This is March’s open discussion thread, but before I get to the topic I’d like to first welcome the several hundred of you new subscribers that signed up in the last week! I try to write a re-introduction post whenever I get a new influx of readers, but I just wrote one a few weeks ago. So if you don’t mind, here’s the link to that one. It also explains how to access some of the benefits for paid supporters, and as there are quite a lot of new ones of those as well (thanks so much!), it’s a good resource.
Also, I have a brief announcement. I teach a nine-week course on my book, Being Pagan, and it starts again 3 April. Each week I present a video and engage in text discussion over a Discord server with participants on the week’s chapter, and I also host two live Zoom discussions.
It’s open to everyone and is sliding scale. You also get either a free digital copy of the book at the basic enrollment rates or a print copy at higher rates, which are again set according to your personal financial situations.
If you’d like to participate, I’d love to see you there. It’s also a great chance to engage in longer discussion with me. Here’s a link for more information.
So much has happened in the last month that it’s quite hard to track it all, or even to place it in time.
For instance—try to remember precisely how long ago it was that Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act in Canada. That was three weeks ago as of the time of this writing. Does it feel longer ago to you? It does to me, as do many of the details of this recent Russian-Ukraine conflict (that started 11 days ago). All that feels much older—but also oddly more recent—than it actually is.
This happens, of course. We experience time in organic ways which machine time cannot accurately reflect, because we are really experiencing events with our body. Our body doesn’t reference some external source of time-keeping when it forms memories; instead, we weave events together in individual tapestries reflecting our emotional states, our desires, and our particular framework of meaning.
We do this especially with love. My fiancé and I have been together now for over two years. His memory in particular is remarkable—he can recall events in lush details which constantly awe his friends. Mine is probably pretty average except for verbal memories—I can recall quotes and ideas I encountered from books so well I never need to take notes.
Still, when we try to narrate our relationship we’re often shocked at how both long and short it’s really been. “Feels like yesterday” we say very often, and yet other events feel like the ancient past.
“Feel” is the important term here. We “feel” our emotional reaction to memories and use the strength of that feeling to judge distance in time, just as we feel our way through a dark room to find our way without stumbling.
Time doesn’t exist as a tangible thing any more than “distance” exists as substance. They’re both human concepts for measuring relationships between one thing and another. Civilization gives us (and imposes) official yardsticks (or calendars, or clocks…) for those measurements, but in the end we still judge those distances through the body.
Thus we can say, ‘I know it was months ago, but it feels like yesterday’ and actually be making a true statement. And we also speak truth when we express surprise and confusion about an event being more recent according to those external measurements than it feels to our personal conception.
The way we experience time is actually just the way we narrate events back to ourselves. The more personal those events were, meaning the more bodily-engaged we were with those events, the more likely our experience of time will be out-of-sync with the external measurements. Deeply-felt love relationships always feel to have their own timeline, especially at the beginning. Time “expands” around us, as in the way a the first weekend you spend with a lover feels like both an entire month and also far too short to have been a full weekend.
But other emotions also shift the experience of time this way. Moments of extreme fear, trauma, shock, and anxiety put us into de-synchronised narratives, even more so because of the way we tend to ‘jump out’ of our bodies during them. Of course, you cannot actually escape the body, but you can retreat from it such that pain feels a little less painful. Going catatonic, “zoning-out,” or generally becoming numb to everything is a strong defense mechanism when you’re being raped or abused, a natural opiate against mind-shattering events. But like any other opiated state, attempting to recall the events later will always yield inaccurate accounts of what actually occurred, and when.
I mentioned the Emergencies Act and the Ukraine-Russia conflict as examples of this narrative problem for a reason. On the surface they seem completely unrelated, two completely different events which caused quite a lot of anxiety for some of us.
However unrelated they appear to be, I’d argue they both point to the same thing, a larger event occurring which we cannot fully feel. Just as the Hindu parable of the blind men and the elephant, we can each only sense parts of the thing, not the whole.
In most versions of that parable, each man insists what he has felt of the thing is actually the whole of the thing, and they fight each other. The key to that parable, of course, is that if each man understood the truth of the object was additive, they would have collectively understood there was an elephant in the room.
A lot has been happening across the world, and really fast, and it’s all been happening in apparently unrelated ways to unrelated people. The last two years, especially, have been a very strange historical moment, and it’s been incredibly difficult to make sense of it. Just like a very large elephant in a room full of blind men, we’re each experiencing part of a very real thing in our particular and individual ways which do not necessarily seem connected to the experiences of others.
Maybe, though, we’ve all been feeling parts of the same thing. There’s been an elephant in the room all along.
I’d love to talk about this, so this is the topic of the March open discussion thread. A few things immediately come to mind that seem related, but it’s not fully clear.
First off, the matter of sanctions again Russians.As you probably know by now, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and other large transactional finance institutions have cut off all services in Russia, as have many other capitalist entities. Also, Russians are now mostly cut off from the SWIFT transfer system, meaning they cannot use direct bank transfers to pay for things outside of Russia.
All of this is of course to punish Putin for his invasion of Ukraine. But it’s an indirect punishment, since Putin is not directly harmed by any of these things. Instead, the 144 million people who live in Russia are being punished, cut off from international economic exchange with a large portion of the rest of the capitalist world. The idea is that their fear, anxiety, and economic hardship will translate into political rage against Putin and they’ll overthrow him or at least pressure him to stop the military action.
The problem is that I don’t think it would work. It’s never worked in Iran, for example. No ‘democratic revolution’ has risen up on account of the US sanctions against SWIFT, Mastercard, and Visa operating there. Iranians just continue on, and alternative and local methods have arisen to replace Western Capitalist financing networks.
Also, I cannot help but wonder if this won’t make Russians turn their anger towards Europe and the United States instead. Consider if this happened to Americans under Trump, if major economic powers suddenly made it very, very difficult for average Americans to actually use the money they’ve earned from wages. Even if it was clear it was done to punish Trump, lower class people from whatever political ideology—those who have the least access to other financial instruments—would probably be more angry at the foreign nations than at Trump. Sure, the urban professional managerial classes would try to pressure for an overthrow (they’d be missing brunch after all…), but they’d have to first convince everyday people that the foreign powers were morally correct to punish Americans.
That means that in Russia, those same bourgeois classes will need to either convince the lower classes of Russia or the capitalist class (the billionaire ‘oligarchs’) that the United States and Europe are morally righteous in their judgment.
Another part of the elephant: there are many reports of vandalism of Russian orthodox churches and Russian-owned business in Canada, the US, and in Germany. When this was done to mosques or synagogues there was mass liberal outrage, but Russians are a different matter it seems. And related to this is also the cancellations of Russian artists in museums and performances (including the high-profile cancellations of composer Valery Gergiev and soprano Anna Netrebko, the latter of whom actually did make statements against the Russian military invasion) and the demands for Russian funding “disclosures” of American academics like John Mearsheimer.
This all feels like many of the mechanisms of the Woke Ideology have fully activated into Intersectional Imperialism. Especially the Antifa-aligned tactics of deplatforming and cancellation now gain popular support when used against anyone who doesn’t fully denounce Putin in the way they are demanded to denounce him. Also, it is righteous and just to smash windows and torch property, provided that destruction is directed against “fascists.” Here, of course, fascist means “Russian.”
This is why I also mentioned the Emergencies Act. It was also an act of cancellation, designed to punish people economically for their political opinions. It was also the first time a Western “Democratic” government had done this, yet it nevertheless also fit within a pattern of economically punishing the people of other nations in order to “fight fascism.”
I think particularly of how the force of populist morality was marshaled against anyone challenging specific government policies, how so many came to call for even harsher punishments (firing doctors and nurses who didn’t get vaccinated, for instance, or barring vaccine-hesitant people from access to hospitals for other reasons and even forcing them to pay more for medical services than vaccinated people).
That same force is at play again, it seems, except now against the new enemies in our midst: the Russians. “Not all Russians,” they might say. “Just the ones we judge to not hate Putin enough.” And though economic punishment hurts everyday Russians much more than it hurts Putin, they ultimately “deserve” this pain if they refuse to risk their lives to overthrow him…
We’re all blind men running our fingers across an elephant. Or maybe it’s not an elephant, but something even bigger.
What’s actually happening right now? Help me figure this out by telling me what you’re experiencing. I cannot feel the whole thing, nor can you, but together we might be able to get close to the truth of the matter.
Yeah, I walk back the 'wokeism is harmless bullshit that will blow over'.
It all does seem to exist on a continuum, doesn't it?
It's like a reordering of civic life/international community with very vague memories of 20th century history, gleaned quickly from the Internet or movies, as a guide.