By Heimlich A. Laguz – Page 15

Reclaiming Conservatism

June 2, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

This essay was written a few years ago and certainly shows its age in some
respects, though it seems all too timely still in others (at least IMHO)…

–

Introduction

Conservatism is an often used term. We can talk about conservative politics as adhering to a fairly strict set of norms, often roughly derived from Christian beliefs. We can talk about conservatism as conforming to the status quo of a society’s mores or power structures. We can talk about environmental conservation. We can talk about conservative economic policy. A person of conservative attitudes might be someone who ‘strictly’ follows a given code or body of religious ethics, be they Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Communist, etc.

It seems the term conservative can be applied to a lot of different things, and I think that this can sometimes obscure important social, political and spiritual issues. The purpose of this essay is to untangle some of the uses of the term and offer a redefinition.

Part of the problem is that different senses of the word are sometimes used as though they meant the same thing. A prime example can be found in the politics of mainstream conservative governments such as the Howard Liberal Government in Australia.

Howard’s Government maintains that it is conservative in a few senses. It says that it believes in ‘traditional family values’ – which seems to mean it believes in the unbroken nuclear family with bread-winning husband, householding wife and dutiful children. It appears to believe in Christianity as the conservative person’s religion of choice (at least insofar as Australia is rooted in Western society). It perceives its conservative mandate to include the view that ‘White Australia’ must be conserved against immigration and refugees.[1] It has little interest in citizens whose relationships are not based on Christian notions of exclusive marriage and definitely isn’t interested in non-heterosexual relationships. It appears to believe its conservative mandate requires strong law enforcement powers, and the prioritisation of corporate interests over broader social concerns and the environment.

Certainly in some sense these attitudes seem aimed at conserving a notion of 1950’s, Menzies era Australia, when Red paranoia, moralism, rigid gender roles, and the White Australia Policy ruled. But does it actually conserve these values (I take it that my reader would agree that at least some of the Menzies era values were pretty flawed)? I think that in some respects Howard misuses the notion of conservatism, specifically in the context of the economy, the environment, and in the area of the family.

Howard’s socio-economic policy has been to deregulate industry, dissolve trade protection laws, and bolster the voice of corporate interests. The general effect has been to relax restraint on the business world. This has seen the country’s social fabric suffer. So for example we now find that the telecommunications industry remains just as inefficient, but now also suffers destructive corruption (c.f. the One.Tel collapse), and ever-rising prices (despite the promise that deregulation would cause a price drop). Traditionally centralised services have been cut loose, as protection for the rights of employees are systematically assaulted.

In short, this kind of socio-economic policy is anything but conservative. Rather than reflecting an attitude of restraint and continuity, it relies on the dubious notion of self-regulation and on apparently uncontrollable market forces. It may seems slightly contradictory, but a somewhat Socialist-influenced economic policy might actually be a lot more stable and conservative (not to mention less destructive to a social fabric assaulted by ever more rampant consumerism and self-serving corporate interests).

The Howard Government’s policy on the environment is that it can get stuffed. It has generally refused to even keep the issue of the environment on the political agenda, let alone take or support steps to conserve the environment. Australia and the US are the only nations who have refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on Reduction of Greenhouse Emissions.

Conservatism, however, means prudence. It seems prudent, regardless of the debate for and against, that
we make very significant steps to reduce our impact on the natural environment. This may mean a short-term restriction on industry, but industry is very adaptable, especially in this non-conservative economic climate. So the notion of environmental conservation, which seems to fall into a really genuine sense of conservatism as prudence and caution, has little support from Australia’s current, ‘conservative’ government.

Howard’s perspective on marriage, homosexuality and Christianity has been referenced to the conservative writer Edmund Burke. He simply believes that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Unfortunately, the social fabric in this country simply has changed. Christianity is a waning force; marriage is viewed with much more perspective, caution and even disregard; and folk are becoming more confident of expressing their sexuality rather than hiding away in shame and suffering. Not only that, but one could argue that the Menzies era never was that great anyway: it was built on an endless yet largely manufactured fear about faceless hordes from communist Asia; on the subjugation of women; on genocide against Indigenous Australians; on the punishment of any variation from a one-dimensional notion of the good.

Here is the crux of the problem: a lot of folks want to vote conservative in the spirit of prudence and caution. Yet this weds them to the irresponsible socio-economic and environmental policies of leaders such as Howard. It also weds them to the often hysterical and flighty paranoia which under Menzies’ reign was named ‘conservative’. Surely a genuine conservatism would not be so lacking in confidence, prudence, and caution in forming judgements.

The notion of conservatism peddled to voters in Australia and other countries (especially the US) is not really very conservative at all. It lacks a sense of solid grounding; it constantly needs to reiterate and insist on a single, abstract dimension of national identity. Conservatism seems to mean having a strong sense of stability. But as Nietzsche so adroitly pointed out, a culture which cannot tolerate any variation from the ‘norm’ must be very weak. It takes a very strong culture to permit variation and difference in opinion. If conservatism means taking the time to strengthen ourselves, surely that would mean encouraging a self-confident society that can span many different perspectives! Instead, Howard is committed to a very brittle backwardness – as exposed in the lack of much or perhaps even any return for our military and political subservience to the US.

As an aside, Nietzsche’s dictum reveals why dictatorships, though built on a notion of strength, can prove to be quite fragile: the tyrant is only one person, and even with modern mass communication, they can only exert so much uniformity. In their passing, all that has slept underground will quickly reassert itself. We are seeing this in a destructive aspect now with post-Saddam Iraq. A similar process can be seen in the radical upsurge of Christian and Islamic extremism in the former Soviet Union.

So if folk are seeking in the notion of conservatism a sense of prudence, stability, roots, and strength, then they’ve been hoodwinked by the notions of conservatism presented to them by ‘conservative’ interests and political parties. Another example? Hitler was a highly radical leader – his actions brought destruction and suffering, and were driven by a lack of confidence, roots, security, sense of self. Yet he appealed to successfully, and was supported by, those seeking the conservative promise of stability and prudence.

It seems that we have established that the word conservative has been used to refer to any number of different agendas. If this is granted, I would go further to suggest that some very radical (and imprudent, and hysterical, and unethical) acts have been given a conservative pretext by the current crop of political leaders.

So having considered the present situation, I would like to suggest some dimensions of what a ‘real’ conservatism would look like. In the process, I hope to reclaim the word for better purposes than those to which it has been set.

Conservatism as prudent foresight

We associate being conservative with being cautious or prudent. To be prudent is to seek many perspectives on a situation before making a decision on how to act. It is to reflect on the extent to which each perspective is true to itself. The more self-contradictory a perspective is, the less we can trust it.

By foresight I do not mean magical divination, but rather our ability to project towards possible futures. We may not be able to anticipate exactly how things will be, but we are able to imagine roughly how things could turn out.

My suggestion is that conservatism entails an attitude of prudent foresight. This means that we live with a certain wariness about the status quo – we recognise that things can change, or that things once thought positive can become negative over time.

Pseudo-conservatives would generally suggest that things should be kept the way they are, or even taken ‘back’ to some more or less mythical golden age of the past. However, our genuine sense of conservatism – as prudent foresight – would require that we be open to modifying our ways and values in order to adapt to the challenges of change. This does not mean that we are compelled to abandon the essence of our worldview or social structure – far from it! But it does mean that, for example, a person of conservative views would take the arguments of conservationists and environmentalists very seriously. Why? Prudent foresight, warily conducted, suggests that the consequences of ignoring the current environmental problems far outweigh the short-term difficulty caused by changing our current, polluting ways. Even if it turns out that things are not as dire as they seem (which I believe is an infinitesimal possibility), the green option is still more prudent. If we bury our heads in the sand and call that ‘conservative’, then we are being neither prudent nor realistic.

Some pseudo-conservatives claim that the jury is still out on issues such as global warming. They appear to be engaging in prudence by not jumping at what they think might be a false alarm.

Unfortunately, the scientists who say there aren’t major problems are funded by those bodies that perceive short term benefit in the status quo – petro-chemical corporations in particular. Meanwhile, it has become ever clearer that the earth’s forests are being decimated at increasing rates; that the seas are rising fast; that pollution levels are rocketing; that weather patterns are becoming more unstable. It seems absurd to suggest that our actions have not been at least a major contributor to these changes in the world’s environmental state. I understand that insurance companies are becoming highly vocal advocates for making our way of life more sustainable – they know that they are the ones who will be forced to pay out as global warming destabilises world weather patterns more and more.

So, no – it is not prudent to ignore the environmentalist call at this stage in the game. There is simply too much evidence indicating the seriousness of the situation. Surely it is conservative to change human industry and activity in order to protect our very survival! For those with any doubts as to this situation I would recommend Tim Flannery’s remarkable book, The Weather Makers.

To take a different angle, consider the current prison system in countries such as Australia or the US. Pseudo-conservative politicians habitually call for tougher sentences, meaner prisons, and less empathy for those that commit crimes. They dismiss any consideration of social context; they are not interested in the vicious socioeconomic cycles which sow the seeds for crime and most criminal behaviour.

The result is that prison recidivism rates immensely high in some Western countries – as many as four out of five people see out their prison terms and then commit more crimes (for which they are caught). This suggests that prison don’t actually reduce crime.

The conservatively prudent, far-sighted response would be to ask about the broader social patterns which produce crime, to ask why prisons fail so miserably to reform their inmates. If something isn’t working, it seems wise to ask why. Piling on more and harsher treatment of criminals doesn’t seem to be doing the trick.

These examples provide a fairly clear explanation of what I mean by prudent foresight. If we agree that prudent foresight is an aspect of conservatism, then we will also agree that what often passes itself off as conservatism is something else entirely.

Conservatism as sheltering mystery

For this section of the essay I must acknowledge the profound influence of Martin Heidegger’s later writings.

For most readers, the title of this section will seem a little odd. What could I mean by “sheltering mystery”? I will provide an example of this kind of conservatism at play.

My example is a practice performed by the ancient Greeks. They had a holiday each year where offerings would be made to placate all the divine beings that were as yet unknown to the Greeks, but which might be out there, somewhere. These beings might be from other cultures, or they might still be awaiting ‘discovery’. Rather than insist that they had the final word on the limits of the divine world, the Greeks were willing to actively face the uncertainty of their knowledge, the uncertainty of their experience of the world, and affirm it.

This ancient Greek practice reveals a deep respect for mystery, for the limits of human understanding. By declining the temptation of claiming knowledge over all things, the Greeks allowed themselves the possibility of being surprised by life. To shelter mystery is to allow space for it in one’s life, in one’s culture. It is to acknowledge the limitations and provisional character of one’s relationship to the world. Insofar as the horizon of all our experiences is the unknown, sheltering mystery means holding our place in the world in high respect. It means that we attempt to understand things on their own terms. It means that we do not attempt to force all experiences into one way of understanding life.

This is not to say that sheltering mystery requires a commitment to relativism. However, it does require that we take different ways of talking, seeing, and experiencing the world seriously. Who knows, perhaps by remaining open to mystery we might find ourselves drawn to new or different ways of experiencing the world ourselves?

Heidegger argues that no amount of measurement, analysis, dissection, or counting can capture the essential character of something – in this case, let us take the example of a flower. I can weigh it, break it down into component molecules, talk about its role in the reproduction of plant life, dissect it for scientific diagrams, or write a manual on the best way to grow it. And yet the essence of the flower cannot be captured through any of these methods. Indeed, Heidegger argued that the more you analyse, the more the thing’s essence slips away from view. This is the mystery of the flower’s essence.

Now suppose my wife gives me a flower. Here the mystery of the flower’s essence steps forth. Suppose I view a brilliantly evocative painting of a flower. Here again, the character of the flower stands revealed. These kinds of revelations are not total, absolute, or quantitative. They are always partial, incomplete. They always ride on the horizon of mystery.

Sheltering that mystery is the finite ‘thingly’ character of the artist’s canvas and paint. Sheltering that mystery is the look in my wife’s eye as she offers me the flower. These ways of experiencing the flower do not have the reassuring absoluteness of exacting measurements or chemical analysis; indeed, they are explicitly wedded to all that we don’t know about the flower. And yet these ways of experiencing the flower always precede any possible analysis or scientific understanding. Without these ways of experiencing, we would not be able to hold in our imagination something we call a flower, to which we might bring the weight of sophisticated interpretation and analysis.

So if this what I mean by sheltering mystery, how might it be conservative? I regard this attitude towards the world as conservative on two counts. Firstly, it always carries with it a sense of the mysterious horizon of our lived experience – a very prudent perspective to hold. Secondly, to shelter mystery is to conserve it, to protect it from being lost in the temptation to sacrifice everything to rational empiricism (which so easily becomes irrational technocracy). Implicit in the attitude of sheltering mystery is the decision to decline rigid adherence to any one way of interpreting one’s experience. “Back to the things themselves”, as Husserl famously remarked, is our watchword here.

Once we adopt this aspect of conservatism into our life, we are likely to acquire a healthy disrespect for the manipulative ‘spin’ with which many authority figures use to sanitise and neaten their rigid attitudes and simple-minded power plays. The call to offer shelter to mystery is an invitation to ask “has this logic been used in a meaningful way?”, rather than “is this logic valid?” It requires that we remain open to the presence, the character, the being of everything we encounter. It tends towards an experience of the world which, if articulated intellectually, might be called animism.

It is no accident that I used an example of ancient Greek religious practice. While religion tends to be more about human institutions than it is about divinity, it in turns gains its life from spirituality. Spirituality, the task of remaining open to (sheltering) the mystery in things, is a crucial aspect of my reclaimed conservatism. Whether we choose to equate the mysterious with the divine or not, myth can be a powerful vehicle for shaking loose our complacency and reintegrating us into an inherently mysterious universe. Mythologies that invite psychological, socio-historical, and magical interpretations are particularly suited to this purpose. Some examples would be the pre-Christian Germanic/Norse traditions; Buddhism; Sufism; or Indigenous Australian traditions.

I suspect that the pseudo-conservative insistence on dogmatic religious devotion (be it Christian, Muslim, or something else) may contain a sliver of forgotten concern for the need to shelter the mystery of things. By comparison, the primary ritual of Sufism is called the Zikr and is literally an ‘Act of Remembrance’ of the divinity of all things. It is not necessary to take myth literally in order for it to help us remember ourselves and our world; all that is needed is a willingness to offer shelter to mystery.

It is no accident that above I talked about this aspect of conservatism as being ‘at play’. Playfulness is often equated with folly. And yet, nothing sends a problem out of control like overbearing, grumpy seriousness. Nothing closes down possibilities or understanding like telling ourselves that ‘this is serious business’. Nietzsche called this attitude the ‘spirit of gravity’, and could not bear its stodginess. His antidote, ‘Gay Science’, is an attitude that is serious AND playful, hardworking AND imaginative. Would it not be exceedingly imprudent to close ourselves off to new possibilities for solving challenges and experiencing our lives? If we are serious about participating in the sheltering of mystery we will regard the ‘spirit of gravity’ as an unfortunate and rather bad habit – and little more.

Conservatism as empathic action

Pseudo-conservatives often express little empathy or concern for the wellbeing of those handed the short end of the socio-economic stick at birth. ‘You get what you deserve’ seems to be their attitude to life. This is not to say that to a greater or lesser extent each of us is not responsible for our own actions. But life is not a blank slate onto which we are free to impose our unfettered desires. All kinds of social, biological, familial, economic, religious, and other limits shape and define what an individual may choose to become.

Thus, the ‘just desserts’ attitude betrays a kind of egomania, a taking credit for achievements which the individual had massive help for by way of their family wealth, social standing, etc. According to social psychologists, people tend to claim credit for the positive things in their lives while blaming others for the bad things in their lives. One never hears a poor person agree with a rich person that one’s wealth is a reflection of one’s virtue.

If we can imagine stepping past these kinds of mind games we are free to seriously ask – where does being truly conservative position us with regard to compassion, empathy, and community?

While I accord postmodernism full marks for refusing to impose one way of seeing things onto a wide range of cultures, I nevertheless think there are some universal aspects of human experience. It may seem obvious, but food plays a pretty big role in every human being’s life. Similarly, I doubt that anyone can truly thrive without sharing some kind of love with other people. I don’t mean to trivialise the great differences that can exist between two cultures or even between two individuals from the same culture. But I do assert that empathy is possible across any boundary – given sufficient time and effort of course.

Empathy is when I experience your life from your perspective. Empathy is when I both understand and feel where you are coming from. In an age of clashing extremisms (e.g. US capitalism versus Extremist Islam), there seems little room for empathy. Since both of the camps in my above example are radicals who think themselves to be conservative, it would appear that empathy has no or little place in pseudo-conservatism.

And conservatism as I have tried to outline it? Would it be prudent, a sign of wit and wisdom, to attempt to understand the challenges and celebrations of other peoples’ lives? Would be it common sense to try and appreciate the manner in which different individuals, communities, cultures, nations, are separate and the manner in which they are related? If our foresight invited us to strengthen the webs of our social fabric, would that insulate us against future, unexpected dangers? The New Orleans disaster is a testament to how dreadful the consequences of not acting on this foresight can be – plenty of resources had been allocated to reinforcing the canal banks that flooded and destroyed the city, but a complacent attitude led to this money being rerouted to military and political purposes instead.

Empathy, be it towards our best friend or towards someone we never have and never will meet, seems to be part and parcel of prudent, sensible conservatism. And yet its justifications are not just utilitarian. If we are committed to the sheltering of mystery we recognise the ethical, spiritual, and psychological importance of being open to the ways that things speak for themselves. Empathy, understood as an attempt on my part to appreciate your experience as though it were my own, is not a mercenary activity.

If we are to be empathetic, how will that guide our actions? Presumably the most important lesson of empathy is that we should not assume that everyone else thinks the way that we do, or that everyone else has the same values as we do. If we want to understand why someone does something, we are free to ask them. Their reasons may or may not hold water in the grander scheme of things, but we at least owe them the right to be heard and related to.

Secondly, empathy implies a commitment to ethics, to personal honour. If I can appreciate your experience of the world and then do something to harm you then I have also harmed myself. Just as I expect to be treated, so must I treat. A good lesson to learn for the arrogant business executive and his or her harried administration underlings! Would I want another country to offer me refuge from political persecution? I’ve no right to expect such treatment if I will not offer it to others as well. Do I expect others to speak the truth and act according to their word? Then I had better be able to respond in kind. In the current climate, it would seem that almost no Australian politician is truly conservative, if we judge them by the standard of personal honour outlined here.

Finally, empathy impels us to offer support to those suffering more than we ourselves are. It impels us to seek to strengthen and deepen social bonds, to offer resources, our time, our imagination, and absolutely not just grudgingly dole out our cash. It requires us to own up to our own ‘spin’, the excuses we make to ourselves for living in ways harmful to ourselves and others. It requires us to take responsibility for ourselves and for others. To act in this manner conserves and promotes the health and happiness of individuals, communities, and cultures. There is nothing conservative in concocting dubious justifications for absurd and inexcusable xenophobia. Our rejection of others is also a rejection of ourselves, a rejection of the parts of ourselves we would like to imagine are ‘really’ the sole province of someone else. To wound another is to wound ourselves.

Pseudo-conservatives often talk about family or community values, and yet generally seem to have very little empathy or compassion for themselves or anyone else. How on earth can community be deepened without empathy?

Does empathy stop with humans? Should we extend as much regard as offered to humans to animals, plants, even inanimate objects? Am I a hypocrite to advocate humanism, spend much money and time working in the environment conservation movement, and then still eat meat? Here I find challenges to my own sense of self, which I cannot easily resolve. I can only conclude this section by inviting my reader to undertake the same challenge.

Conservatism as regenerating roots

Regenerating roots means a few things, but in essence it refers to the view that postmodern humanity is alienated from him/herself, from other living things, and from the world in general – and that we need to put a lot of energy into changing this!

If we are to conserve ourselves and the world we live in we must first have whole relationships with urselves and the world. If I am split within myself, if I experience other people or the world around me as alien or fractured, how can I possibly even have anything worth conserving?

History, it must be said, has burdened us with many contradictions. In Australia we celebrate the festival of Easter in Autumn. Easter is generally regarded as holy because Jesus Christ died and was resurrected at this time. And yet a little research tells us that the Easter festival in Germanic Europe well predated the coming of Christianity. It was a celebration of spring and rebirth. The word Easter is literally the modern version of the name of the Anglo-Saxon spring goddess Eostre, whose continental German equivalent was Ostara. Easter, good old Christian Easter, has never stopped being a heathen occasion.

There are so many contradictions in the history of our modern Australian Easter festival. Can a spring celebration make sense when transplanted to southern hemisphere autumn? Does the Christian overlay implicitly keep and set to work heathen motifs? How can we make sense of the too and fro of Germanic and Roman cultures that have left us with this bizarre cross-breed? And how can any of this make sense in post-colonial Australia – a place that Europeans came, partly in the name of Jesus, in order to destroy the Indigenous Australians, whose traditional ways of experiencing life have much more in common with pre-Christian Germanic spirituality than with the Christianity that the Germanic peoples have by and large adopted?[2]

Given the blood and suffering that the fractured history of even one annual festival reveals, it seems clear that we need to make some effort to understand where we have come from. It is tempting to idealise the history of one’s ancestors, to gloss over the bad and deify the good. In some cases someone else’s more exciting or exotic history is co-opted as one’s own – Germanic Europe did this with Roman Catholic culture, throwing in Greek, Arabic, and now perhaps even New Age elements as it suited.

Australian pseudo-conservatives can harp on about the mateship of the ANZAC days – yet this is only one narrative in our country’s rich history. What of the conscientious objectors? The women who kept society running? The children who lost parents? The soldiers who returned broken alcoholics, perhaps making their loved ones’ lives miserable? What of the immigrants whose ancestors fought against the ANZACS, or did not fight at all? What of the slavish obedience to mother Britain that led Australian soldiers into the Great War? The tapestry of our history is profoundly rich and is written in suffering as well as joy. There is no caution, no prudence, no reserve, no good taste in choosing to idealise one thread in the weave and ignore the rest.

Since my own spirituality is so deeply wedded to Germanic archetypes, divinities, spirits, etc., I feel deep sadness at the confused, simplistic, polyglot chaos of our historical sense. Thanks to the colonial enterprise, Christianised Europe has managed to introduce this kind of spiritual and cultural fragmentation to many other parts of the globe – along with, of course, exploitation and alcohol.

The regeneration of roots therefore has three major aspects. The first is for each of us to turn a genuinely curious and critical eye to our implied history, to engage and challenge the easy myths we permit to comfort us, and to ponder the ways in which we bear the mark of each layer and aspect of our heritage. Personally I found that one of my oldest spiritual and historical influences, Germanic heathen beliefs, held the most relevance for my life and character. Perhaps others of Germanic heritage will not have this experience, and that is fine. The same goes for all possible heritages and ancestries.

The second aspect of regenerating our roots is to take seriously the harm that both we and our ancestors do or have done to others, and where appropriate to make reparations. No person and no culture can move forward with their victims or themselves until the debt of blood on their conscience is cleared.

The third aspect of regenerating our roots is to imagine new layers that might be added to our histories. Forging new ways of being spiritual, of being creative, of having community, family, or love. It is likely that this task will be informed by what has come before, or perhaps from cultural influences not directly contained in our heritage. This is the heart of what I mean by regenerating our roots – remaking for the first time our relationships to time, culture, love, the natural world, ourselves. There are so many tools available to us in this challenge to conserve our heritage by reinvigorating it as living tradition. They include reading, writing, meditation, art and performance, psychotherapy, community service, even raising a family.

Ultimately the way we will best be able to conserve ourselves and our world is to constantly reweave the past into new and beautiful patterns of existence that recall their origins and invoke the future. Seen in this sense the term ‘conservative’ may seem a far cry from the pseudo-conservatism so often peddled in recent times, be the peddler John Howard, George Bush, or Osama Bin-Laden. So be it.

Disentangling conservatism and egotism

What is the greatest foe of conservatism as I define it? Egotism.

Egotism is my commitment to myself, to my rightness, to my indubitably, to my unquestionable goodness. It is rigid, brutal to anything or anyone who deviates from its values, and it is highly hypocritical. It is defensive, paranoid, and stupid.

No human being is free of the danger of egotism (I am no exception). Whether we flee to a rigid self concept in the face of death, anxiety, or deep-seated feelings of inferiority, the end result is the same. For some, egotism becomes a cage, a trap within which the person rots. For others it becomes a battering ram, a brittle war machine which shreds all before it until eventually it shatters on the rocks of mortality.

Pseudo-conservatism is used as a vehicle by both of these approaches to life. It enables a person to justify the unjustifiable. It allows irresponsible individuals and groups to shirk the consequences of their actions (at least in the short term). Ultimately, pseudo-conservatism is just the attitude that “I am right and you are wrong unless you absolutely agree with me”. In other words, it is a punitive and ugly manifestation of egotism, which in turn is probably the most wretched and botched element of human nature. Of course, I have more faith in my own opinions than I do in the opinions of those who disagree with me. However I need to be able to transcend my own ego enough to engage with difference. If someone cannot do this then they’ve just failed one of life’s central challenges.

Both egotism and pseudo-conservatism invite us to become lax in our selves, to become hypocrites, to hand responsibility for our lives over to passive fear or desperate rage. Any ideology which de-emphasises the power of human agency for both good and ill lends itself to profound abuse by those without scruples, those driven by ego madness.

One final point that requires emphasis is the interwoven relationship of spirituality and politics. It seems quite common for a person to have done a lot of deep personal, psychotherapeutic, and spiritual growth and change, and yet never have challenged their blinkered political perspectives. The reverse is also true: a person can have a deep appreciation of politics and ethics, yet have great difficultly developing within their own self. I don’t expect everyone to agree with my opinions, but I am always surprised at the ways in which someone can be so committed to growth and insight in one part of their life and yet be unconscious of difficulties they carry in another part of their life. Perhaps this essay demonstrates why I find spiritual, ethical and political concerns to be inseparable.

Heathen Imaginings

December 1, 2009May 28, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

I wrote this paper a few years ago, and my views may have since changed…

–

The first great challenge to modern Heathenism has come. Will we dare to overcome ourselves, or will we fall into the death of stasis? Will we dare to overcome ourselves, or will we let our weaknesses, our fears, our baseness, overwhelm us? This is the question I see, more and more, facing us.

The time has come that we begin to imagine ourselves. We need to ask, “Who are we?” No longer are terms like ‘universalist’ or ‘folkist’ appropriate – these have come out of grasping at particulars. At best, they refer to people who believe fundamentally the same things – the terms thus virtually lose their relevance. At worst, they are reactive, fearful stances that choke upon themselves. Therefore, the time has come to do something radical. The time has come for us as Heathens to take the radical step of imagining ourselves. *

Our ancestors were not the isolationist hicks that extremist folkish Ásatrúar want them to be. They were profoundly in tune with the ‘outer world’. From the earliest times, they travelled vast distances. They aggressively incorporated ideas from other cultures that were in essential conformity with their own.

The Elder Futhark is itself a product of this eager syncretisation, a syncretisation that came when a Northern
magician recognised the power of Roman/Etruscan alphabetic language and combined it with the Germanic grasp of pictographic symbolism. In this one move, Rune magic came into its own – too syncretistic for the extreme folkish understanding, yet too true to its inner essence for extreme eclecticism to grasp. No surprise that both of these ‘camps’ in modern times think of the origin of the runes in hobbled and politically circumscribed ways.

Our ancestors did not see the world in the fear-laden terms of separation, the terms that extremist folkists deal in. Our ancestors understood that a thing’s essence is not the sum of its particulars. They understood that their own essence was not the sum of their particularity.

Ásatrú has in modern times been intensely insular, and with good reason, for she was weak for many years. But now she has stabilised. She has regained her grounding. It is time to break open the protective armour of Ingwaz and step back into the world. It is time to cease bickering over academic minutiae. It is time to accept that we are REVIVING, not accurately reconstructing, a tradition. It is time to activate our mytho-poetic imaginations, as much wiser souls than myself have put it.

Ásatrú in modern times has never been ‘pure’. Its major magickal exponents have always brought their influences, usually of the western esoteric tradition, with them. Politically, it has always had elements of its number infected by the contempt-worthy fear that is racism. It has always been infected with those who argue for the ahistorical notion that “each people should be locked away by itself”, a notion which was and will always be the position of apologists for totalitarianism.

This alone reveals the bankruptcy of those who want modern Heathenism to be culturally isolated, or who think that all cultural exchange equates to new age eclecticism. As it happens, these people have already accepted many ahistorical additions to Ásatrú – the foremost being the notion of our ancestors being insular. Sadly, these people have also often accepted the infantile fears of right-wing extremism.

Our ancestors revelled in the wide tapestry of the world, and yet managed to maintain a multitude of distinct and coherent religions and cultures (for truly it is fair to say that the dark age Norse were significantly different in culture and religion to their Bronze Age forebears). Cultural integrity and coherence is not maintained by cultural isolation – history seems to prove this a thousand times over.

We must remove the pedestals we have placed our ancestors upon, and critically engage with them. We must understand that they too made mistakes. In saying this, I mean to say that criticism is the highest form of praise. He that cannot question turns the object of questioning into a sacred cow. May Loki lay low all stodgy spirits of seriousness! Nietzsche was right – we need gay scientists, not dour pharisees.

Our ancestors eagerly innovated. All-too-often we moderns cling to the record of the past. In doing this we obey their example to the letter, not to the spirit. It is time to release a little of Tyr’s academic hold and abandon ourselves to the exhilaration and dread of Woðanaz. The fruits of research need to be interpreted, developed, explored, not taken as pronunciations ex cathedra. If we imprison ourselves within the woefully limited picture we have of the past, we will doom ourselves to stagnation, psychological illness and devolution.

Will we become a tradition of fear, insularity, pettiness, backwardness? This is the danger that now faces us. The challenge is no longer survival. The challenge is to become a living, breathing, evolving – yet still coherent – life tradition.

The time has come to imagine ourselves, to cease pretending that Need impels us to reactivity. We are long overdue in ending our tolerance of the Christian-born instincts of racism and right wing extremism. The time has come to become a living religion, in a modern world.

As Heathens, we are inherently atavistic. We must trust the deep taproots of our ancestors and our gods to protect us as we grow and evolve, and cease clinging to fear. The struggle for the Heathen imagination has begun, and the very survival of our tradition as something other than a series of pseudo-political parties or isolated cults is at stake.

Let us take up this challenge with ecstasy.

(* For more on the idea of Imagination, I can only refer my reader to John Ralston Saul’s masterpiece, On Equilibrium.)

Odin has a Light Sabre

May 28, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

This article was written a few years ago… so my views have probably evolved since then.

–

I recently had a strange insight into the profundity of the first three Star Wars films (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi). They have some deep parallels with the Heathen mythos, and some truly special psychological insights about the paths of Tyr/Teiwaz, and more especially, of Odin/Wodan. Then Othrerir roared, and out came this essay. I ask readers who are sceptical of the substance of the Stars Wars trilogy to consider this essay before they dismiss it for superficial reasons.

I will not comment on the new Star Wars films because 1) the third doesn’t exist yet; 2) I’m note sure that there is anything profound in them. And as a final note of slightly indulgent clarification, when I use words like ‘human’ below, the reader should infer that I mean all of the sentient alien species in the Star Wars films, not just the humans specifically.

At the end of The Return of the Jedi (which I will refer to as Return from here on in), Luke Skywalker, the Jedi knight, finds himself confronting his dark Jedi father (Darth Vader) and Vader’s malignant master, Emperor Palpatine. Palpatine tries to defeat Luke by exhorting him to “give into the hate” that dwells within him. Here we see the fundamental conflict of the Odinnic magician, of the child of Wodanaz. The struggle for Jedi (magicians) like Luke and his father is to find equilibrium between light and darkness, between Asgard and Hel. Each has an important place in the whole, but when one dominates disaster results.

The Jedi or magician struggles to resist the impulse to give into the hate. They feel keenly their own power and strength, and it is easy to forget that this strength has only come because they have surrendered their ego to The Force (the fundamental life energy of the universe that underpins the metaphysics of the Star Wars films). They risk beginning to feel that they have some innate power, and this is when the darkness, the hate, threatens to overwhelm everything and bring disaster upon the Jedi’s head.

Hate stems from fear and objectification. When the Jedi (or magician) denies that her power flows from The Force (or wyrd, or the Way), they are denying the fundamental subjectivity of the universe, treating it as dead matter onto which they may impose their will. Compounding the danger of falling into this attitude is the fact that the Jedi IS powerful, and so they feel that they have external or objective evidence of their personal greatness whenever they successfully act with purpose.

The Jedi, in their attempt to avoid the trap of being consumed in hatred and egotism, must not repress the darkness. Either they will go mad, or else it will grow out of all proportion and overwhelm them, turning them into a cancerous monster. They will become a beast, become even less than a Jedi that chooses to be totally consumed by hatred. All hope of redemption is then gone.

They must not indulge the darkness within, but they do have a responsibility to use it. They must turn it towards positive ends. They must use their resources as the outsider, the killer, the critic, the artist, the mystic, to contribute to higher ends – to help bring about a less tormented world, to help heal it. They can use the strength and independence that their darkness can give them both to combat those who have indulged it (though they must have care, as the magnitude of Luke’s temptation shows), and to destabilise trends around them that are causing or allowing injustice or needless suffering. An incredible amount of art and creation, things that enrich so many lives, stems from the transformation of darkness into beauty. I am not criticising darkness, I am criticising those who abuse it.

On the surface, the ‘light side’ of The Force is much weaker than the ‘dark side’. This is for two reasons. One, it is non-linear – it is diffuse, it works in subtle ways throughout the whole fabric of the world. Two, the dark side is bound up with egotism – it is concentrated densely within the dark Jedi’s personality. The upshot is that in most situations the dark Jedi is able to bring more power to bear more rapidly than the light Jedi. He is more responsive in crisis situations. This is part of why the Jedi must learn to become comfortable and at peace with his darkness – it has its place and is valuable, so long as it is not allowed to rule.

Regardless, the light side is infinitely more powerful, because the Jedi who works with the light becomes a conduit for all of Being. They become a vortex of creativity and life, and in the moments when they is able to move with the tide of the world, they move with the momentum of the universe. The dark Jedi, conversely, must expend endless energy forcing circumstances, twisting patterns, manipulating, maintaining a constant sense of drama and crisis. They can never relax, because their power can only manifest when brought to bear on resistance – difficult circumstances, enemies, etc. And because they can feed only on their own energy, on their victims, and on the negative energy generated by the conflicts they orchestrate, they end up burning away into a hollow, monstrous shell. They become a living draug, a walking corpse. A sociopath.

When we follow Luke through from Star Wars through to Return of the Jedi, we see how he evolves, and we see the critical impact that other archetypes have on his own Odinnic one. He is raised as a farm boy, in touch with natural cycles, and raised in a spirit of humanism and passion. This sets him on the right path, and we must acknowledge that dark Jedi may have had a very big handicap in early life, though not always (some are just self-indulgent brats).

And yet his passion, which wells from the dark of the unconscious, makes him dissatisfied with his simple Vanic life (the Vanir are the Heathen nature and agriculture gods). This is the curse of the Aesir (the Heathen gods of nobility, magic, art, and war). Luke was raised by his uncle, a very Vanic man, they struggle constantly. Luke’s uncle is perpetually worried about Luke because he sees the trouble and suffering that this same passion brought Luke’s father, Darth Vader. This is an example of ancestral orlog, the process by which each generation must assume responsibility for retaking the tests failed by the previous one (orlog is a Norse word meaning ‘primal layers’ and refers to the past as a force that pushes the present towards a partly determined future).

Luke’s uncle does not understand the passion that Luke and his father share, and believes that he can keep Luke safe by stifling, dismissing and ignoring Luke’s sense of adventure and lust for mystery. This actually intensifies Luke’s tendencies, and also makes him idealise the only person he knows who allows a place for this aspect of his personality – Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Kenobi is a light Jedi, and his archetype is Tyr/Teiwaz, not Odinn/Wodan. He was Darth Vader’s master, but he failed to help Vader find equilibrium between darkness and light because he could not understand just how powerful the darkness is.

Although Kenobi is easily capable of killing, and is pragmatic about the means he uses to achieve his ends, his ‘dark’ acts are not motivated by passion or desire. Rather, he commits them because he accepts the flow of wyrd (a concept from Heathen belief similar to The Force). He has enough faith in wyrd that he does not question or argue with the courses of action that are Needful for the success of his quest to help promote empathy and equilibrium in the world.

Therefore, Kenobi does not struggle with the dark as Luke does. He is a child of Teiwaz, he has utterly offered himself to the Force as an agent for healing (of course sometimes healing requires the controlled destructiveness of the rune Kenaz, hence Kenobi’s warrior aspect). His burden is that he is doomed to self-sacrifice and will never truly know the rewards of his right action. In contrast, those who are Odinic must struggle endlessly with tides of shadow that threaten to drown them and turn them into the very monsters they fear and despise.

In the first film, Kenobi helps his friends escape from the Death Star by willingly going into battle with Darth Vader, despite knowing that he will be killed. He is comfortable with sacrificing himself for the good of his friends and for the bigger picture.

And yet he empathises with Luke’s hot-headedness, and sees that if it is repressed it will still manifest in the long run, but twisted and hideous. He has learned from his mistake with Vader, and so eases Luke into the Jedi path. Although he can see that potentially Luke may become an even worse agent of hatred and suffering than Vader, he has faith in wyrd, The Force, in The Way, and is willing to take his chances in mentoring Luke. He realises that to not try is to fail, and moreso, it is to fail to take responsibility for the need that he has been called on to fulfil. The way of Tyr/Teiwaz is the path of absolute responsibility, whereas the Odinic/Wodennic Jedi (e.g. Luke or Vader) must work hard to resist abandoning the path of right action and falling into hatred, into rampant, uncaring darkness.

To be absorbed by the dark of ego is to refuse to take responsibility for one’s own capacity to destroy and bring suffering. It is to refuse to take responsibility for the innate empathic bond with others and with Nature that all people must accept and move with. Hatred, therefore, is cowardice. It is for this reason that racism, elitism, sexism, homophobia, totalitarianism, etc, are contemptible. People with these attitudes pride themselves on being more powerful or better than those they victimise or demonise. But in truth they are the weakest of the lot, because they lack the strength of character to acknowledge even the most basic essence of being human – empathy.

Because of his total openness to the world, Obi-Wan Kenobi does not truly die when he is slain, but lives on as a spirit and guide to those he loves. Dark side egotism tries to live forever by seizing up and sealing itself from the world. Ironically it is Kenobi’s embracing of totality and surrendering of ego that lets him live on.

Luke is bonded to his friends Han Solo and Princess Leia through trust, empathy and love. He understands their flaws, and vice versa, but is able to love them anyway. They may not be able to understand the conflicts and responsibility that his nature entails, but they have faith in him and love him for his compassion and his determination. They also help to counterpoint his self-indulgence, bringing him back to earth when he becomes too lost in the ego-dangers of mysticism (the atheist Han especially plays this role).

Luke also helps his friends to have faith in themselves and find themselves – for this is the kind of healing that Wodanaz may bring. He helps Han take responsibility for his own life and begin working for the Rebellion to help create the chance for a society based on compassion and empathy. He helps Leia to have faith in her role as a leader, somebody who brings out the best in others. They help each other to come to terms with their conflicted and pain-riddled childhood. As it turns out, Luke really IS the brother that Leia never knew she had.

Luke’s next teacher is Yoda, who long ago attained equilibrium between light and dark, but who then chose to become a hermit. When we meet first meet him we find that he has gone into solitude so that he might maintain his stability until he is again needed.. For him, there is none of the false pretence of ‘try’, which really reflects insecurity and the low self-esteem that leads to the grating parade of egotism. There is merely do or not do. He is totally comfortable with the responsibility that he bears to all things, and therefore when there is Need for action, he acts. At first this mystifies Luke, whose lack of self-belief clouds his judgment and his connection to The Force.

The critical moment of Luke’s training with Yoda is when he goes into the dark valley. Yoda tells him that the only thing in this valley of darkness is “what you take with you”. In youthful ego and fear, Luke straps on his lightsabre and other weapons and heads into the dark.

There he confronts an imaginary Darth Vader. They fight and Luke beheads his foe. To his horror, the imaginary Vader’s helmet flies off to reveal that it is actually Luke. This is an important lesson for Luke – it forces him to confront his own darkness and realise that if he does not take responsibility for it and use it for the benefit of the whole he will become what he fears and despises. It also teaches him that he cannot indulge the temptation of objectifying his enemies, of reducing the world to simple dichotomies of good and evil. He must learn to empathise with everything, even those things that he hates and fears, if he is to avoid becoming those things.

Luke’s response to these revelations is something of a classic. Soon after the battle with his dark self in the valley, his enhanced clairvoyance reveals that Han, Leia and their friends are travelling to the Cloud City of Bespin, seeking refuge from Darth Vader and his Imperial space fleet. Luke realises that Vader is one step ahead, that his friends will be betrayed, and that Han will be turned over to his old enemy, Jabba the Hutt. Although Yoda warns him that his presence will not help and that he is not yet ready to face Vader, Luke attempts to take on TOO MUCH responsibility too soon, adopting a Tyrric role that he, as Odinic, cannot truly see through. If you pay careful attention to these parts of the film, you will notice that his arrival at Bespin does not contribute to his friends escape (they do it of their own initiative), and Han Solo is frozen in carbonite and shipped off to the court of his revenge-hungry foe.

Instread, Luke battles Darth Vader, who manipulates him into doubting both Obi-Wan Kenobi’s honesty and his own worth, before humiliating Luke in battle. Vader tries to corrupt Luke into joining forces with him, into making the same mistake that Vader did. Thus Vader becomes a direct agent of his own corrupted orlog, trying to propagate it in his son through unfulfillable offers of love. This dynamic is similar to an addict trying to encourage others to use drugs. In his sense of loss and betrayal, Luke reacts by denying Vader, who in anger severs Luke’s hand and leaves him for dead. The parallel with Tyr sacrificing his hand to Fenris in an ultimately futile attempt to save the Aesir from Ragnarok (the death of the gods) is clear.

Again it is the love and empathy of his friends that saves Luke after this disastrous initiation. Although this mainly occurs off-screen (between the second and third films), it is implied in the closing scene of The Empire Strikes Back (the second film). There we see a recovering Luke holding hands with Leia as their star ship flies away with the still-determined tatters of the Rebel Alliance to fight another day.

We then find ourselves at the beginning of the third film, Return of the Jedi. In the opening, Luke works to save Han Solo. By this stage he is almost totally in equilibrium with dark and light. He plays the role of Woden as wanderer and manipulator to gain entry to Jabba’s court, and becomes the catalyst for the rescue of his friends – Han, Leia, Lando Calrissian, Chewbacca, and the droids. He also pays back with blood the debt owed to Boba Fett, the bounty hunter who helped Vader capture Han and who took Han back to Jabba.

Although the Rebellion needs him to assist in battling the new Death Star, Luke realises he has yet to fully let go of his fear and egotism. He returns to Yoda, who before passing away tells him his last test is to kill Vader. Luke thinks that Yoda means that if he cannot murder Vader then he will never come to terms with his darkness and find equilibrium. In fact the test that Yoda foresees is that if Luke DOES kill his father then he will fail and be consume by hate. This is the dreadful manipulation that the Emperor tries on Luke when he and Vader fight as the battle over the Death Star rages at the end of Return.

When Luke confronts Vader and the Emperor, the Emperor sense Luke’s darkness, that he is not yet at peace with it, and tries to make him commit to hatred. If Luke were to slay his father in anger, then there would be no turning back, and the Emperor sees that he has even more ‘potential’ than Vader.

Vader has been so consumed by hate and ego that be has become more machine than man, “twisted and evil” as Kenobi describes him. The Emperor, the darkest of the lot, is not exactly an image of vitality, wholeness or happiness either.

As Luke and Vader duel, it becomes clear that Luke’s hatred is more overwhelming than Darth Vader’s, who finds himself in an emotional conflict because the fragment of light still left in him empathises with his son’s struggle. He cannot truly bring himself to slay his own son, and in a curious reversal, it is now Luke who severs Vader’s hand. Luke prepares himself for the killing blow, but empathy returns. When he sees how helpless and wounded he has made Vader he throws his weapon aside. With this act, he lets go of the hatred, the egotism. He ceases letting it have a chance to dominate him. He allows it no more than its rightful due, and would rather be killed by the Emperor than compromise. This is a mighty evolution of the Skywalker family’s orlog, for the son has overcome the temptation that consumed the father and, as I am about to discuss, this act also helps the father to atone for his own failure.

As the Emperor slowly kills Luke with his lightning hands, Vader in turn recovers his empathy. For the first time the awful consequences of indulging the dark side of the force are revealed to him in a way that he can permit himself to empathise with – in the attempted murder of his son. Inspired by the example that Luke has set by sparing him, Vader finally take responsibility for his actions and for his own darkness. With his final strength, he hurls the Emperor off a precipice, turning his capacity for darkness and destruction to a good end. Father and son lay together, exhausted and hurting, but finally whole and finally able to love one another. Soon after Vader dies, but he is reborn as Kenobi and Yoda were. With his final breath he lets go of the leaden burden of egotistical hatred. He becomes a son of Wodanaz who is able to find equilibrium and take responsibility for the empathic duty that rests on the shoulders of all human beings – love.

Luke is left to continue the ancestral path of the family of Jedi, a family bonded sometimes by blood, but more generally by common experience, harmonised (though sometimes different) perspectives, empathy, and fellowship. Interestingly, some semi-official written ‘sequel’s to the films have Luke later succumb to the darkness, and this is an important message. ‘Enlightenment’ is not forever, equilibrium is a responsibility to maintain, and initiations are not final. One must undergo initiations again and again in the process of growth, for an initiation is not just a ceremony (though ceremonies can be used to cause initiatory experiences). An initiation is some kind of challenging or traumatic life experience that helps you let go of repression and delusion and opens you to the central core of things that matter.

Hopefully by now my reader can see why I believe that the first three Star Wars films are essentially as profound as any mythology, be it Heathen or otherwise.

Heathenism and the Pre-Modern Worldview

August 15, 2024May 28, 2008 by Heimlich A. Laguz

This essay was written some five years ago. Obviously my views have evolved since then…

–

It occurs to me that this paper may seem anti-science. I assure my reader that I do not have a problem with science per se. My issue is with the way it has been interpreted and the troubling ideas that it has been used to excuse.

As such, my issue is primarily with scientific culture. The basic idea of using controlled experiments as a device for interpreting the manner by which things operate is unimpeachable. In any case, it far predates our modern scientific establishment.

Perhaps we should also consider whether the rise of modern technology is perhaps more to blame for the problems I see than science. Not because technology is in-itself bad, but because it happens to have allowed the mistaken assumptions of scientific culture to penetrate almost every part of our existence.

I am at risk of starting in the middle and charging feet-first into the beginning. Without further ado, let me unfurl my ideas.

Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, first published in the 17th century, brought about a revolution in our world. It marked a turning point in our basic understanding of our place in the world, of the character of the world, of our relationship to the world.

Unfortunately, it seems this change was largely for the worse.

For Descartes, the world was simply an impersonal, life-less, three-dimensional grid. The only conscious beings were humans, and they were but flickers of soul, locked away in inescapable subjective cages. Descartes believed that there was an unbridgeable gap between subjective and objective worlds, making absolute doubt about the external world a serious problem (never mind the absurd character this doubt has to us in our everyday context).

Descartes tried to solve this schizoid relationship between the fundamentally quantitative external world and the fundamentally qualitative internal world by invoking God. God, he felt, would always assure that we are more or less connected to our world, even if for some reason he also permits us to get it wrong now and then.

The problem is that none of Descartes’ arguments to this effect actually work. Every one of them has a flaw that renders it invalid. The idea of ‘proving’ that god exists by the mere exercise of logic seems to miss the point anyway.

No one in the western philosophical tradition since Descartes has been able to fix his metaphysics. Officially at least, nobody takes his views seriously any more.

But ideas have a way of transforming the playing field in ways the players are not aware of. Even though no one believes in Descartes’ metaphysics, his ideas subtly determined the direction of philosophy, science, and broader Western culture in damaging ways.

Descartes believed that humans were unique in having souls. Indeed, he performed the most monstrous experiments on animals, believing that they were but complex machines with no sense of pain. But, because his philosophy started by making an impossible cleavage between the subjective world and the impersonal external world, he could never situate humans in that world.

The history of science and philosophy shows that most theorists subsequent to Descartes have unconsciously internalised this view of the world as an impersonal matrix with neither absolute nor relative meaningfulness. As such, they have tried to get out of Descartes’ fix by deciding that there is no soul.

The ‘no soul’ view has turned out to be about as unprovable as Descartes’ view that soul exists. Although it rejects Descartes’ dualism, it retains the flawed thinking that first led to Descartes’ dilemma, and as such it collapses under its own problems.

Nevertheless, many scientists and philosophers seem to operate on the pre-empirical assumption that the world can be treated as though it were but a huge deterministic matrix, a giant machine. While recent work in physics may have shown that this machine works much more subtly than once thought, the basic continuity from Descartes to quantum physics remains (but see below, where I sort of contradict this claim). Of course, this way of thinking assumes that humans are meaningless machines like everything else.

God – by which I mean anything that is mystical, holy, meaningful, or conscious – is locked away from this reality, or else does not exist. This way of thinking has deeply affected the popular mindset, even if its rejection of the soul has not done so to the same extent.

Sadly, the fact that science works has given currency in broader society to scientific culture’s unconsciously held Cartesian preconceptions – despite their falsity.

The 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche railed against this nihilistic worldview. In his estimation, science and philosophy had killed God. They no longer permit it a place in the world. The religious instinct, which Nietzsche took as being a strong aspect of human nature (contrary to the usual misreadings), was being denied more and more. As such, he felt that the west was clinging ever more desperately to Christianity, political extremism, etc., in a desperate attempt to hold at bay the meaninglessness of the Descartes-inspired world.

He was convinced that new values and beliefs needed to be erected, and part of that project was to question the nihilistic spin that scientific culture had come to put upon the world via Descartes and company. In the same fashion, he felt scorn for modern politics, seeing it as being little more than a forum for hypocrites, petty-souled anti-Semites (remember his context of 1880’s Germany), and absurdly idealistic revolutionary communists. All of these political ‘solutions’ he saw as being firmly grounded in nihilism.

The sociologist Max Weber spoke of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ – that our experience and understanding of the world has been deeply shaped by the view that reality is just a huge, impersonal machine, best understood by numbers. After untold thousands of years living in the world, as a part of it, we came to feel that things are just bits of impersonal stuff, and that we were barely better. The widespread acceptance of this view was brought to completion through the emergence of the industrial revolution.

I refer to Descartes’ way of understanding things as the modern worldview, and I contrast it with the premodern worldview. If Heathenism is to be what I believe it should be, it must grasp the premodern worldview and act accordingly.

The modern mentality has played a major role in driving the overbalancing greed of modern capitalism. Nor would we rape the environment so viciously if we did not see it as a mere resource to be exploited. Once, we saw it as a huge and all-inclusive system, which we were an integral part of.

I believe the simple-minded mentality of “us versus them” begins to get a foothold once we lose sight of this holistic perspective. This leads to xenophobia, violence, the manipulation of many by a few, and the paranoid sense that all cultural exchange is destructive.

Sadly, some Heathen groups have fallen into this mentality. In doing so they come to have far more in common with fundamentalist Christians or right wing extremists than they do with the historical Heathens of old.

Cross-cultural interaction does not automatically equate to conflict or in one culture being subverted and dissolved by the other. It does, however, potentially bring mutual respect and friendship. Being friendly and open does not make you a target for destruction by some epic culture-hating force.

Historical Heathenism was definitely premodern in its view of things. Heathens of old saw the whole world as filled with spirits, wights, disir, elves, dwarves, trolls and giants. These beings are part of the folk appreciation that each thing and place has a unique character and presence. All things have some form of subjectivity – it is just that humans have a very elaborate form of subjectivity. All things are ‘spirited’, even if we moderns may not choose to literally believe in little bearded men running about the roots of mountains.

The world itself had a being and spirit, expressed for example in the world tree Yggrdrasil and the fact that it was held to be made from the body of the proto-god Ymir.

Heathens of old felt themselves a part of the cycles of the seasons, the crops, the weather, the cycles of night and day. They felt a kinship with the natural world to the extent that one of the most frequent poetic kennings for ‘human’ was ‘tree’, and their myths claim that humans were made out of trees. They saw the universe itself as the tree Yggrdrasil.

They knew Nature, the world, as being whole, one grand being, not some nihilistic matrix of numbers populated by schizophrenic human robots. By the same token, they recognised each individual place and thing to be unique and worthy of honour.

Our forebears’ basic worldview had much in common with the indigenous beliefs of cultures worldwide, as well as with the intuitions that guide Taoism, Shinto, and other eastern traditions. Truth is found only in the synthesis of all extremes, in the whole – an intuition that Hegel and a small number of other western philosophers also possessed, thought most often too infected with academic pedantry to understand what sat in their laps.

There are many paths that travel from the premodern worldview. They each have unique elements that cannot be easily ‘translated’ to other roads, but nevertheless they stem from similar root intuitions.

What draws us to Heathenism? I believe that one force that draws us back to the elder troth is that we feel the nihilism that has infected our world. And we feel that our very being as human knows, at some inarticulate level, that the world is a whole, that all things have an inherent Being or spirit, that humans are not locked out of the world – that they are integral to it.

It is difficult to hold onto this sense when we live in modern, industrialised cities. We are alienated from Nature both psychologically and geographically. If the western world was still primarily agrarian in basis, you can bet that pre-modern philosophies would have a lot more currency.

In the same way, our sense of family and community is becoming more and more dissolved. The ‘nuclear family’, an absurd caricature of family relations, is touted as an admirable norm. Every problem we see, we see as ‘someone else’s’. ‘Community’ is not something that can be created out of nothing, in the way that political parties attempt. It takes time, experience, mutual affection, the shared experience of good and ill. We would do well to attempt to recover the extended family patterns we once had.

For thousands of years our ancestors experienced the world in the premodern way, and I believe that our collective unconscious remembers and pines for this understanding, this real understanding, not the superficial misunderstanding of Descartes. For the premodern understanding is a healthy way of relating to oneself as well as to the rest of the world.

The premodern worldview sees mystery as central to everything. It has a deep appreciation for ambiguity, for not-knowing. It recognises that the world escapes our finite human grasp. This stands in distinction to the ‘control freak’ mentality that modern technology has in some respects lead to. Modern science tends toward the view that we can know everything. The pre-modern view sees that this is both impossible and undesirable.

It is an arrogant conceit to think that Nature would be so obliging that a bunch of experiments performed by vastly fallible creatures can lay open her every pore for ogling.

Although science is an accurate describer of the world, it is not a true one. Truth is more than just accuracy. Truth is a reciprocal relationship, which scientific culture struggles with by virtue of its Cartesian birth certificate.

That said, quantum physics is making inroads to resisting Descartes’ worldview. But whether it will ultimately succeed remains uncertain. It is heartening that its holistic approach is having a major impact on the thinking of all kinds of academics, decision makers, etc.

Unfortunately, it does not seem to appreciate the other, more qualitative, aspect of the premodern perspective – that each thing has its own character or being, by virtue of its place within the grand structures of Being.

The Tao of Physics< is probably the best attempt to elucidate the holistic thinking of quantum physics. Martin Heidegger’s essays “The Question Concerning Technology” and “Building Dwelling Thinking” are the most powerful illustrations of the Being of each place and thing that I have encountered. John Ralston Saul’s On Equilibrium is the most complete statement of this way of thinking I have yet encountered.

In the last few centuries, then, we have sought to impose our understanding on the world. We have come to believe that the world is but a collection of stuff, of things, mere things, sitting uneasily side-by-side.

But the world is so much more than this. In Heathen ceremonies, we honour the being of gods, wights, Nature, one other, our selves. We again give respect and love to the very world around us, as all balanced cultures seem to do. We recognise that we have a place in the world, and that the world has a place in us.

By living ‘true to the gods’ – Ásatrú – we live true to ourselves and to our world. That said, we would do well to remember that merely calling ourselves Ásatrú or Heathen – indeed, even acting out the practical and cultural aspects of Heathenism, is insufficient. We must strive to act in accordance with the holistic perspective as well. The trappings of tradition are vital, but they are no substitute for the values of that tradition. If one does not appreciate the meaning of one’s actions, then one is merely a self parody.

On reflection, I realise that modern Heathenism has a definite bias towards the Aesir – the gods of consciousness, wisdom, human society, war, and nobility. But it is the Vanir who are the nature pantheon, the gods of agriculture and farm folk. They are perhaps more deeply connected to the premodern worldview. This is not to say that the Aesir, Odin in particular, do not appreciate the premodern perspective.

But it is to say that Heathenism must reconnect with its Vanic roots if it is to become a serious spiritual philosophy and meaningful cultural perspective. I challenge all Heathens to dwell deeply on the nature of the premodern worldview.