I'm just now picking up the book. Since I don't get the sense this is covered within, to what extent did the Church enable or push back against this mechanization? By the industrial revolution, pagan culture wasn't really a significant force (examples of venture capitalism in Darkest Africa (c) notwithstanding). Europe was squarely Christian well before this.
Wouldn't this kind of materialism require the Church to give up its own intrinsic mysticism if it wanted to remain synonymous or at least parallel with the state?
So, um, the problem is that Europe wasn't really "squarely Christian." Sure, it was nominally so, and there was no actively overt pagan rites, but it's not really true to say Christianity had taken over if people were still doing magical rites and engaging in pagan festival projects, even if those were "christianized." For instance, in one the Werewolf trials, the accused actually got released and merely slapped on the wrist a bit because he claimed to be protecting humans with magic. That minor slap was because he admitted he didn't use Bible verses or say Jesus's name in his spells.
The church kind of held back the tide of this mechanization until the 1500's, but it was precisely their fear of the rising popularity of magical beliefs and the "demonic" that led them to side with the Machine. Jean Bodin, the aforementioned witchhunter and architect of the nation state, was a catholic who'd taken holy orders (he was a Carmelite).
My takeaway from this part of Caliban and the Witch is to expect repression. People have this idea that the witch hunt was caused by ideology or religion or even bad food and that it’s over. But it’s never over. The Red Scare, the Satanic Panic, the War on Terror, Qanon- those who don’t fit the capitalist projects will always be “Satanic” and the capitalists always need to “protect the children”. To my mind, a true pagan cannot be a good capitalist wage-slave because there is an antagonism between an animist valuation of the world and a capitalist one. (The same could be said of other religions which value the world, including some branches of Christianity. I just don’t have a better word than “pagan” to describe someone who sees her/himself as a part of nature with a responsibility to Her.) To the pagan, the body, the experience, and the world are important and money is a delusion. They didn’t kill the pagans (or the recalcitrant peasants) irrationally but rationally. And if we truly live by the ideals that capitalism had to overturn, we will end up in opposition to our corporate overlords.
Boom! My head is exploding wide open upon this chapter. I’ve finally caught up on the book and although I am a new reader to your stuff Rhyd, I agree totally about how important this chapter is.
You know I’ve read over the years so many times how capitalism uses violence against us and as someone that has grown up in a fully capitalist world I’ve never quite “got it”. Sure, I’ve slowly come around to the idea that police are there to protect private property, that took me a while, but this idea of a violence against us was always a little fuzzy.
But then came this chapter. Fuck, I should have read this 20 years ago.
This slow but steady (and very violent) breaking down of the peasant class and turning them into the working class. Death penalties for vagrancy?? Like WTF?!?
And look at us now, we think nothing of showing up to work on time and even feel guilty for taking a day off work when we’re feeling under the weather.
This one chapter just blew apart my world view. Thank you for doing this free Rhyd!!
Now how do I distill all this and slowly teach it to my two little girls so that they have a very healthy distrust of the government, the church, and all authority!
Raising little anarchists is hard work because they always question everything you ask them to do! 😂
I think the best that can be done is to teach (by modeling as well) them that they should never be ashamed of who they are and that they should never diminish themselves to please men or anyone else.
Tell you a story, the other month the girls were blaming each other for using “bad words” (they’re 9 & 6). A dinner table discussion followed in which all the bad words were discussed and their meanings and even allowing the girls to say each out loud. Turns out dada says the “S” word a lot (turned out to be “stupid”, not “shit” haha) and Mama say the “F” word.
So last time we were in the city, Lola dragged them along to mass and the girls surprised us a few days later when they claimed that the priest had said the bad word!
To refer back to my earlier comment regarding ideas and their strength... Do I get it right that you, Rhyd, would say that capitalism and machine logic is not an "idea" but more an "enchantment"? And that therefor an "idea" might be thought of as the "strongest" among ideas in almost a quantitative manner, but an enchantment is a qualitative thing, an unpredictable thing, a thing that has a time and place in, well, the rythm of the cosmos. An enchantment can be faced with a counterspell, so to speak? I'm putting words into your mouth but I'd be really curious if that is what you mean.
“We shape our bodies and wills not towards our own desires, but rather to be model workers, model consumers, and model subjects.”
Powerful stuff. Unfortunately, at least in the case of the model worker, people are compelled by the need to make a living in the current system. How can this be escaped? I suppose labor organizing is one way...
My book has only just arrived. I've been enjoying and learning a lot from all sections that have already been discussed. I'll try to catch up- but may start from chapter four from the get go...
So good Rhyd. I count myself as one of those who, having engaged with a lot of embodiment and earth-centric spiritual practices over the years, has come to an intuitive understanding of these principles. It's helpful to put more intellectual bones on that intuition and understand it in a historical context.
I particularly appreciate your point toward the end about the esoteric perspective on capitalist conditioning. We can analyze this phenomena through a certain layer of reality and call it 'capitalism' or 'the mechanistic worldview' -- and such an explanation can go far. But if we understand reality as multi-dimensional, we might deepen our inquiry to wonder who or what is the source of these ideas? On the energetic plane, it's like there's a battle on the level of vibration for the allegiance of the human soul. As though there is a certain energetic matrix (of fear, greed, envy, etc) woven by a kind of dark wizardry that tempts or seduces humans into developing anti-life ideologies.
Seeing things in this way can lead us to recognize that the remedy needs to involve not merely the undoing of the ideas themselves -- though this is essential -- but also a transmutation of the energetic or vibrational ground from which those ideas spring. A 'counterspell' as one of your readers put it. (I've also called such an approach 'subtle activism'.)
This lucid essay on Chapter Three rang so many bells for me. Chapter Two’s discussion gave me a nightmare about being kidnapped and locked in a car by a grizzly bearded fellow with rape on his mind and left me a bit speechless.
On to Chapter Three. As I am a college English teacher, I immediately though of Sir Kenneth Robinson’s Ted Talk on “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” He is a wonderful comedian but that aside, he talks at length about the industrialization of education particularly starting in the 19th Century. Industrialized education gave us that hierarchy which places languages and maths at the top, things making us useful work slaves. The Arts, of course, are at the bottom, with Dance at the bottom of the Arts.
One thing Robinson stresses is all the different learning modalities and that some people need to move to think, not sit motionless and silent in neat rows. So many today are medicated to be able to do so. Robinson mentions the British choreographer Gillian Lynne. Her school told Mrs. Lynne to take Gillian to see a doctor because she was a fidgety, underperformer disturbing her classmates. Fortunately the doctor (probably in the 1930s) didn’t prescribe ADHD meds, but told her mother to enroll Gillian in a dance school. The result: Gillian Lynne choreographed two famous Broadway shows, "Cats" and "The Phantom of the Opera" and became a millionaire a few times over.
One of my college courses is Creativity based on “Fearless Creating” by Eric Maisel. In it he talks about how children play, how highly imaginative they are, but by their mid-teens this has been schooled out of them. Maisel also discusses the need to reclaim our wildness and gives a couple of examples: George O’Keeffe painted naked, Marc Chagall painted with his pants off and Victor Hugo when blocked called in his servant to take away his clothes. My students stare at me in disbelief!
It's a struggle to get college students to fire up their creative juices and rediscover their robust imagination. One small exercise I do to get them out of their logical school brain is to have them breath in on “I Am” and out on “Completely Stopping” for a time until they have crossed over that bridge into a more creative place, one where they can stop chasing perfectionism and straight As and start improvising off “seeming” mistakes and allowing some wildness into their art.
May I just say, I find magic willing and waiting for us on the fringes when we decide to walk away from that 9-5 job and don’t have a clue of how we are going to make ends meet. It is exists. You somehow find what you need at the right time. You become happier and the gut feelings grow again of what you need to do to survive. Somehow everything is ok. You realize you don’t need all the crap you buy with the money you make at the soul deadening job you go to everyday. Just saying.
The body as machine seems to crop up so much nowadays with all the folks selling various programmes to fix this or eradicate that. There's no sense of a 'complete body with its own integrity'. You've got a bad hip? get an artificial replacement. A bad knee? get an artificial (but probably not very good) replacement. I have a very bad hip (legacy of a professional dance career) but I don't particularly want a hip replacement. No-one really understands that. There's also the 'society as machine' and individual bodies just increasingly seen as 'units' to fit in to that machine wherever the machine needs them. People end up being up-rooted and moving all over the place in order to 'fit into' the machine that society has become. Local connections are lost; local traditions disappear, or are just seen as 'old hat' and 'out of date'. People moving all over the place don't have a connection to the land and so don't stand up for it.
The magical aspect is very interesting. Some magic is 'bad', and some magic is 'good'. I think a lot of magic went into religion, including Christianity, but of course couldn't be called 'magic' anymore, and only certain people (usually men) were allowed to practise it, and there were very severe penalties for anyone who wasn't officially 'allowed' to practise it but who dared to. The use of the word 'magic' to describe conjuring, trickery, sleight of hand etc. is interesting too. To many people that's what they think of as 'magic'; the 'pulling rabbits out of hats', and 'sawing women in half' type stuff. These 'magicians' are usually men with a (mostly useless) female 'assistant' who generally isn't wearing very much and doesn't do much except pose and display her scantily clad body, and get 'sawn' in half from time to time. How interesting that it's the women who get 'sawn' in half.....!
Superb. Thankyou.
I'm just now picking up the book. Since I don't get the sense this is covered within, to what extent did the Church enable or push back against this mechanization? By the industrial revolution, pagan culture wasn't really a significant force (examples of venture capitalism in Darkest Africa (c) notwithstanding). Europe was squarely Christian well before this.
Wouldn't this kind of materialism require the Church to give up its own intrinsic mysticism if it wanted to remain synonymous or at least parallel with the state?
So, um, the problem is that Europe wasn't really "squarely Christian." Sure, it was nominally so, and there was no actively overt pagan rites, but it's not really true to say Christianity had taken over if people were still doing magical rites and engaging in pagan festival projects, even if those were "christianized." For instance, in one the Werewolf trials, the accused actually got released and merely slapped on the wrist a bit because he claimed to be protecting humans with magic. That minor slap was because he admitted he didn't use Bible verses or say Jesus's name in his spells.
The church kind of held back the tide of this mechanization until the 1500's, but it was precisely their fear of the rising popularity of magical beliefs and the "demonic" that led them to side with the Machine. Jean Bodin, the aforementioned witchhunter and architect of the nation state, was a catholic who'd taken holy orders (he was a Carmelite).
My takeaway from this part of Caliban and the Witch is to expect repression. People have this idea that the witch hunt was caused by ideology or religion or even bad food and that it’s over. But it’s never over. The Red Scare, the Satanic Panic, the War on Terror, Qanon- those who don’t fit the capitalist projects will always be “Satanic” and the capitalists always need to “protect the children”. To my mind, a true pagan cannot be a good capitalist wage-slave because there is an antagonism between an animist valuation of the world and a capitalist one. (The same could be said of other religions which value the world, including some branches of Christianity. I just don’t have a better word than “pagan” to describe someone who sees her/himself as a part of nature with a responsibility to Her.) To the pagan, the body, the experience, and the world are important and money is a delusion. They didn’t kill the pagans (or the recalcitrant peasants) irrationally but rationally. And if we truly live by the ideals that capitalism had to overturn, we will end up in opposition to our corporate overlords.
Boom! My head is exploding wide open upon this chapter. I’ve finally caught up on the book and although I am a new reader to your stuff Rhyd, I agree totally about how important this chapter is.
You know I’ve read over the years so many times how capitalism uses violence against us and as someone that has grown up in a fully capitalist world I’ve never quite “got it”. Sure, I’ve slowly come around to the idea that police are there to protect private property, that took me a while, but this idea of a violence against us was always a little fuzzy.
But then came this chapter. Fuck, I should have read this 20 years ago.
This slow but steady (and very violent) breaking down of the peasant class and turning them into the working class. Death penalties for vagrancy?? Like WTF?!?
And look at us now, we think nothing of showing up to work on time and even feel guilty for taking a day off work when we’re feeling under the weather.
This one chapter just blew apart my world view. Thank you for doing this free Rhyd!!
Now how do I distill all this and slowly teach it to my two little girls so that they have a very healthy distrust of the government, the church, and all authority!
Raising little anarchists is hard work because they always question everything you ask them to do! 😂
I think the best that can be done is to teach (by modeling as well) them that they should never be ashamed of who they are and that they should never diminish themselves to please men or anyone else.
Yes! For sure
Tell you a story, the other month the girls were blaming each other for using “bad words” (they’re 9 & 6). A dinner table discussion followed in which all the bad words were discussed and their meanings and even allowing the girls to say each out loud. Turns out dada says the “S” word a lot (turned out to be “stupid”, not “shit” haha) and Mama say the “F” word.
So last time we were in the city, Lola dragged them along to mass and the girls surprised us a few days later when they claimed that the priest had said the bad word!
The wife and I were like Whaaaaaat???
Turns out it was “Jesus Christ”
ha!!!
Lol that’s cute!
Magnificent! This whole series really has put into words what I've always felt but never been able to express. Many thanks Rhyd.
To refer back to my earlier comment regarding ideas and their strength... Do I get it right that you, Rhyd, would say that capitalism and machine logic is not an "idea" but more an "enchantment"? And that therefor an "idea" might be thought of as the "strongest" among ideas in almost a quantitative manner, but an enchantment is a qualitative thing, an unpredictable thing, a thing that has a time and place in, well, the rythm of the cosmos. An enchantment can be faced with a counterspell, so to speak? I'm putting words into your mouth but I'd be really curious if that is what you mean.
Yes, I think that’s right.
Enchantments are on the level of cosmological thinking, as they shape not just what you think but how you think.
“We shape our bodies and wills not towards our own desires, but rather to be model workers, model consumers, and model subjects.”
Powerful stuff. Unfortunately, at least in the case of the model worker, people are compelled by the need to make a living in the current system. How can this be escaped? I suppose labor organizing is one way...
My book has only just arrived. I've been enjoying and learning a lot from all sections that have already been discussed. I'll try to catch up- but may start from chapter four from the get go...
So good Rhyd. I count myself as one of those who, having engaged with a lot of embodiment and earth-centric spiritual practices over the years, has come to an intuitive understanding of these principles. It's helpful to put more intellectual bones on that intuition and understand it in a historical context.
I particularly appreciate your point toward the end about the esoteric perspective on capitalist conditioning. We can analyze this phenomena through a certain layer of reality and call it 'capitalism' or 'the mechanistic worldview' -- and such an explanation can go far. But if we understand reality as multi-dimensional, we might deepen our inquiry to wonder who or what is the source of these ideas? On the energetic plane, it's like there's a battle on the level of vibration for the allegiance of the human soul. As though there is a certain energetic matrix (of fear, greed, envy, etc) woven by a kind of dark wizardry that tempts or seduces humans into developing anti-life ideologies.
Seeing things in this way can lead us to recognize that the remedy needs to involve not merely the undoing of the ideas themselves -- though this is essential -- but also a transmutation of the energetic or vibrational ground from which those ideas spring. A 'counterspell' as one of your readers put it. (I've also called such an approach 'subtle activism'.)
This lucid essay on Chapter Three rang so many bells for me. Chapter Two’s discussion gave me a nightmare about being kidnapped and locked in a car by a grizzly bearded fellow with rape on his mind and left me a bit speechless.
On to Chapter Three. As I am a college English teacher, I immediately though of Sir Kenneth Robinson’s Ted Talk on “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” He is a wonderful comedian but that aside, he talks at length about the industrialization of education particularly starting in the 19th Century. Industrialized education gave us that hierarchy which places languages and maths at the top, things making us useful work slaves. The Arts, of course, are at the bottom, with Dance at the bottom of the Arts.
One thing Robinson stresses is all the different learning modalities and that some people need to move to think, not sit motionless and silent in neat rows. So many today are medicated to be able to do so. Robinson mentions the British choreographer Gillian Lynne. Her school told Mrs. Lynne to take Gillian to see a doctor because she was a fidgety, underperformer disturbing her classmates. Fortunately the doctor (probably in the 1930s) didn’t prescribe ADHD meds, but told her mother to enroll Gillian in a dance school. The result: Gillian Lynne choreographed two famous Broadway shows, "Cats" and "The Phantom of the Opera" and became a millionaire a few times over.
One of my college courses is Creativity based on “Fearless Creating” by Eric Maisel. In it he talks about how children play, how highly imaginative they are, but by their mid-teens this has been schooled out of them. Maisel also discusses the need to reclaim our wildness and gives a couple of examples: George O’Keeffe painted naked, Marc Chagall painted with his pants off and Victor Hugo when blocked called in his servant to take away his clothes. My students stare at me in disbelief!
It's a struggle to get college students to fire up their creative juices and rediscover their robust imagination. One small exercise I do to get them out of their logical school brain is to have them breath in on “I Am” and out on “Completely Stopping” for a time until they have crossed over that bridge into a more creative place, one where they can stop chasing perfectionism and straight As and start improvising off “seeming” mistakes and allowing some wildness into their art.
Awesome points and I love the exercise you do with your students!
May I just say, I find magic willing and waiting for us on the fringes when we decide to walk away from that 9-5 job and don’t have a clue of how we are going to make ends meet. It is exists. You somehow find what you need at the right time. You become happier and the gut feelings grow again of what you need to do to survive. Somehow everything is ok. You realize you don’t need all the crap you buy with the money you make at the soul deadening job you go to everyday. Just saying.
I love this chapter.
I second this Laura.
The body as machine seems to crop up so much nowadays with all the folks selling various programmes to fix this or eradicate that. There's no sense of a 'complete body with its own integrity'. You've got a bad hip? get an artificial replacement. A bad knee? get an artificial (but probably not very good) replacement. I have a very bad hip (legacy of a professional dance career) but I don't particularly want a hip replacement. No-one really understands that. There's also the 'society as machine' and individual bodies just increasingly seen as 'units' to fit in to that machine wherever the machine needs them. People end up being up-rooted and moving all over the place in order to 'fit into' the machine that society has become. Local connections are lost; local traditions disappear, or are just seen as 'old hat' and 'out of date'. People moving all over the place don't have a connection to the land and so don't stand up for it.
The magical aspect is very interesting. Some magic is 'bad', and some magic is 'good'. I think a lot of magic went into religion, including Christianity, but of course couldn't be called 'magic' anymore, and only certain people (usually men) were allowed to practise it, and there were very severe penalties for anyone who wasn't officially 'allowed' to practise it but who dared to. The use of the word 'magic' to describe conjuring, trickery, sleight of hand etc. is interesting too. To many people that's what they think of as 'magic'; the 'pulling rabbits out of hats', and 'sawing women in half' type stuff. These 'magicians' are usually men with a (mostly useless) female 'assistant' who generally isn't wearing very much and doesn't do much except pose and display her scantily clad body, and get 'sawn' in half from time to time. How interesting that it's the women who get 'sawn' in half.....!