I just found out that Punctum Books has created a Shadowing the Anthropocene travel mug based on Vincent van Gerven Oei’s superb cover design of my book. Cool.
Readers can spare yourself the money for the book (read the free PDF) and get the mug instead!
(Hipster alert!)
Posted in Anthropocene | Tagged Shadowing the Anthropocene | Leave a Comment »
My course “Self-Cultivation and Spiritual Practice” starts from the premise that philosophy — at least as it has existed outside of today’s analytical philosophy departments — has generally been about how to live, and that the best philosophers around the world have offered detailed instructions on how to get better at that. Historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot has called those “spiritual exercises,” and some contemporary philosophers (including Michel Foucault in his last years and Peter Sloterdijk more recently) have tried, in some ways, to make it that again. Since that dovetails well with the current popular interest in spirituality, yoga, mindfulness, and other such things, I offer the course to provide some historical and cultural grounding to practices found in the spiritual and philosophical “marketplace” today.
It’s a survey course that moves from the ancient world (Greece, India, China) to today’s emergent spiritualities. We just covered the Hellenistic world last week, and one of the little tidbits I shared included some advice for living in difficult times. It’s intended to help students distinguish between the perspectives of the Stoics and the Epicureans, and specifically between what Stoics call the “view from above” — a kind of universe’s view on our lives — and what the Epicureans might have called the “view from within” (or the “argument from nature”). While the views below aren’t exactly demonstrative of these, I think they work in our present context.
I prefaced the comment by noting that I teach and research the cultural dimensions of the environmental crisis. (The spiritual practice course is a special course taught for my university’s Honors College.) That means that I’m as aware as anyone of the scope, scale, and difficulty of the challenges humanity is and will be facing in the coming decades — an awareness that is enough to make anyone a pessimist (no kidding). The Covid-19 pandemic has only made that awareness feel more acute. So these are ways of tempering a “pessimogenic” situation with what I think of as “realistic optimism.”
Continue Reading »Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged argument from nature, Epicureanism, Pierre Hadot, spiritual exercises, spiritual practice, Stoicism, view from above, world situation | Leave a Comment »
On day one, I poked an eye open. And shut it tight.
On day two, I tried again, looked around, grasped for something, clutched it tight. Then I ate it.
On day three (a lot of things happened between days two and three), I started thinking.
Continue Reading »Posted in Manifestos & auguries | Tagged apocalypse, creation story, Day Six, Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, holy triamazikamno, octave doctor, Peter Sloterdijk | Leave a Comment »
See how far you follow my line of thinking here:
(1) Democracy (institutional and not just majoritarian/representational) is better than the alternatives. Let’s live with it (and defend it).
(2) Democracy as practiced in the U.S. today is partial, compromised, and somewhat muzzled, but still better than the alternatives. Let’s fix it up.
(3) Democracy, no matter how partial or complete, is not sufficient when it is leading us all off a cliff. At that point direct action becomes necessary. So are we heading off a cliff yet?
Continue Reading »Posted in Manifestos & auguries | Tagged democracy, tipping points, Trump | 1 Comment »
In part 1 of this article, I compared two recent books, each of which proclaims a “new paradigm” in the scientific study of emotions and affect: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “constructivist” How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Stephen Asma’s and Rami Gabriel’s “basic emotions”-rooted The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. In part 2, I relate each of these to recent social-scientific writing on “affective” or “emotional practices” and to a few key sources of my own efforts to articulate a “philosophy as a way of life,” that is, a contemporary askēsis: specifically, to Spinoza (briefly), Gurdjieff (at greater length), and Shinzen Young (whose mindfulness system I used as a basis for my own, presented in part 2 of Shadowing the Anthropocene). I end with an extended practical exercise that brings these strands of thinking together.
Continue Reading »Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged A. H. Almaas, affect theory, affective neuroscience, affective practice, askesis, C. S. Peirce, constructivism, emotional practice, G. I. Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff, Hadot, inquiry, Jacques Lacan, neo-Spinozism, Paul Maclean, philosophy as way of life, philosophy of the moment, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, Spinoza, spiritual practice, three-body practice, triune brain, triune self | 1 Comment »
The Covid-19 pandemic has offered all kinds of interesting case studies for those who study controversies in science, technology, and medicine. Hydroxychloroquine is one of them. It’s a bit unusual in that it highlights how the left-liberal mediasphere has sometimes followed similar trajectories as more commonly found on the (Trumpist) political right. But it’s interesting all the same, and perhaps even more so for that reason.
Norman Doidge, psychiatric clinician, popular science writer, and “neuroplasticity guy,” has written a helpful analysis of the controversy that, to my mind, qualifies as a kind of “popular STS” (science & technology studies), providing some interesting insights into the workings of medical and other sciences.
Continue Reading »Posted in Science & society | Tagged COVID-19, Hydroxychloroquine, medicine, Norman Doidge, pandemic politics, public communication of science, replication crisis, science and technology studies, science controversies, STS | 4 Comments »
The study of emotions, particularly within the field of affective neuroscience, is a complex field riven by paradigmatic division. In my book Shadowing the Anthropocene, I proposed a way to engage with one’s experience, including one’s emotional or affective experience, within an “eco-ethico-aesthetic” (or “logo-ethico-aesthetic”) practice that could help us deal with the “Anthropocene predicament.”
In the following two-part article, I reflect on that attempt in light of recent debates in the field of affective neuroscience. In part one, I summarize my understanding of what’s at stake between two approaches to emotions, represented by two recent popularizations of some fairly complex neuropsychological theory: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Stephen Asma’s and Rami Gabriel’s The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. While emerging from rival and in some respects opposite schools of thought, both books proclaim “new paradigms” in the understanding of the human mind. The projected second part will apply the debate between these perspectives to the process-relational “practices of the self” I introduced in Shadowing the Anthropocene, and will revise and extend those practices in the process.
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged affect theory, affective neuroscience, Charles Hampden-Turner, constructionism, constructivism, emotions, G. I. Gurdjieff, Lisa Feldman Barrett, neurophenomenology, neuropolitics, neuropsychology, politics of affect, practices of the self, Rami Gabriel, Stephen Asma | 4 Comments »
Here’s a back-of-the-envelope hypothesis on the “new media regime” and some open questions that follow from it.
Two groups are faring best these days under the current (new) media regime.*
The first is surveillance capitalists, who have developed ways to monetize and harvest new data technologies directly for the accumulation of wealth. (That covers the Jeff Bezoses, Mark Zuckerbergs, Larry Pages and Sergey Brins. If you add software billionaires like Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Larry Ellison, you have 7 of the 10 wealthiest individuals in the world.)
The second is conspiracy entrepreneurs (such as the Alex Joneses, al-Baghdadis, and Q’s), who know how to work social media into new forms of cultural capital (including millenarian cults like QAnon and the Islamic State), and the politicians who know how to work that capital into political capital (the Trumps, Putins, Bolsonaros, and Modis). There’s overlap between those two groups, and will probably be more of it, so I list them together. (Why conspiracy? Because in unsettling times people seek explanations, and in the new media regime, those explanations can be forwarded without much, if any, support.)
Continue Reading »Posted in Media ecology | Tagged Alex Jones, Anomalies, conspiracies, climate justice movement, Cold War 2.0, conspiracy culture, conspiracy entrepreneurs, conspiracy theories, Donald Trump, Facebook, futurism, global media studies, global weirdness, Google, illiberalism, media ecology, media politics, media regimes, QAnon, surveillance capitalism, Trump-Like Derangement Syndrome | 1 Comment »
I’ve long been receptive to the idea that we need a spiritual, or even a religious, movement to address the climate crisis. Of course, I define both “spiritual” and “religious” quite broadly, and am well aware of how both terms have been shaped within histories that are Eurocentric and dominated by monotheistic, Christian, and more recently Protestant assumptions about what constitutes religion (and “spirit”) and what does not. As a (sometime) scholar of religion and spirituality, I avoid those assumptions.
Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation movement is, in my view, a spiritual movement. When it gets critiqued on empirical grounds, as it has been recently — and when it gets defended on those same grounds — the spiritual impulse underlying the movement might get lost. Clarifying what that impulse is can be helpful when one is trying to disentangle the arguments between the movement and its critics.
Continue Reading »Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter | Tagged Deep Adaptation, ecospirituality, environmentalism, Jem Bendell, Open Democracy, radical environmentalism, religion and ecology, societal collapse, spiritual environmentalism, spiritual movements | 6 Comments »
So, 150 or so fairly prominent individuals write/sign an open letter defending “justice and open debate.” (We can call them intellectuals, or literati, or academics, or even celebrities of a sort — maybe “intellectual celebrities” — but see point #1 below on generalizations.)
In the letter, they single out Donald Trump and the “forces of illiberalism” for criticism, but aim their guns at something more general and vague — “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty” — with allusions to (citation-free) examples that only hint at specifics. Media responses have provided the missing object here, calling it “cancel culture” – a term that emerged in social media, but that has been vigorously taken up by the right as a problem of the left.
Some people are pleased by the letter, even delighted, especially on the right (note WSJ’s headline “Bonfire of the Liberals“), others are not happy at all. At least one community feels threatened and sees it as promoting an erasure of their very existence (“containing as many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions as it does”), I’m guessing especially because of one of the signatories (the one who is the most commonly cited in headlines; see point #1 below).
Here are a few observations on the letter and the responses it has elicited, accompanied by questions that are only partly rhetorical and a hypothesis that I haven’t seen explored elsewhere yet.
Continue Reading »Posted in Cultural politics | Tagged cancel culture, culture wars, free speech, intellectual class, J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, media ecology, media platforms, media politics, media regimes, Noam Chomsky, print literati | Leave a Comment »