Weekly Digest – December 6, 2020

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I didn’t find the time I’d hoped to pick a few good paragraphs from most these pieces.  Where I didn’t just a sentence or two about why each is worth your time:

On WNYC’s On the Media, listen to Elizabeth Hinton explain—in the wake of mass public response over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolice police—how the institution of policing in the United States has shifted over time, how police became the default agency for responding to emergencies, and how we might imagine and fund a different approach to keeping communities safe.

  • Joshua Mitchell interviewed by Richard Reinsch II, The Spiritual Quest of Identity Politics.  Mitchell gets some things very wrong, e.g., his assessment and portrayal of The Green New Deal, but I think he’s onto a few things, e.g., secular frameworks for attempting to purify the self which have historically been the province of religion.

I understand that the question of original sin is involved in all sorts of huge debates between Protestants and Catholics, I’m actually trying to go back and move beyond that debate and say, “What does it mean for us today in light of identity politics?” My point is, if it’s original, then we can’t solve the problem of stain and impurity by purging another group, which is exactly what identity politics is trying to do. The Christian claim is, the only way out is to recognize that all of us are broken, whatever we may have done to each other as groups or individuals, all of us are broken… There’s no mortal innocence.

Is it possible to be at home in this world? The foundation stories of very different cultures, from very different times and places, seem to tell us that it was once, but that things are different now. In India, the Mahabharata tells a story of cyclical time, moving from a primal unity towards dissolution and collapse, after which the cycle begins again. The final era of the cycle, the Kali Yuga, is overseen by the dark goddess of disintegration, war, strife: humans move further and further away from the sacred centre where truth is to be found, deeper into their own small selves. The Kali Yuga, needless to say, is our time.
Here in the West, the same tale is told as the story of four ages. The primal unity, in this case, is represented by the Golden Age, long in the past, in which humans lived in balance with the world. The subsequent degradation moves downward through Silver and Bronze ages to our own Iron Age, a time again of egoism and strife. This in turn is mirrored by the fulcrum-story of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the myth of the Fall. Again, we hear of a time in which humans lived in deep communion with God and with Earth, in a garden no less. We could have stayed there for eternity, but there is something in us, some thorn, that will not grow that way. We wanted more, we wanted knowledge and power, we wanted to beat God at His own game. We were banished from the garden, and now we wander as exiles, torn between pleading to be let back in and defiantly building our own, better home here on Earth: a genetically-modified smart garden, arranged entirely around our own self-love….
What interested me [during my time running the Dark Mountain Project, from 2009 to 2017], and still does, is a simple question: where can we find writers who could paint a picture of the world beyond our tired Occidental stories, whether the mainstream stories of progress’n’growth or the well-worn counter-cultural ruts of ‘resistance’, ‘social justice’ and a more egalitarian version of megacity machine living? And in particular, my ongoing question: are there any writers out there who can point the way back to the garden?….
The best answer that I ever found came from a modest Indian man whose surname I still do not know, despite having corresponded with him, and published him, for years. I can’t remember how we came across Narendra, or whether he came across us, but when I look back now I think that his writings were some of the most important that Dark Mountain ever published.
All that I know about Narendra comes from his writing, and he gives little of his story away there… From 1980 until 2013, Narendra lived in and then visited the remote Abujhmad region of Bastar, one of the last bastions of traditional Adivasi people in India. When he first visited, the region was virtually untouched by the outside world. There were none of the intrusions of the modern state – schools, roads, sewage systems, taxes, ideologies and the rest… The region had ‘neither trade nor industry, commerce, occupation or other modern apparatus,’ he explains. Perhaps not coincidentally, ‘neither was there hunger, starvation, beggary or lingering disease.’ The people lived in tiny bamboo and thatch huts, but their real home was the land itself. When Narendra asked one Adivasi why they didn’t build bigger homes, given all the land available to them, he didn’t understand the question. ‘This is our home’, he said, indicating the forest itself.
Perhaps this is the first lesson. The Adivasis of Abujhmad did not live ‘close to the land.’ They were the land. The conceptual understanding of the world which Western people, whether imperious progressives or dreamy Romantics, might wish to impose on their life will inevitably be wrong, because there is no ‘conceptual understanding’, there is only being.