Nowtopian

I’ve been writing about the absurdity and degradation of buying and selling human time for a quarter century. Sometimes it feels like whistling in the dark, but other times I get a jolt of the incredible vitality of sticking to such a basic truth in the foggy blizzard of daily news and ridiculous obsessions that dominate our culture. As has been happening with increasing frequency for me, things I’m reading suddenly cross over and connect in surprising and inspiring ways. To wit, the April Harper’s magazine has a feature article called “The Spirit of Disobedience: an invitation to resistance” by Curtis White.

For the past few years I’ve been developing friendships with people who are loyal to and involved in some kind of self-described ‘spiritual’ life, even though I’ve always been an atheist, and find most things ‘spiritual’ silly or embarrassing. Nevertheless, there’s a certain emotional and political affinity I feel with these friends and acquaintances that emerges from the fact that we share an engagement with a more complete sense of what it is to be alive, a more multidimensional experience of life than banal empiricism or self-delusional religiosity.

Curtis White’s article is one of the best essays I’ve read in a long time. It starts by recapping the polarization between Christianity and Enlightenment, discussing its obvious presence in our contemporary political world, but tracing its presence way back to colonial America (when it was a split between the Boston Unitarians and the fire-and-brimstone evangelicals in the hinterlands) and of course much further back to Europe’s own religious wars between the hierarchical churches and the philosophical humanism that was rooted in a daily life. But his point is to show how both sides of this apparent opposition share an embrace of capitalism and private property, which ultimately makes them pillars of a culture of death.

“In the end, evangelical Christianity conspires with technical and economic rationalism. In the end, they both require a commitment to ‘duty’ that masks unspeakable violence and injustice… If we live in a ‘culture of death,’ as Pope John Paul II put it, it is a culture that is made possible by the advocates of both Reason and Revelation. In the oppostion of Reason to Revelation, death cannot lose. Ours is a culture in which death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives. Our exploitation of humans as ‘workers’ is legal and somehow, weird and perverse though it may seem, generally acknowledged as part of our heritage of freedom, and virtually the entire political spectrum falls over itself to praise it.”

White goes on to decry the commonplace praise for job creation, and the duty-bound support for militarism that is largely supported across the spectrum as well. Against this monolithic consensus he goes back to find a ‘third option’ in history, one produced by the Enlightenment too, but as suspicious of the claims of Reason (esp. the economic rationalism that defines capitalism) as it is of orthodox religion.

“At its origin is the poetic system devised by William Blake in the late eighteenth century… Christianity, for Blake, bled from Jesus his real substance as prophet/poet. Reason, or Ratio, on the other side, born with the scientific revolution, divided the world from the self, the human from the natural, the inside from the outside, and the outside itself into ever finer degrees of manipulable parts. From Blake’s point of view, both religion and reason were deeply antihuman, destructive errors.”

This reveals my own ignorance and lack of education, but I’ve been aware of the poetic power of Blake for a long time, but still haven’t read him. I also doubt my ability to get the power of it from a direct reading, since the language of that time so often leaves me unmoved. But White’s essay is another of those “Cliff’s Notes” moments where I feel like I’m getting the real meaning without having to do the work. He continues his discussion of Blake by showing how he gave rise to the whole Romantic tradition, embraced ardently by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“In contrast to institutional Christianity, whether dull Unitarians or fiery Evangelicals, Emerson imagined that the world is held together by a spirit that is not of the Church, and certainly not of Reason, but of a direct experience of the world. Emerson made this Romantic idea American, and he gave it first to Henry David Thoreau, then to Whitman, and through Whitman to Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and to so many fractured movements of the recent past and present: the 60s counterculture, the environmental movement, and New Age spiritualism, in particular. They are the heirs to the Imagination’s counter-Enlightenment, with its contempt for the hierarchical authority of the Church and its deep suspicion of what was unleashed by Enlightenment Reason.”

Here we reconnect to my personal experience of meeting people who are genuinely radical and engaged, but (to my mind) oddly committed to the ‘spiritual’. Clearly instrumental Reason has made it possible for scientists and technicians to produce the technologies of mass murder and planetary destruction, thinking all the while that they are doing something ‘good’. But the nature of the ‘spirit’ that so many of my contemporaries are so comfortable embracing has always left me scratching my head or recoiling in anxious horror.

Continue reading Refusal and Spirit