the moment it's useful to tag it as emerging in a space where the gods seem distant, where human must decide what relation to take to them. The gods Epicurus has in mind, after all, are indifferent to things they can't change, and serve for us as models for a similar detachment. This isn't the space most monotheists occupy, or wasn't until the early modern period, when hellenistic forms of thinking reemerged in a big way (in part as a lingua franca for a Christian world divided against itself). Susan Neiman has argued that the problem of evil is the defining concern of modern western thought - a sign of the importance of this hellenistic revival. But one might also say that hellenistic philosophies aren't, well, very deep. Therapeutically powerful but existentially thin. It may be that not only the gods but the evils they describe are a little too conjectural. All promise to help one avoid getting one's heart broken by life, but it may be that such heartbreak is the beginning of true humanity.

A third direction one might go is to say that the problem is not only not exclusive to monotheism but may be broader than theism or even religion itself. What is the problem, then? Philosophers of religion distinguish moral and natural evils - wickedness and suffering - but the greatest intellectual challenge may be the perennial mismatch between these, however we understand them, and the greatest existential demand for the Anthropocene the increasing impossibility of distinguishing them. Max Weber took this idea and ran with it, appropriating the term "theodicy" for the problem spurring religious intellectuals on, in every tradition. Intellectuals, he argued, work to make of experience a "meaningful cosmos," refining and deepening the assumptions of their traditions as they do so. He thought there were a few "rationally satisfying" solutions sprinkled across the world religions, but that none of these was existentially bearable. All made one want to exit this "ethically irrational" world, perhaps into the maw of mysticism. The world may or not be "ethically irrational" in this way but clearly much religious creativity (and retrenchment) can be traced to the effort to shore up systems of practice and belief in the face of painful realities. And it does seem that these realities can be described, to a point, in general terms. These general terms make comparative religion possible, even as they construct "religions" in ways the hellenistic philosophers might have recognized. And they suggest that the problem of evil is not a problem only for religious folks. There is something in the reality of evil - in the reality of a reality which contains evil - which wrenches every human attempt to find meaning, a home in the world.

But of course, and so we come finally to the problem of good, it may be that challenges of wickedness, suffering and bad things happening to good people aren't the only challenge to thought, the only thing that might touch the heart in a profound way. With or without Weber's help it's clear that deep pondering on the varieties and processes of "evils" point one to ontological abysses - and peaks. This is more than run of the mill duhkha. How can evils do such harm? Where do they come from? There are other conundra, too. How can good nevertheless come out of evil, as it so often does? As moderns, fed the thin gruel of Neo-hellenistic philosophy for a few centuries, we almost need to be backed into the problem of good. You know, this one:

If there be a God, from whence proceed so many evils?

And if there be no God, from whence cometh any good?

(Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy)

This is no more an argument for the existence of divinity than Epicurus' old questions are arguments against it. It points rather to a second set of reasons for wonder. It reminds us that,  although we accept them as a matter of course, the existence of things for evil to despoil isn't obvious. Boethius ends up going in a more hellenistic direction: none of these things should matter as much to as as they customarily do, compared to eternal things. But the question is a profound one. Excavating it is my project, which begins with wondering why it needs excavating in the first place. If evils are so evident that we assume they can be defined in a general and generalizable way comprehensible to people of every and no faith tradition, why not also goods?

A whole bunch of problems rear their heads at this point: awareness of deep cultural difference and the ways it has been silenced by universalizing discourses, as well as a batch of skepticisms regarding the ontological bona fides of our judgments of good. Aren't they just things we like? Don't cultures have greatly differing understandings of the good? Anyway, aren't any and all the things someone might choose to call good just things produced by the random and morally neutral processes of evolution - and inseparale from whatever we might deem evil? The hellenistic temptations are strong to conclude that, in the end, nothing really matters. Except for evil! Can we make evil matter without letting the goods it compromises matter in the same way?

I've heard a sort of hellenistic response to the Anthropocene from some students: it's good to know that though the human story end Earth will survive, that life will endure. Things come and things go, that's the way of the world. Geological time scales make it hard to see things any other way. Sure, we get sentimental about our vanishingly thin slice of history, but really it's no big deal. A shame, but not a problem. Maybe, in fact, it's time for us to go. Also in its way hellenistic is the apparently contrasting thought that, though life as we know it (especially non-human life) is doomed, humanity will find a way to adjust, whether on this planet or somewhere else.

But, but, but, one wants to say, how dare we come to terms with the great destruction we have unleashed? The potential extinction of other species matters because their existence does. Whether we understand this in terms of the beauty or ingenuity of individual species or their valued place in ecosystems, the deeper reality is their existence at all, the existence of life, which, now, belatedly, again we are learning not to take for granted.

(may change!)

The new semester begins four weeks from today! My syllabi are far from finished, though this one - for Theorizing Religion - looks more naked than it is: I'm transforming it from a twice-weekly to a weekly class. Meanwhile guidance of various sorts is starting to trickle in - it'll become a torrent soon enough. Here's a snibbet of the latest:

Spaced out together

I ushered at church today, so got the wide view - more than the livestream can show. Summer congregation size allows for generous spacing, and the pallets of food for the Pantry Program fit right in, offering no obstruction to the glorious sound of the organ and soloist.