Ship of Fools

All aboard!

Well, it’s about time.

I was very pleased recently when my spiritual soul-brother Paul Kingsnorth finally came out in a series of blogposts and interviews that he thinks the world is sinking precipitously toward totalitarianism through the advent of the v@ccine passports and mandates that become more alarming by the minute, especially in Germany, Austria, and the Great Ahriman, Australia, but also in Ireland (where the Brit Kingsnorth makes his home) and a bewildering array of other countries, states, and municipalities such as California and New York. Enough, argues Kingsnorth in his own inimitable way, is enough.

Even Rod Dreher has finally come around and seen fit to comment on this concerning development. He did it using Kingsnorth’s epiphany as a screen in a recent post, though I don’t think he’s entered this fray heretofore. At least not that I’ve found. Must be a slow news week in Hungary.

I honestly don’t understand why it’s taken them so long.

I saw this coming from the proverbial mile away, as early as spring of 2020. It was not hard to predict—and many I know, even good friends, told me I was being paranoid and that such things could never happen. They’re happening. My astounding insight (jk) was not the product of anything remotely resembling spiritual vision, but due to the fact that I’ve been an English professor teaching students the ABCs of rhetoric and its evil stepsister propaganda for twenty-some years. Using texts from Plato’s Gorgias to Huxley and Orwell to to the novels of Philip K. Dick to Adam Curtis’s eye-opening Century of the Self series (and so many things besides) throughout my academic career I’ve been asking students to examine the toxic environment of words within which we are constantly saturated and bombarded. But solid teaching, it seems, is no match for the technocracy. Technocracy is here, and its winning.

I suppose it is a poet’s curse. As a poet and songwriter, I am keenly attuned to language and meaning, to text, context, and subtext. I’m attentive to the hypnotic cadences of lines and the insidious ways messages insert themselves into our awareness—and into our subconscious. I am sure you, gentle reader, could rattle off any number of advertising jingles from your earliest childhood without making a mistake—I was born in the early 60s, and I’m sure I could drop dozens without coming up for air. Political speech operates in the same register: “Just say no,” “I believe in a place called Hope,” “Change has come to America,” “Believe women,” “Make America Great Again,” and let’s not forget the New World Anthem, “Build Back Better.” None of these slogans mean a damn thing; their only quality is how they inject a feel-good soporific into the body politic while the social engineers and technocrats proceed apace in toward their goal of total control, a goal nearing its realization, as governments everywhere, but especially in the “democratic West,” move ever closer to the digital promised land of a social credit system.

People may wonder what this has to do with Sophiology. Everything, actually. As anyone familiar with my work would know (minuscule though that coterie is), my claim is that technocracy is the anti-Sophia (Kingsnorth calls it “The Machine”). It is (as I’ve written) completely Ahrimanic (a term I do not use in a dogmatic anthroposophical sense—so spare me the complaints). Simply put, my vehemence on this subject is a direct outgrowth of my Sophiology—for I see an inverse relationship between the sophiological and the technocratic: the more technocratic the world grows, the less room is there for Sophia to appear.

I felt this technocratic specter rising long ago, far earlier than my earliest attempt at capturing this in writing when I wrote about Blade Runner and transhumanism almost twenty years ago. I’ve been watching it approach and wrote my sophiological works at least in part as a way to alter that trajectory. I’ve failed, obviously, though I take some strange comfort in knowing that the technocrats see my work as enough of a threat to quash traffic to my various internet platforms. Maybe this is why Kingsnorth and Dreher (among others, certainly) have been so reluctant until now to speak up. I hope others join them.

I suspect things may come to a head on or around the twenty-fourth of this month, when Saturn and Uranus form a hard square from Aquarius to Taurus. This square suggests a breaking down of power structures and a tension between authority and technology. I remember, as you might, when the internet was a much more democratic digital environment—and not the Thought Police of the World Archons it is now. Saturn and Uranus were conjunct in 1989—the year the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Bloc Communism started to crumble. I remember how hopeful I was (my eldest son was born that year) that the world would be a better place. What a chump I was! Communism somehow became cool! When Saturn and Uranus were square in 2000, the world was in a financial crisis (remember Enron?) accompanied by the Y2K panic (computers). When the planets were in opposition—2008—finance and technocrats were in full-on “screw the proletariat” mode with the housing crisis and the tanking of the global economy. I fully expect a financial component to this one (Taurus), but there is also the possibility of something new coming into being (Aquarius). It could get ugly for a minute, but—and this depends on people of good will—that ugliness could turn to beauty.

If my life has taught me anything, it is that the Archons—at whatever level—may be clever, but they’re also entirely lacking in wisdom, which is to say stupid. This is nothing new, of course. Originating in Plato in the Republic, but very popular from the medieval through the early modern periods, the emblem of “The Ship of Fools” has born witness to the incredible folly of the human race, and especially of those assuming the reins of power. Here is Plato’s telling:

“There’s the shipowner, larger and stronger than everyone in the ship, but somewhat deaf and rather short-sighted, with a knowledge of sailing to match his eyesight. The sailors are quarrelling among themselves over captaincy of the ship, each one thinking that he ought to be captain, though he has never learnt that skill, nor can he point to the person who taught him or a time when he was learning it. On top of which they say it can’t be taught. In fact they’re prepared to cut to pieces anyone who says it can. The shipowner himself is always surrounded by them. They beg him and do everything they can to make him hand over the tiller to them. Sometimes, if other people can persuade him and they can’t, they kill those others or throw them overboard. Then they immobilise their worthy shipowner with drugs or drink or by some other means, and take control of the ship, helping themselves to what it is carrying. Drinking and feasting, they sail in the way you’d expect people like that to sail. More than that, if someone is good at finding them ways of persuading or compelling the shipowner to let them take control, they call him a real seaman, a real captain, and say he really knows about ships. Anyone who can’t do this they treat with contempt, calling him useless. They don’t even begin to understand that if he is to be truly fit to take command of a ship a real ship’s captain must of necessity be thoroughly familiar with the seasons of the year, the stars in the sky, the winds, and everything to do with his art. As for how he is going to steer the ship—regardless of whether anyone wants him to or not—they do not regard this as an additional skill or study which can be acquired over and above the art of being a ship’s captain. If this is the situation on board, don’t you think the person who is genuinely equipped to be captain will be called a stargazer, a chatterer, of no use to them, by those who sail in ships with this kind of crew?” (Book VI)

The past twenty-some months clearly bear this out. People haven’t changed all that much.

Hopefully, those who survive the coming madness (not to mention the current madness) will be able to bring wisdom back into the center of human striving and flourishing. We’d be fools not to.

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.

The Mystical Body of Romanticism

'The Funeral of Shelley' by Louis Édouard Fournier (1889), detail.

Some people, it seems, have a tendency to over-idealize the life I live, as if on our biodynamic farm my family and I shimmer in some agrarian dreamworld in the manner of rather tall hobbits. Ours is certainly a world foreign to that of most of those in my social class (intellectuals, academics, and other learned professionals), but it’s far from idyllic. Farming is hard work, for one thing, and we often put in 12-14 hour days at the height of the growing season. For another, it’s unpredictable—and weather, insects, animals, and a host of other variables can often destroy that which we so earnestly and carefully seek to preserve. And I won’t even get into the human interactions that can often be, well, complicated. In short, farming in this way is not unlike living in a realm somewhat like that depicted in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. But it is a good life. It’s just not an easy one.

My wife and I undertook this life because we wanted something more tangible, more sacred, than that available to us in the wastelands of modernity, overshadowed by corporate superstructures and technocracy and characterized by endemic alienation from the Real. We turned to the land, not only to work it biodynamically as a way to heal the land itself, but also to heal ourselves. Nevertheless, some people think what we do is very quaint, charming even, but dismiss it as nothing but an iteration of Romanticism. I’m fine with that. If the alternative is postmodern alterity and distanciation from the Real, then I’m a card-carrying Romantic.

Paul Kingsnorth, whom I’ve written about recently, also gets smeared with the label of Romantic—and he doesn’t mind, either. And he pushes back. “It seems to me,” he writes, “that Romanticising the past, in our culture at this point in time, is less common than Romanticising the future. The only difference is that Romanticising the future is socially acceptable.” [1] Think about that next time the WEF peddles the chintzy wares of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they of the “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” (which has mysteriously disappeared from the WEF website. HA!) future. Kingsnorth lives a life not unlike mine (from what I can tell) and even gives workshops on using a scythe. Which is so cool. And I’m sure he understands the challenges and hardships of such a life and doesn’t get lost in misty-eyed fantasies of an agrarian Elysium. We are not, as of the moment, exactly dead.

But Romanticism is not only about returning to the land, though Wordsworth and many of the great Romantics, not to mention Ivan Illich and E. F. Schumacher, have certainly endorsed such an idea. It’s also about fighting, and even dying, for an ideal. What is really worth fighting, let alone dying, for? Certainly not “strategic governmental objectives,” though Truth, Beauty, and Goodness—however one interprets them—surely are. Lord Byron, profligate that he was, gave his life for an ideal (or tried to) when he left his scurrilous lifestyle to fight for Greek independence, a failed but noble cause. As I write this, citizens of Cuba and France show signs of a willingness to fight for an ideal—freedom. What would you fight for?

Romanticism, that is, is messy, hard to nail down, and, therefore, more human than the technocratic promises of Utopia that are the inheritors of the Enlightenment’s hollow project. H. G. Schenk in his The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History, puts it as well as anyone. For him Romanticism is

“a unity […] characterized as contrariness, dissonance and inner conflict of the Romantic mind. Utopian dreams for the future side by side with nostalgia for the past; a marked nihilistic mood accompanied by a fervent yearning for faith; serious attempts to bring about a Christian revival followed, in an admittedly marginal case, by the very abandonment of faith on the part of the former apologist; the long tug-of-war between the old religion and the new ideologies—these are some of the unresolved contradictions which lie at the core of the movement. No shorter formula can be devised to define the essence of Romanticism. All short-cut definitions that have been put forward—well over a hundred—are unsatisfactory.” [2]

Christianity, then, can be construed as a kind of Romanticism. This may be because the god of Christianity is a human god, thereby making Christianity the most human of religions.

Romanticism has, I have to confess, inhabited every phase of my life—from my youth as a musician, my work as a poet and teacher, in my scholarship and writing (Sophiology—hello?), as a husband and father, no less than my thirty years in biodynamics. For me, it’s all about hope: the belief that we can make the Kingdom present in our lives. I heard this in the music that inspired me as a young man—in Kate Bush and The Waterboys, for example—and I felt it in the poets, from the Romantic period and after, who continue to nourish me. They say, with Joyce’s Molly Bloom, “Yes” to this business of being human. The point is that to be human is to be a Romantic. It’s the default position.

One of the great moments of late-20th Century Romanticism.

The great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley met his end in Italy while sailing into a storm. Unfortunately, though a decent sailor, the poet could not swim. When the Tyrrhenian Sea’s waves brought Shelley’s sodden corpse back to land, a volume of Keats was found in one of his jacket pockets, a volume of Sophocles in the other. At Shelley’s funeral, while the poet’s body burned on the shore of Leghorn, his friend Edward Trelawney poured libations of incense, wine, and oil into the flames and consigned Shelley’s remains to the love of Nature. Then, just before the flames devoured it, Trelawney grabbed the poet’s heart.

The mystical body of Romanticism continues to burn, and we are in no danger of running out of fuel. No matter. What needs transfiguring in the fire of time will be transfigured. The treasures we find in its pockets we will cherish, despite fads and the affectations and disaffections of taste. What will remain is the heart, even if some need to risk burning in order to retrieve it. And how beautiful is fire.

A clip from the 2015 film version of Far from the Madding Crowd.

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. Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (Graywold Press, 2017), 37.

2. H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (Frederick Ungar, 1966), xxii.

Paul Kingsnorth and John Michael Greer Are My Homeboys

Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern

I can take a hint.

A few weeks ago, I went through a spate of queries as to whether I had read anything by Paul Kingsnorth or John Michael Greer. These inquiries were from readers of my books and my blog as well as from good friends—and when I received three such prompts from three people completely unknown to one another within the space of a couple of hours, I figured it was time to give these two writers a hearing, Like I said, I can take a hint.

I had never heard of Kingsnorth, the novelist and environmental writer, though it seems as if I should have. Good heavens, he’s everywhere these days! I had heard of Greer, but only knew about his neopagan writings (which I’d never read), and learned that not only was he Archdruid of North America at one time (a job I did not know available) but also that he is a very perceptive social critic, the kind of guy not afraid to ask the most obvious questions. My friend Mike Sauter, a regular contributor to Jesus the Imagination, has been recommending Greer’s blog to me for a good long while, and I really liked this blogpost on Johnny Appleseed,. And, for Pete’s sake!, his blog is entitled Ecosophia. How have I not been following this guy?

Anyway, prodded by my better angels, I purchased a couple of their books, Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays and Greer’s The Retro Future: Looking to the Past to Reinvent the Future, both published in 2017. My own book Transfiguration, which treats many of the same issues as their books—transhumanism, the coming collapse of the technocratic paradigm, our relationship to the Creation and divinity, and how to live a fully human life—was published in 2018. So, obviously, I was overjoyed to find two kindred spirits out there in the world.

The gist of Kingsnorth’s book (and approach to life) is that talking about environmentalism and the thing we call “activism” are essentially fruitless at this moment. Better, he argues, is to actually live it, which is why he and his family bought two and a half acres in the west of Ireland (Kingsnorth is British) and started walking the walk instead of talking the talk so much (his own admission). As anyone familiar with my work will know, this is precisely what my wife and I have been doing on our biodynamic farm. Theoretical environmentalism is one thing; living it is another.

Greer’s book, on the other hand, is a cogent interpretation of modernity and its discontents. In particular, he repeatedly points out that those of us who think electric cars and wind farms will solve anything and allow us to still hold to our transportation-heavy and technologically-reliant lifestyles in the future are living in a fool’s paradise. That’s why his book examines the retro future: he thinks what we need to do is start developing the skills that will be necessary in a post-industrial age (I also touch on this in Transfiguration). He lists “seven sustainable technologies” that would serve humanity in good stead as we move into such a time: 1) organic intensive gardening; 2) solar thermal technologies (not the same as solar panels); 3) sustainable wood heating; 4) sustainable health care; 5) letterpress printing and its related technologies; 6) low-tech shortwave radio; 7) computer-free mathematics. Some may bristle at these, astonished that Greer would suggest that the future will not be one of multiplying digital playgrounds and unbounded transportation freedom. Greer might say they’ll just have to learn the hard way.

As I did in Transfiguration, in these two books these writers anticipated where our civilization was heading and how to answer that. They’re pretty smart guys, but the World Archons are also pretty smart and could also see where things were heading—so they’ve been trying to game the outcome to their advantage. But that can only last so long. I don’t think either of them saw what the Archons were planning. But here we are.

Kingsnorth was recently received into the Orthodox Church and, unfortunately, he’s been paraded around by a number of Orthodox bloggers and such much in the way the captured Cleopatra was through Rome (Catholic media is horrible at this kind of convert trophy hunting as well). Nevertheless, an incipient Sophiology certainly seems to inhabit his work (which may be what drew him to Orthodoxy). The Archdruid Greer also seems to embody an inherent Sophiology. For souls attuned to both the natural spiritual worlds—and who do more than that conceptualize, a sophiological sensibility is simply unavoidable.

Ride on, brothers.

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.