For now, I’ve taken on the responsibility for organizing a campaign rally for Ralph Nader in Salt Lake City on July 31st. There is a whole lot to do to get things ready (venue, event organizing, publicity, press, etc.), so I want to get started. The first organizing meeting will be held tomorrow, July 9th at 9:00 pm in SLC. Everyone that would like to help is invited. Email me at nielsen.cj@gmail.com for the address and driving directions. Again, there is a lot of work to do, so the more volunteers the better.
In my next post I will write about my experience attending a speech by Glen Beck at the BYU Marriot center as part of the Provo Freedom Festival festivities. Read the following quote by Walter Benjamin to get a notion of the logic that I perceived at work in Mr. Beck’s talk:
“The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects fo the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not the right, but a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life . . . .
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on largest scale while respecting the traditional property system.”
-Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
More on that in the next post.
Lastly, as promised, here is the extended version of my last post on the death of God in the city.
Like most final papers I write for my classes, I left this for the last minute, but there still might some salvageable lines in there, so I’ll let you read it.
God died in the city. All of the streets curved like question marks, and the answer was “no.”
“Come on man, it’ll be great. We’ll sleep out under the stars, rock climb all day tomorrow,” my friend says to me on the phone. I have never been rock climbing and have no particular desire to try it. It has always seemed to me like precisely the wrong way to approach nature, this overly masculine drive to conquer a place, to take your shirt off, walk up to a mountain, proceed to grope it unsolicited, and then shout down to your friend to take a picture. Properly pornographic. But I need a break from school, and I would like to spend time with my friends, so I decide to go.
When we get to the campsite near Canyonlands National Park, John and his friends have a macho conversation about climbing gear. I crawl into my sleeping bag annoyed, because it seems that my fears about the attitudes and ambience that go along with most outdoor recreation will be confirmed. I doze off after a few minutes but wake up in the middle of the night, and the only thing I can see through the opening in my mummy bag are the stars. For some reason, I am struck through with awe. The irritation dissolves out of my body, and I am filled with thankfulness for the beauty of the sky and the place I am in. The light pollution in Provo makes it impossible to experience the night sky like this. Terry Tempest Williams writes about a friend that once remarked that light pollution is a conspiracy against higher thought. It feels like God is real tonight. I’m glad I came here.
God died in the city. What else could he have done there, if the city itself is predicated upon death? The logic of the city dictates that, in order for one species, humans, to be able to remain stationary in dense populations, the majority of other species that previously inhabited a place must be crowded out or destroyed. The laying of concrete and construction of houses and buildings are part of a process of simplification that brackets off and discards life’s dizzying diversity in order to make a wild place tractable. Manhattan’s forests and deer, and Brooklyn’s beavers and meadows were progressively pared down until all that was left were the animals—rats, pigeons, cockroaches—that could survive scurrying between millions of human feet.
They city is a dead space and our minds become its mirrors. It is all but impossible to believe in God, or anything other than human, if all we see around us in our daily lives is human production and artifice. Another way of stating the logic of the city is that all others must be cut off so that self can be affirmed, represented, and replicated. “Nothing but self” is the mantra that city dwellers more or less unwittingly chant on the sidewalk, on the freeways, in elevators, in their sleep—sharp words that, along with most other forms of life, have killed God.
Quite literally then, the city is a selfish place. And, if all sin is at root selfishness, then every city, not just Las Vegas, Sin City. The scriptures often equate the city with evil; Cain is the founder of the first city mentioned in the Bible, which he built after committing the first murder; wickedness is condensed and concentrated in Sodom and Gomorra; we’re continually warned to flee Babylon; Jerusalem killed the prophets, chased Lehi away, and crucified Christ.
Why have we moderns, who are by definition city dwellers, stopped believing in God? It is not because the transcendental (meaning, purpose, immortality, God) is inherently more unbelievable than the immanent or the empirical. Solid science tells us that the probability of the Big Bang randomly producing a universe hospitable to life is between 10 to the 120th and 10 to the 10 to the 123rd to 1—in other words, absolutely impossible. And yet, here we are. Hugh Nibley once wrote to Sterling McMurrin that believing in immortality (and I would also say God) is no problem once we get over the enormous odds against existing at all.
It is only by recognizing and inhabiting the enigmas of existence—and science and religion both are full of them—that we begin to approach truth. But we must be dispossessed of the enigmas in order to inhabit the city. The fundamental selfishness of the city requires us to avert our gaze from the mysteries of the other, to stop struggling with anything that lies outside of city limits, which are contiguous with the limits of self.
The INHUT group [a study abroad group that I was a part of this summer] has just arrived at Green Jacket Ranch in Vernon, Utah. We are all waiting for dinner to cook on the propane camp stove. The Richey sisters are playing Frisbee in the cow pasture. Riley is on his knees looking at something in the grass. Over by the fire pit, a small crowd gathers around Ashley as she chuckles out an embarrassing story about herself. Some are talking, others are resting against tree-trunks or lying on their sleeping-pads. I decide go for a hike in the hills just behind the ranch house. The noises of camp fade and a new set of sounds billows up as I walk among the stout junipers: crickets chirring the dropping evening temperatures, squirrels rustling like a jazz snare, singing house finches, the oblivious caws of a magpie, and a flock of sandhill cranes trumpeting as they flie overhead. The different sounds combine, detangle, and coalesce constantly. There is a definite theme, but it never quite repeats itself—chaotic unity, rhythm without meter.
After dinner, Alan and Liz Mitchell take us on a tour of their ranch and tell us about what it’s like to live and work there. We stand on a small bluff with pastures and herds stretching out below us. “People in town don’t have this. It’s like you are the place. It’s not just a dead thing you pass through,” says Liz, and I think to myself that this sense of place must have something to do with warbles and vibrations I heard earlier on my hike. Alan rattles off some statistics about the business of cattle ranching in Utah. He talks about the politics of irrigation as he points out creeks and canals in the valley below us. As I listen to Alan, my attention shifts from the sound of birds to the sound of sprinklers in an alfalfa field. The two sounds are completely different—the one melodious, swooping, and variable, the other thin and repetitive. The former is both symbol and actual manifestation of the baffling diversity of the natural world, whereas the latter reverberates the human to wrestle a chaotic place into submission and thereby derive profit.
Liz and Alan are forced to implement some of the methods and instruments of industrial agriculture in order to survive in the money-based economy that has spread out from its urban birthplace to blanket most of the world. They are making little, if any, profit off of their land, but neither do they enjoy a completely harmonious relationship with a the bounties of nature. They live in an in-between state, in which the exigencies of profit meet the resistance of a harsh terrain.
The repetitive rattle of the sprinklers at Green Jacket echoes the essence of the city: profit. Profit can only be maximized when homogeneity reigns, when all things lose their individual character and are rendered equivalent through the assignment of cash-value. Repetition is the mechanism of profit. Diversity is leveled through the repetitive production of ever more tradable things. Repetition is the rhythm of the city, and it and rolls over anything that would infringe upon the profit and prosperity (real or imagined) of city dwellers. Such repetition cares nothing for living others, be they plant, animal or human. Profit is not satisfied with the edification of a city, but demands its enrichment and expansion and, for this reason, sends shock waves of repetition out to flatten the wild country into fields for food and energy.
Creation is the opposite of repetition; it promotes the profusion of life and its indefinitely increasing variety. Creation cares for the living others that are as well as the living others that can be and, therefore, leads to the complexity that profit and repetition abhor. It is the unwhistlable song I heard in the convergence of animal sounds in the hills around Vernon. If repetition is the essence of profit, which leads to homogenization and death, then creation is the essence of nature, which leads to the proliferation of life.
In other words, creation is care. It is God’s work. And we drive God from the world as we replace creation with repetition.
I am about seven years old, and I am dreaming. I am walking alone through the halls of my house. I stop and notice a little hatch in the wall that I have never seen before. A little bewildered, I decide to open it and see what’s behind it. The hatch reveals part of a huge machine enclosed in the walls of the house, a dense network of pistons, pipes, chains, and belts that make a roaring metallic noise as they pump and churn. There is something terrifyingly arbitrary about the sounds and movements of the machine. I sense it is about to rip me to pieces.
I wake up screaming and run frantically about my dark house, only half conscious. My parents wake up and sit me down on the couch and try to calm me down, asking me what’s wrong. I mutter something incomprehensible as I hyperventilate. I am confused and disoriented, weightless, about to drift over an event-horizon into the crushing grip of annihilation. My parents hold me, hushing and rocking me back into full wakefulness. I finally calm down as I realize that I had been dreaming but am awake and safe now.
I have several more nightmares like this over the next couple of years and react the same way each time. There is always some sort of machine—a writhing robotic arm, a huge iron ship—but never any human operators. The machines just drone on as if possessed, but, what’s more horrifying, I know that they are not. There is a pervasive sense of violence in the automaticity that looms before me in each dream.
Paradoxically, the selfishness required of us in our cities has not resulted in our becoming more authentically and robustly ourselves. Rather, we have surrendered our wills and our creativity to what Alain Badiou calls “the automatisms of profit.” We have come to resemble the commodities that pervade almost every aspect of our lives; we are all becoming more and more similar to each other in our blandness, arbitrariness, and banality. True subjectivity is a result of a choice to act deliberately in some way to negotiate an encounter with a true other. This process is only possible through the freedoms maintained by the variabilities and exchanges of creation.
Some of us sense something wrong in our situation; we miss creation even though we have never known it directly. We feel we must experience something other than self, but, since we don’t know where to find it, or how we would interact with it if we did, we are forced to create our own other. This is the function of much of contemporary art, as well as many forms of outdoor recreation. Since we are so alienated from the natural other, we feel compelled to invent ever new and different experiences. But in each case the inventions we inscribe in works of art or superimpose on mountains and rivers mirror our uncreative state of repetition. We have not escaped sameness at all, which is evidenced by the fact that all of our artworks and outdoor excursions can be assigned monetary value and traded among the equivalencies of the market.
We must ressurect God, and we can only do so by changing our economic practices while at the same time transforming our conception of the way that nature works. The two things go hand-in-hand. Theories of capitalism and Darwinian evolution emerged at about the same time and are both premised upon the idea that scarcity and competition are the basic driving forces of economies and nature. According to this perspective, the world is only a machine, driven by the endless repetition of cause and effect. To this we may answer that the world simply does not work this way. Pioneering scientists like Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have begun to posit that “creation, not survival, is the primary force active in evolution.” They go so far as to say that “love is controlling principle of the evolutionary processes that gives rise to the ever-increasing diversity of life.” Creation and love “bring forth multiple worlds…fashioning new enactive couplings for no other reason than that they can be formed.” The song of creation allows for an infinite number of counterpoints; whenever one note is missing its correspondent, another bursts into existence.
We can change our economic practices, which are currently driven by the automatisms of profit, to match our new understanding of evolution in nature. This may require us to restructure or even abandon our cities, but, once we have brought about an economy based on the principles of love and creation, we will see that there will again be room for God in the world.
We can begin by listening to the birds that land in our backyards and perch on our wires. They have not yet been mechanized; strands of creation stream and billow behind them as they fly toward the city. Then let us follow these songs up into the trees and out into the forests and marshes outside of town. What at first we hear—the interrelations of living things and the coarticulations of care—will soon become available to our other senses and become beautiful and true to us. We will return to our streets and houses and the buzz of our former lives will then sound like unbearable noise. But, since we have heard creation, we will realize that the sounds of repetition are not inevitable, and we will dismantle its instruments. We will allow creation to reinhabit our space and its vibrations to reinstruct our minds.
The song of creation will answer, “Yes,” in thousands of ways.