Feeling the Elephant
March open discussion thread
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.
Love this invitation Rhyd. I’ll contribute with another invitation, evacuate immediately from all social media. Avoid any news reports that smell off. Do a deep dive into your own confirmation bias. Go into the woods if you can and watch moss grow. Read more poetry. Dance in the kitchen while you make dinner. Hug more people. Make more eye contact. Boycott screens and establish a rich inner life. Practice gratitude. Forgive yourself.
very nice metaphor for what is happening. I agree with you. There is a powerful energy/force/event moving through the world's human population (and as well through all our kindred species). ALL of us feel it, how we respond to it differs depending on a great many factors, from where we live in the world to our individual characters to our particular cultural myths. We are like elephants feeling the tsunami coming and heading for higher ground. Only in our case we have no idea where higher ground is, so people seize on whatever they can that they feel will make them safe. They are looking to restore intelligible order to the world around them. And the fault for what is happening lies elsewhere of course, so if only THOSE people would change in THIS way, all would be find.
But it won't of course. Because the underlying foundation of human civilization has been undone. Earth is not an inexhaustible resource for extraction by unrestrained corporations. Nor is Earth an amusement park for our enjoyment. Earth is in fact a nonlinear, self-organizing, emergent life form which we destabilize at our peril. And we have destabilized it past the point of no return.
When any non-linear living system begins to destabilize (from planets, to local ecosystems, to individual organ systems, they send out a signal. And those signals are felt with a part of us far deeper than the rational mind. We still have that capacity, just as elephants and other life forms do. We FEEL the signal but it doesn't fit into either rationalist or monotheist myth structures. (Well, except for end time narratives as Pat Robertson recently reminded the world.)
We live in a time when the majority of people in the western world believe that it is possible to rationally control both nature and civilization, to rationally control and direct human behavior, including our own. But nature is not rational, nor is it irrational. It is nonrational. Rational behavior is based on a set of assumptions that are accepted as foundational. From there rational decisions are made. But IF those assumptions are inaccurate to the real world, that is the world that underlies the virtual world of our civilization, eventually rational behavior will destabilize the foundational, real world itself. What is built on top of that, that is, civilization, destabilizes and eventually collapses.
That is what is happening now. Earth ecosystems all over the world have passed tipping points. Some wiser part of us knows it, feels the signal being given off by Earth itself. And people panic because rationality is failing. The paradigm used for the past two thousands years (monotheistic/rational) is collapsing because it is not accurate to the real world. (Most people do not realize that rationalists and their priests, scientists, are the most powerful of all the protestant sects; there is little difference in their cosmology.) And as John Ralston Saul put it (in Voltaire's Bastards: The Tyranny of Reason in the West) when their belief system and patterns of behavior fail, in that system, the belief is that you simply did not apply it STRONGLY enough and so the interventions are escalated in an attempt to reassert control. All that does is escalate systemic collapse. The more technological and rationalist mechanisms are forced on nonlinear systems in collapse, the faster and more complex the collapse.
So, your metaphor here is absolutely perfect. Everyone of us is touching (or being touched by) the elephant and everyone of us is describing the territory we are experiencing. Some of us have a very wide gaze, some more narrow. Nonetheless, none are complete. Standing back, however, as you have done here, reveals that the underlying dynamic is identical no matter who is doing the describing or promoting any particular response to what they are perceiving.
We are in a time when old systems are collapsing. Nothing is going to stop that process. The people we have depended on to run things, to be good governors, have failed in their job; they have failed us and our children and their children. As Aldo Leopold once said, "The first step in intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts." But instead they dissected the world to make all the stuff in which we are drowning, most of it from hydrocarbon modification (plastics to pharmaceuticals to food). People have been urging a different course for centuries but have been denigrated for doing so (unscientific, unchristian, anti-progress, anthropomorphizers). But all their warnings are now manifest, we are surrounded by collapse everywhere we look.
Earth systems change from the bottom up, all the kindred species in ecosystems working to solve their part of the problem utilizing their own unique genius. And that is what we need now, for humans to do the same. People such as you who write this blog, people like Greta, Bill Mollison, Masanobu Fukuoka, and on and on and on. And slowly a new way will come into the world.
But it is not going to be easy or safe or fun. Grief will be our companion on the journey, it is not something we can deal with and move on (as Lesley Head put it). Still, there must be those among whom we can weep and still be counted as warriors (adrienne rich). We, as Bill Mollison once put it, are members of a community unbounded by geography or time . . . or species. I have hope, but no optimism (false hope). Hope is a faith that comes from life itself, in the emergence of new generations of all our kindred species. For life, as Jeff Goldblum once immortalized it, finds a way.