The Regeneration Podcast

Dear Friends!

Just a quick note to let you know about a new sophiological initiative, the Regeneration Podcast. The idea for this project started when my good friend, Mike Sauter—a frequent contributor to Jesus the Imagination—suggested the two of us should host a podcast. We know lots of people interested in the regeneration (read: “reimagination”) of culture in fields as far-ranging as economics, education, farming, the arts, science, and religion—and absolutely not limited to these areas! In Mike’s description: William Blake said “Everything that Lives is Holy.” Mike Sauter and Michael Martin discuss faith and the world with friends and guests through a sacramental lens. We call this “Sophiology.” Farming, the arts, child-rearing, politics, economy, religion, education and culture. Think “Holy,” but think of all the world outside of church buildings; the divine shining through all of creation. Peace and love Christian Anarchism from the bottom-up.

For our first interview, we interviewed the radical economist Guido Preparata. It was a mind-blowing conversation. Guido is one of the most brilliant people I know—and he does not hold back in this conversation. Years ago, I was searching for scholarly work on perishable currency, and found his work. Explosive stuff. I’ll never forget the smile on my face when I found his website and saw the words “Conspiracy theory is too important to be left to conspiracy theorists” scroll across the page (that quite has been replaced by an equally trenchant one by Cervantes). Check out his website here.

So please give the podcast a listen and feel free to subscribe. Currently we are only on Podbean, but should be on other apps momently.

And check out that sweet bumper music!

The Canadian Peasants’ Revolt

Still from the film 'Winstanley,' 2016

As it so happens, for the past few months I have been researching into the history of enclosure laws as part of a book project, tentatively entitled The Land, about our/my relationship to land, both wild and cultivated. It’s a subject that has long interested me, and I write about it at some length in my book Transfiguration.

For those who may not know, enclosure laws were laws passed by governments from the late-medieval period through the early nineteenth century that chipped away at the common lands, “enclosing” them in hedges, fences, and walls; and thereby prohibiting the peasantry’s access to them and the subsistence they could derive from it. In Utopia, Thomas More bewails the cruelties of enclosure laws passed to increase profits from the English wool trade:

“Now they are becoming so greedy and wild that they devour men themselves, I hear. They devastate and pillage fields, houses, and towns. For in whatever parts of the land the sheep yield the softest and most expensive wool, there the nobility and gentry, yes, and even some abbots though otherwise holy men, are not content with the old rents that the land yielded to their predecessors. Living in idleness and luxury, without doing any good to society, no longer satisfies them; they have to do positive evil. For they leave no land free for the plow: they enclose every acre for pasture.”[1]

Nevertheless, it was all legal. But legality, as the great Marxist historian E.P. Thompson writes, is not equivalent to morality, calling enclosure, “a plain enough case of highway robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a Parliament of property-owners and lawyers.” [2] And in the nineteenth century, the poet John Clare, himself a rural farm laborer, observed, “Inclosure like a Bonaparte let not a thing remain, / It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill / And hung the moles for traitors.” [3]

Enclosure hardly ended in the nineteenth century. Though Marxists like to claim peasants like Jack Cade, Robert Kett, and Gerrard Winstanely as proto-Marxists (they should more accurately be called “proto-distributists”), Marxism in practice has never been very warmly attached to the peasantry (the proletariat, to you and me). As Lynne Viola writes, “Russian Marxists were implicitly antipeasant. In glorifying a god of progress which, it was thought, doomed the peasantry to social and economic extinction, they rejected the very idea of the peasantry as a separate culture.” [4] Anyone who has spent even five minutes with contemporary university Marxist poseurs knows with what utter contempt they hold the working classes.

Many times through the history of enclosure, the peasants have rebelled. When everything was taken away from them, what did they have to lose? The power, money, and military were never on their side, so they usually lost. Many of them were likewise uneducated and illiterate, making them easy prey for the casuistry of the elite classes who pillaged them and who spread lies about them through their rhetorical and argumentative wiles. As Lord Edward Somerset, Protector during the minority of Edward VI, wrote concerning Kett’s Rebellion, “In most parts lewd men have attempted to assemble and, seeking redress of enclosures, have in some places, by seditious priests and other evil people, sought restitution of the old bloody laws, and some have fallen to spoil.” [5] Such slander.

In addition, John Taylor Gatto has argued that current real estate practices in the United States which divide and conquer rural lands to optimize capital through gentrification—often raising taxes 600 percent or more over time—also squeeze people off of their land and send them off to the “workhouses” of factory and retail “employment.” I drive by such “developments” all the time in rural Michigan, as McMansions and shoddy housing of Styrofoam and particle board go up in ghastly subdivisions. It’s a racket, played by politicians and real estate speculators. Talk about “lewd men.”

Those fighting enclosure, throughout all of history, have ever been up against a group of right bastards.

The synchronicity between my research project and the Canadian Truckers Convoy may have come to your attention by this point—it certainly came to mine over the last week. For what is this protest, but a postmodern iteration of a peasant protest?

Of course, I’ve seen some commentators try to dodge such a comparison. “Some of the truckers are owner/operators. They’re not working class.” Please. I have a 10-acre farm; that doesn’t make me BigAg. I would further argue that these truck drivers and their very working class supporters, in fact, are precisely rebelling against enclosure: the last frontier of enclosure, their own (and our own) bodies. Though many of them are vaccinated, they are protesting vaccine mandates and the inevitable social credit systems that will come in their poisonous wake. Our bodies, that is, will no longer be ours, if the powerful get to dictate what we do with them.

As with earlier peasant rebellions, this one is also countered from the side of the ruling class with slurs, epithets, and other forms of vitriolic propaganda, not least from the Canadian Prime Minister, who apparently has done more blackface than Al Jolson.

During Gerrard Winstanley’s protests against enclosure during the seventeenth century, local lords like Sir Francis Drake organized gangs to attack his compatriot, called “The Diggers,” much like agitators who disrupt peaceful protests in our own day. Winstanley’s Diggers were accused with trespassing and they were arrested on specious charges—and local courts, easily compromised by the wealthy and powerful, habitually sided with the oppressors. Not much has changed.

Most of the peasant revolts ended in flames of ruin, the power of governments, their comparably inexhaustible wealth and military might too overwhelming to resist for long, especially when the rebels simply wanted the powers to leave them alone. But not all failed. One exception would be the African and Indian farmers telling Monsanto and Bill Gates to take their GMO seed and get bent in the last decade. And a notable one is the Solidarity Movement in Poland, which turned the tradesman Lech Walesa into a household name as his movement eventually led to the downfall of the Communist Party in his country (and elsewhere). He was arrested several times for his illegal (but completely moral) activities and was eventually Poland’s first democratically-elected President. So the peasants don’t always lose. Sometimes the bad guys go down. But there are always people who support the bad guys, just so we’re clear. Just don’t be one of them.

John Clare’s poem “Badger” is one of the most subtle commentaries on the relationship of the peasant to power. It is also a brilliant cautionary tale. Badger

The badger grunting on his woodland track With shaggy hide and sharp nose scrowed with black Roots in the bushes and the woods, and makes A great high burrow in the ferns and brakes. With nose on ground he runs an awkward pace, And anything will beat him in the race. The shepherd’s dog will run him to his den Followed and hooted by the dogs and men. The woodman when the hunting comes about Goes round at night to stop the foxes out And hurrying through the bushes to the chin Breaks the old holes, and tumbles headlong in. When midnight comes a host of dogs and men Go out and track the badger to his den, And put a sack within the hole, and lie Till the old grunting badger passes bye. He comes and hears—they let the strongest loose. The old fox hears the noise and drops the goose. The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry, And the old hare half wounded buzzes bye. They get a forked stick to bear him down And clap the dogs and take him to the town, And bait him all the day with many dogs, And laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs. He runs along and bites at all he meets: They shout and hollo down the noisy streets. He turns about to face the loud uproar And drives the rebels to their very door. The frequent stone is hurled where e’er they go; When badgers fight, then every one’s a foe. The dogs are clapt and urged to join the fray; The badger turns and drives them all away. Though scarcely half as big, demure and small, He fights with dogs for bones and beats them all. The heavy mastiff, savage in the fray, Lies down and licks his feet and turns away. The bulldog knows his match and waxes cold, The badger grins and never leaves his hold. He drives the crowd and follows at their heels And bites them through—the drunkard swears and reels. The frighted women take the boys away, The blackguard laughs and hurries on the fray. He tries to reach the woods, an awkward race, But sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase. He turns again and drives the noisy crowd And beats the many dogs in noises loud. He drives away and beats them every one, And then they loose them all and set them on. He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men, Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again; Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies And leaves his hold and cackles, groans, and dies. Some keep a baited badger tame as hog And tame him till he follows like the dog. They urge him on like dogs and show fair play. He beats and scarcely wounded goes away. Lapt up as if asleep, he scorns to fly And seizes any dog that ventures nigh. Clapt like a dog, he never bites the men But worries dogs and hurries to his den. They let him out and turn a harrow down And there he fights the host of all the town. He licks the patting hand, and tries to play And never tries to bite or run away, And runs away from the noise in hollow trees Burnt by the boys to get a swarm of bees.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. Sir Thomas More, Utopia, trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (W. W. Norton, 1992), 12.

2. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Vintage Books, 1966), 218.

3. “By Langley Bush,” lines 7–9. Quoted in Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 50.

4. Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin (Oxford, 1999), 14.

5. Quoted in Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2002), 62-63.

The Parallel Polis, or How to Beat the Technocracy

In my book Transfiguration, I write about various possible alternatives to the sterile and anti-human, anti-sophianic institutions that surround us. For one, I propose the idea of “the sophianic hedge school” as a healthy alternative to Education, Inc. that has done so much to ruin human flourishing and poison society. I also floated the idea of perishable currency, inspired by both Rudolf Steiner and Guido Preparata. This is to say nothing about the importance of the CSA (“Community Supported Agriculture”) movement as well as the availability of herd shares as a way to secure clean food and dairy products uncompromised by the death-bestowing toxins of BigAg and the diabolical interventions of BigPharma that follow in their wake. What I propose in that book is a kind of alternate society, almost, as I’ve written in this blog, like the invisible society within society that operates almost like the parallel universes found in the novels of Philip K. Dick.

I am not the first one to suggest such movements, of course, but in my ongoing consternation at the increasing totalization of the Governmental-Pharmaceutical-Technocratic paradigm, I have found myself reexamining the responses of earlier (but not that much earlier) generations when faced with such menacing totalitarian structures. As I’ve mentioned before, Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind is a great place to start if one wants to trace the gradual acquiescence of more or less good people to the will of the corporatocracy’s insidious egregore. In such scenarios (and this was also the case in England’s gradual transformation from a Catholic into a Protestant nation in the 16th and 17th centuries), the Archons first work on the middle-manager class—the intellectuals, professors, teachers, prelates, and so forth—trusting that they will lead the rest of society into a brave new world.

I also revisited the writing of Václav Havel. I probably first heard of Havel when I was in high school and he was a Czechoslovakian playwright and dissident imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain in his homeland. Some years later in one of my first major publications as a poet (in the journal Cross Currents), I was very proud to find my work alongside an interview with Havel in which he argued that a “sense for the transcendent” was the only hope for uniting multicultural and multifarious societies. This time, however, I revisited his essential essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”

“The Power of the Powerless” was written in 1978, long before the Iron Curtain showed any signs of cracking. But crack it did. Havel and his compatriots in the Eastern Bloc at that time were advocating for “parallel structures” or a “parallel polis” (the term contributed by his fellow dissident Václav Benda) as ways for peoples under whatever form of oppression (things were very different in Poland than in Czechoslovakia, for instance). For Havel, the lynchpin for such an undertaking is the ability to “live in truth,” since the Communist governments were notorious for lies (not that modern Western democracies are any better), what led in the USSR to “hypernormalization” (i.e.. “everybody knows everything is a lie, but let’s all act like it isn’t”).

According to Benda, “the mission of the parallel polis is constantly to conquer new territory, to make its parallelness constantly more substantial and more present. Politically, this means to stake out clear limits for totalitarian power, to make it more difficult for it to maneuver” [1]. This parallel polis was envisioned as primarily cultural, as in the arts, but also social. It simply had to do with giving up on the lie and living in truth (I think of Pope John Paul II, when still a Polish cardinal, leading a procession through the streets of Krakow with an empty frame since it was illegal to process with a religious image, in this case of the Virgin). As Ivan Jirous writes in “Parallel Polis,” “Those who take part are active people who can no longer stand to look passively at the general decay, marasmus, rigidity, bureaucracy, and suffocation of every living idea or sign of movement in the official sphere” [2]. How these words resonate today.

Havel extends this:

“The point where living within the truth ceases to be a mere negation of living and becomes articulate in a particular way, is the point at which something is born that might be called the ‘independent spiritual, social, and political society.’” [3]

I think our own moment calls for such a rebirth, much in the way the Dark Ages presaged the coming of Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, and Francis of Assisi or the waning of the Middle Ages opened onto the Florentine Renaissance. Surely the second coming is at hand.

I have been waiting, in vain as it turns out, for some Distributists or Communitarians to step up and be counted at this, their moment. But...no. They seem either to have retreated into their pipes and ale or become Catholic Marxists or worse.

But part of the problem is the overarching tyranny of our technology, a technology that has so aided the Archons in their quest for totalizing power. Havel—like Heidegger, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, and so many others—was onto this. In 1978, he wrote,

“Technology—that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of modern metaphysics—is out of humanity’s control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction…. We look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we have created inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural affiliations (for instance, from our habitat in the widest sense of the word, including our habitat in the biosphere) just as it removes us from the experience of ‘being’ and casts us into the world of ‘existences.’” [4]

I will submit that part of the instinctive resistance we have to “lockdown culture” resides precisely in such a sensibility. A Zoom meeting with nature, even human nature, is not possible.

Like Havel, his exact contemporary Ivan Illich also saw what technology (not to mention modern medicine!) was doing to us. “If tools are not controlled politically,” he writes, “they will be managed in a belated technocratic response to disaster. Freedom and dignity will continue to dissolve into an unprecedented enslavement of man to his tools” [5]. It’s almost as if he were watching us. I can only imagine what he and Havel are thinking.

Havel, for example, observed the trajectory upon which even Western democracies were headed:

“It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being helplessly dragged along by it.” [6]

Bingo.

We have many ways to build our own parallel polis. We can extricate ourselves as much as possible from the technocracy and their flunkies in government and simply live. At Stella Matutina Farm (where I live), for example, we rely almost entirely on traditional tools (with the exception of a few modern contraptions like my chainsaws). We mow some of our grass, but the cattle take care of most of it. And what we do is not an anomaly: most sustainable farmers employing no-dig methods operate pretty much the same way—and even our tiny 1.5 acre garden supplies an enormous amount of food.

But even more, our idea of a parallel polis extends to the social sphere, in particular in the ways we celebrate the Christian year. We observe all the feasts, but our biggest celebrations occur at May Day and Michaelmas. At May Day this year, when our state was still under various mandates and most social activities were suppressed by government and, alas, the Church, a friend asked if she could invite some of her friends who were starving for conviviality. Surprisingly, over fifty people—mostly families—showed up to dance around the maypole and feast together. This is what a parallel polis looks like. It may not be much, but it certainly fits what Jiří Dienstbier described as something contributing to “the continual renewal of the meaning of authenticity” [7]. Bureaucracy may be death by a thousand papercuts, but the parallel polis—by which I mean “a sophiological structure”—bestows life by a thousand tiny, some might even say “insignificant,” gestures. Even our recent forays into house church can be seen as an example of this. “The failure of the modern experiment,” as H.J. Massingham so cogently observed, “is seen to be so because it is anti-Christian, anti-natural, and anti-realistic” [8].

It’s not hard. Live in truth.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. Václav Benda, et al., “Parallel Polis, or an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe: An Inquiry,” Social Research 55, nos. 1-2 (Spring/Summer 1988): 211-46, at 219.

2. Ibid., 228.

3. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” in Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav (Faber and Faber, 1986), 85.

4. Ibid., 114.

5. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (Harper, 1973), 12.

6. “The Power of the Powerless,” 116.

7. “Parallel Polis,” 231.

8. H.J. Massingham, The Tree of Life (London, 1943), 173.