There is…a way of disqualifying the metaphysicians. Judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods? ….what tangible good have they done for mankind?…. Step by step, before the advance of science [the metaphysicians] have been driven back.”
–Socialist revolutionary protagonist Ernest Everhard in Jack London’s The Iron Heel
…my belief in the profanity of technology is not widely shared. While there have been astute religious critics of the machine, it appears that many spiritual leaders and thinkers are as swept up in the Machine’s propaganda system as anyone else.
– Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: The Unmaking of Humanity
[America is] the first culture in history that has colonized itself.
–Robert Bly, The Sibling Society
Just outside of Utica, in the barn of a once-working farm owned by friends, each summer for the last 10 years, a Shakespeare play is staged. Even back in the 1980s and 90s when young Allen Wilcox, an actor and now director of this theater, was growing up there, it was past its active dairy farm years. Now the big white barn, fully repurposed, is Allen’s and his family’s quite splendid theater arts project. He brings up actor friends from NYC, and draws in many people from the local community to take parts in the plays, help out with staging and set design, etc., and to serve as ushers and hosts on theater nights. The theater is part of a small local cultural renaissance that began in the 20-oughts, in which it is no exaggeration to say our Cafe in Utica, now gone, and the arts space next door, The Other Side, still going, played a significant part.
Without then having the name for it, I see these creations of Orin’s and mine now as acts of what writer Paul Kingsnorth, drawing from a book titled The Question of Class Struggle (1982), by Craig Calhoun, calls “reactionary radicalism.” According to Calhoun, who wrote about the doomed resistance of the pre-industrial people in England, the term refers to “movements of people who would fight against the coming of industrial society, who had traditional communities to preserve (hence “reactionary”)…and were radical populists in that they “rejected the very foundations on which capitalist society was being built in England.”
Different from the book clubs, choral and chamber music societies, writers’ and poets groups that had preceded it, and had existed quietly in the background of local public life, and different from the more established arts organizations that have to keep soft-pedaling art to get as many paying customers through their doors as possible, the Cafe in a quite radical way more or less proclaimed the Humanities tradition and the making of art as fundamental to defending humanity and a culture. We – my husband and I – saw them, as much as local businesses – as an alternative to the mechanization – and now I would say also to the colonization – of our humanity. Once someone has done something such as start up independent Shakespeare productions in our left-behind region in this culturally exhausted age, you know they have some ideas going for them that are not limited to manifestations of ego. (The recent New York Post joke that Uticans were supposed to take umbrage at, suggesting the reason real estate prices are so low here is that nobody wants to live in Utica, I guess made Manhattanites feel better about the outrageous cost of housing paid for the supreme privilege of living in NYC!)
In late July, at this year’s performance of The Tempest, I was seated in the barn next to a young man, Greg, attending with his wife, whom I’ve known for at least 20 years as a thoughtful, leftward, committed idealist. Now in his late forties, he is in the midst of starting his second family after a painful breakup a decade or more ago. He and his new wife, she too in her forties, are expecting child #2, while his oldest child, from the previous marriage, is off to college in the fall. After letting go of his family’s local food business, a work he disliked, he’s now employed as an engineer in a fairly large local firm. There, as Greg admitted to me that night, he and his colleagues labor to enrich the owners, the adult children of the actual founder, all of whom live “out West somewhere.” Further, he admitted ruefully, the company adds nothing to the world that could be construed as contributing to any social, environmental or other idealistic good. Towards the end of our conversation, he divulged that the new family had been made possible by a vasectomy reversal (I interrupt this broadcast with a warning to those opting for transgender surgeries for which there may be no reversal! That is, it is not unusual to change one’s mind having made such a very permanent decision!) Suffice to say the quiet happiness of the young couple sitting next to me was sweetly palpable.
I offer this little glimpse as evidence that I do know the complications that come with any hope of extricating ourselves from the world made possible to us by technology – no matter what it is doing to our humanity. Instead of giving up, however, I am tending to “go for broke” in my envisioning what is still possible that could offer resistance to the Machine and its technology, which author Paul Kingsnorth – fully reasonably in my view–identifies as profane. Although other writers and thinkers have sounded notes of alarm about this revolution, few have taken critique as far. Rare (I’m guessing) among those who will express doubts about the future technology is moving us towards, he admits his respect for the ideas of the late poet/mythopoetic men’s movement leader Robert Bly. This influence is important to mention. To take Bly seriously as a prophetic voice in regard to technology’s advance is to blatantly disobey the rule that only science can provide us with authoritative knowledge.
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Another bit of evidence for how far we leftward people are from unbamboozling ourselves from the dominant techno-progress-all-good reality came my way recently. In the latest installment of his Peoples’ Classroom, attended by an astonishing (for Utica, I mean) 50 people or so, teacher “Luigi” focused on Native American history. There were not a lot of surprises for me in this talk, for I have done a fair amount of reading in that history. However, living as we Mohawk Valley-ites do next door to the Oneida Nation’s Turning Stone Casino, one of the most successful casinos in the country, Luigi did disabuse us of any idea that the casinos have been good for native Americans as a whole. Not at all – the majority of native Americans still live in the direst poverty, lead all other minorities in suicides, etc. Towards the end of his talk, he spoke about contemporary efforts by Native Americans to get their land back. After purchasing some of their original lands back from the town of Sherrill in 1998, the Oneida Nation maintained that the properties should be tax-exempt. Their exemption was upheld in 2 NYS courts, but when sent to the Supreme Court, it was voted down 8 to 1.
Luigi wanted us to know that Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the woman “lionized,” as he put it, by liberal progressives, voted with the majority – with Thomas, Scalia, et al, saying in her opinion, “too much time has passed since the original treaty was signed.” Coming at the end of the shameful history we’d just revisited, one could sense the news was hitting the mark with the audience. Then Luigi went on to show us some more of Ginsberg’s lesser-known stands and votes, including numerous votes against Black people’s and Native people’s interests. About Colin Kaepernick’s famous taking of the knee during the George Floyd protests, she called his action “dumb and disrespectful.” The one that caught the largest gasp from the audience, however, was her remark about Roe v. Wade, about which her concern was “population growth in groups we don’t want too many of.”
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My preoccupation these days, boringly, tediously philosophical as it sounds, has been how to think outside the insanity of our times that includes this desperate need on the liberal end to find heroes among these in some ways, yes, admirable, but also morally de-based people, that yields without much protest to the technocracy that accomplishes so much good, and yet at the same time is replacing human existence with machine existence. The only basis I have yet found that provides a place to stand against the technocracy in defense of humanity is in that direction so long ago discarded in the materialist, liberal mainstream mind that any advocate of it, especially one speaking outside the religion “box,” like poet Robert Bly, is simply laughable. That basis is that reactionary throwback to tradition – belief in the supernaturally real. And tradition provides the basis not because it has no patience with wishy-washy liberal morality, although it does not, but because it insists that spirituality is not a tool, useful for adding glamor to our liberal vanity, but sovereign.
Moreover, for all the people like myself who cannot receive belief secondhand, there exists another way. The sovereignty I’m talking about is not (entirely) demanding obeisance to someone else’s truth- finding, i.e., the God-inspired oral traditions and scribes behind scripture. It is attained personally and experentially, in the way we’ve been told of by many artists and other mystics in history, but perhaps most authoritatively for Americans by America’s own RW Emerson. That is, it does not matter how dismissive one is of God belief; still and even so, there is a perspective given in the personal soul that does not have to be invented – it is – to those who will sacrifice to have it. This perspective, though our metaphors for it might be different today, is not different from the one preached by Jesus, which, the Church having allied itself with power, has been ignored through Christian history with only a few exceptions.
Just because the Divine voice was hijacked does not mean we don’t need it, just that it has become rarely heard in Western consciousness. Western consciousness, in which power and avarice rule, to which everyone – oligarchs, bourgeois, and the oppressed alike – necessarily adapts, has few exceptions. But it has been safeguarded in monasteries, and has occasionally appeared in the lives of remarkable human beings whom we have considered “great” because through them we glimpsed the great creative heart of humanity.
Let me be the first to acknowledge this direction toward imaginative, spiritual authority is likely to be taken up by very few. The faith and hope and meaning now being put into the relationship with technology keeps so many of us going, such that, more or less, we must forgive its threat, even its real threat to our humanity, which may, after all, just be hyperbole from some Chicken Littles like me.
However, and though I’m no fortuneteller, to the extent that western liberals can reconnect with the depths of meaning in our own souls, a transformational change in hearts, on the leftward end of the political spectrum could have great effect. It could leave room in our beings for an influx of grace sufficient that we, the vast liberal middle, would be no longer politically useful to the oligarchs manipulating ugly resentment-based populism to buttress the neoliberal reality in which human beings are discardable! But this is a goodness that has to show – by their fruits, etc. The choices we make matter. Humbly walking the in-place, people-and-past connected talk is not optional. Following vision, not optional. There is no viable alternative to the triumph of the Machine other than to cultivate the specifically human and humanly imperfect ways of making, building, creating, living our lives in place over lifetimes, in families and communities; to live the spiritual reality of interdependence as sovereign truth. Be creatures, not machines. Start a Shakespeare theater in a region where local theater productions are typically limited to lightweight, highly accessible comedy fare? Turning swords into play-acting – Yes!
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Reading Jack London’s The Iron Heel with our book club turned out at first to be amazingly synchronistic with my metaphysically-oriented thoughts. The book begins with a scene in which the protagonist, very smart socialist revolutionary Ernest Everhard, blasts the complacent beliefs of a gathering of clergymen who’ve been vocalizing concerns for “the working class.” Their metaphysics keeps them up in the air, he charges, above the reality faced by working people; it keeps them on the side of the capitalist owners instead of protesting the horrible working conditions. A tough argument to refute, and easily and even eagerly agreed with today by all of us who would prefer not to have to believe in airy things, materialism being still the only reality that makes sense to modern, imagination-reduced minds.
Interestingly, Ernest also takes off against “machine-breakers,” businessmen who would turn back the clock to the older model of doing business, before the age of conglomerates. Thinking of “reactionary radicalism,” what if London’s businessmen had just taken their thinking further, to realize technology must be used in ways that reinforce the “moral economy,” rather than destroying it? But this would have required London to challenge his own Marxism, which wanted to put workers in charge of the existing factory system, not resist industrial society itself.
The materialist victory has not turned out well. 118 years after The Iron Heel was published, it looks as if – and some of us are seeing this – even that hard-headed, fact-based theorizing that took up the noble cause of the working class – in that triumph, the baby got thrown out with the airy bathwater. Metaphysics is not just airiness out of touch with the world; it’s that which infuses the created world with any meaning at all. Its opposite is not freedom, but nihilism. Science, which has brought us so much of the world we enjoy, now our monotheistic basis for irrefutable truth, has proven itself not to be up to that faith we’ve put in it. Married with technology, science faith is taking us way past sustainability, and into a future where Moloch replaces Christ as king. And as far as the revolution anticipated in The Iron Heel, while the working class still provides the valid basis for socialist critique of capitalism, the poor and oppressed remain the multitude in this world, holding up identity for the rest of us so that we may not be them.
