Blessed are the Greens ...

Members of Extinction Rebellion's Red Brigade who have 

come to save the world with mime and religious rhetoric.

Photo by Sibylla Bam Bam

 

 

I. 

 

In an email responding to a recent post on Heide Hatry's Schneebären, an angry reader writes:    

 

"I was deeply offended (though hardly surprised) by your blasé attitude towards the global Climate Emergency; a phrase you italicise presumably to express your scepticism, if not, indeed, to indicate you are an out-and-out denier of the unfolding environmental crisis.   

      Why must you treat this serious moral and political issue with the same studied irony and indifference that you seem to treat everything you write about? What is wrong with you? I can only hope and pray that you one day wake up and become part of the solution, not the problem."

 

I would like, if I may, to make a statement of reply here ...     

 

 

II. 

 

As someone with a philosophical disposition, I am naturally inclined towards scepticism; particularly when confronted with dogma, doxa, or a mixture of both - and, unfortunately, there are many people involved with the green movement who believe the things they believe to be incontrovertibly true as scientific fact, accepted opinion, or an item of faith.      

 

I don't deny the issues that concern my correspondent and others like her - in fact, if she goes back to the post which prompted her to write, she'll see that I express my own disquiet about environmental matters (including habitat destruction and the threat to wildlife) - but I do challenge the language used when, as so often, it takes on a religious tone and offers a moral interpretation of events. 

 

I can just about stomach those green activists who think of themselves as eco-warriors - and believe me I hate the language of militancy too - but when they start to also imagine themselves as crusaders and eco-evangelists on a mission to save the planet, then I'm afraid I resort to studied irony as a kind of defence mechanism or antiemetic, because, as Jello Biafra once put it, all religions make me sick [1].         

 

III.

 

Whilst it's obviously not the case that all eco-types are either seeking out a new faith or looking to supplement (and green) an old one, it's pretty clear that some are. That's why I think the author and filmmaker Michael Crichton wasn't too far off the mark to suggest that environmentalism has become the religion of choice for many in today's world.

 

In a 2003 speech, Crichton conveniently outlined some of the ways in which environmentalism has reinterpreted the Judeo-Christian belief system:

 

"There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. 

      

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday ... these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith. 

      

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them." [2]

 

To paraphrase Nietzsche: Environmentalism is the heir of Christian moral culture. In other words, it's a new form of ascetic idealism. And, for Nietzscheans at least, that's a problem. As it is for Crichton. As it is for me. Like the latter, I wish to demoralise environmentalism and abandon the mythic (and apocalyptic) fantasies that it likes to peddle - particularly when these are tied to utopian political narratives that always seem to end in tears (and bloodshed).    

 

  

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring to the classic Dead Kennedys song 'Religious Vomit', written by 6025 Cadona, on the 8-track EP In God We Trust, Inc., (Alternative Tentacles, 1981): click here. 

 

[2] Michael Crichton, 'Remarks to the Commonweath Club', San Francisco, (15 Sep 2003): click here to read the full transcript online. The paper is often referred to by the title 'Environmentalism is a Religion'. 

      Interestingly, Crichton fictionalised his arguments on this subject in his novel State of Fear (HarperCollins, 2004). Despite being a work of fiction, the book contains graphs, footnotes, an afterword explicitly setting out his views on global warming, an appendix in which he warns against the politicisation of science, and an extensive bibliography. It should also be noted, however, that many climate scientists, journalists, and green activists have gone on record to say that Crichton's work is an error-strewn and wilfully distorted interpretation of the facts.   

 

See also: Joel Garreau's essay 'Environmentalism as Religion', in The New Atlantis, No. 28, (Summer 2010), pp. 61-74. Garreau usefully traces the move from theology to ecotheology, touching on both neo-paganism and the greening of Christianity. Garreau also comes up with the amusing coinage carbon Calvinism. Click here to read online. 

The Man Who Slept: Notes on an Autobiographical Fantasy by D. H. Lawrence

I. Opening Remarks

We are extremely grateful to Professor Hiroshi Muto of Keio University for providing us with a new and more accurate version of Lawrence's unfinished and untitled 'Autobiographical Fragment' - a queer mix of fiction and essay often known as 'A Dream of Life' - in which he corrects the multiple errors of transcription that had crept into the (supposedly authoritative) Cambridge Edition of the text published in Late Essays and Articles and edited - somewhat carelessly it would seem - by James T. Boulton.    

Admittedly, some of these fifty errors are minor. But even minor errors can result in ungrammatical sentences, or, indeed, sentences which are both grammatically and semantically compromised. Thus, as Lawrence's eagle-eyed Japanese translator says, a new version of the work - using the holograph manuscript (i.e. Lawrence's notebook) as the base text - was necessary.   

The 'Autobiographical Fragment' was written by Lawrence in October 1927. What begins as an essay about returning home to the East Midlands, mutates halfway through into a bizarre and at times ludicrous tale set a thousand years in the future, in which the narrator-protagonist discovers the coal-mining village of Newthorpe has become a kind of heaven on earth or New Jerusalem.

Whilst I admire most of Lawrence's writing, I have always disliked this piece - and still dislike it now, even after the many corrections made by Hiroshi Muto. I've no problem with the autobiographical material, it's what follows that irritates and nothing depresses me more than Lawrence in full utopian mode ... 

II. A Dream of Life: Synopsis

Having fallen asleep in a quarry cave, or, more precisely, "a little crystalline cavity in the rock [...] a little pocket or womb of quartz, among the common stone", the narrator is disturbed from his (almost deathly) deep sleep by a strange motion and reborn into the world in a manner reminiscent of the man who died. Like the latter, he has to fight his way back into consciousness, into life:       

"There were some dizzy moments, when my I, my consciousness wheeled and swooped like an eagle that is going to wheel away into the sky and be gone. Yet I felt her, my I, my life, wheeling closer, closer, my consciousness. And suddenly she closed with me, and I knew, I came awake."

The man who slept is acutely aware of his own physicality; of the fact that he has a face, a throat, and "a body that ended abruptly in feet and hands" and wasn't merely a disembodied, free-floating consciousness. He can hear the words of a stranger speaking to him and feel the warm hands of men, who laugh, as they bathe his flesh:  

"So as they washed me, I came to myself. I even sat up. And I saw earth and rock, and a sky I knew was afternoon. And I was stark naked, and there were two men washing me, and they too were stark naked."

He is helped up and dressed by these strangers with their healing hands, soft voices and "formal, peaceful faces and trimmed beards, like old Egyptians". They accompany him to the town and he notices that all signs of industrial civilization - the colliery, the railway, the enclosed fields - had all gone. A cart, drawn by oxen, slowly passes in the distance, led by a man who is also entirely naked.

The town itself - now called Nethrupp - had "something at once soft and majestical about it, with its soft yet powerful curves, and no sharp angles or edges, the whole substance seeming soft and golden [...] as in the hymns we sang in the Congregational Chapel". 

Then three men on horseback canter up from behind:

"They were men in soft, yellow sleeveless tunics, with the same still, formal Egyptian faces and trimmed beards [...] Their arms and legs were bare, and they rode without stirrups. But they had curious hats of beech-leaves on their heads. They glanced at us sharply, and my companions saluted respectfully." 

As the man who slept and his companions approach the town, more and more people are to be seen; mostly men "wearing the sleeveless woolen shirt of grey and red", but there are women too, "in blue or lilac smocks", although some of the younger ones "were quite naked, save for a little girdle of white and green and purple cord-fringe that hung round their hips and swung as they walked".

He can't help admiring their "slender, rosy-tanned bodies" and the fact they were as "comely as berries on a bush". In fact, that was the quality of both sexes: "an inner stillness and ease, like plants that come to flower and fruit". 

The man who slept is introduced to a figure of authority, reclining on a dark-yellow couch and guarded by men in green. He had the beauty of a flower rather than a berry. This chieftain of some kind gives him permission to stay in the town and he is supplied with clothes of his own: "a blue-and-white striped tunic, and white stockings, and blue cloth shoes" and housed in a small, sparsely furnished room, containing a bed, a lamp, and a cupboard - but no chairs.

At sunset, the town square erupts to the "queer squeal of bagpipes". The men start to stamp their feet, like bulls, while the women "were softly swaying, and softly clapping their hands" and making a series of strange sounds. Everyone dances "with the most extraordinary incalculable unison", but according to the man who slept, there was no external choreography:

"The thing happened by instinct, like the wheeling and flashing of a shoal of fish or of a flock of birds dipping and spreading in the sky.  [...] It was as once terrifying and magnificent, I wanted to die, so as not to see it, and I wanted to rush down, to be one of them. To be a drop in that wave of life."

Almost as quickly as it started, the dance ends: the townspeople disperse in silence. Even the man who slept recognises that this is odd and disconcerting behaviour: "I was afraid: afraid for myself. These people, it seemed to me, were not people, not human beings in my sense of the word. They had the stillness and the completeness of plants."  

Next, the man who slept is shown a communal washing area and toilets. Then taken to the communal dining room, where the men sat naked on the floor round a blazing wood fire, enjoying an evening meal of porridge and milk "with liquid butter, fresh lettuce, and apples". Everyone helps themselves to what they want and everyone washes their own utensils, each hanging his own spoon and plate in his own little rack. This greatly impresses the man who slept: "There was an instinctive cleanliness and decency everywhere, in every movement, in every act."

Deciding to join in, the man who slept takes some porridge and watches as more men arrive, slipping out of their clothes at the first opportunity, softly talking and laughing, and playing board games. Then he's taken to meet the supreme spiritual leader, who wears a deep red-coloured tunic: 

"He had brown hair and a stiff, reddish-brown beard, and an extraordinary glimmering kind of beauty. Instead of the Egyptian calmness and fruited impassivity of the ordinary people, or the steady, flower-like radiance of the chieftain in yellow [...] this man had a quavering glimmer like light coming through water."

He informs the man who slept that he fell asleep in "one of the earth's little chrysalis wombs" and after a thousand years woke up "like a butterfly". That whilst he may not live for much longer, he shouldn't be afraid; just take off his clothes and let the firelight fall on him.


III. A Dream of Life: Analysis

I know that many readers of Lawrence - including Hiroshi Muto - find this tale beautiful; a poignant attempt by Lawrence late on in his life to provide a glimpse of the kind of society that he dreamed of. But when one examines this utopia of touch it reveals a number of troubling aspects. Here are ten points of concern:

1. It's a phallocratic order based on an eroticised fantasy of male homosociality. And ultimately, that's just another way of perpetuating traditional gender stereotypes and reaffirming patriarchal authority. Mellors might find himself very much at home, but I wonder what Connie would think ... 

2. Life in this utopia seems to involve an awful amount of stripping off - so much so, that one could imagine such a fantasy going down well with militant naturists who insist that truth loves to go naked and that it's more healthy and vital to go around without clothes: only it doesn't and it isn't. Rather oddly, if there's one thing that Lawrence fetishises more than nudity, it's clothing (as will be clear to readers of this and other works).    

3. If militant nudity is simply crackpot, then the utopian politics of post-industrial agrarianism is all a bit Pol Pot: I really don't fancy returning to Year Zero and nor do I desire to see naked peasants working the fields with oxen in order to earn a bowl of rice a day. There are times when reading this work that one imagines heads skewered on stakes.

4. Lawrence may write of a democracy of touch, but that doesn't mean there are no class divisions in his New Jerusalem. We note, for example, there are men on horseback whom ordinary citizens must salute respectfully. And just like the gender divisions, these class divisions are colour-coded and sartorially inscribed. For someone who was so sensitive to the issue of class, it's surprising that Lawrence doesn't seem to appreciate how his own perfect society would invariably be prone to tensions and conflict arising from its hierarchical structure.      

5. I'm quite happy living in a room that is sparsely furnished. But Lawrence takes his ascetic idealism too far when he doesn't even allow people to have a chair to sit on. Just as I don't want to salute some prick on a horse or walk around the streets naked, nor do I wish to sit on the floor like a dog, thank you very much.

6. The people play bagpipes. 

7. Communal dancing: despite what the man who slept says, this is obviously compulsory and strictly choreographed in a manner that would make even Kim Jong-un smile. As for pagan sun-worship, that's all very lovely until it goes a bit Aztec or Wicker Man and ends with human sacrifice. Many readers of Lawrence like to believe he put such fantasies behind him after The Plumed Serpent but, as a matter of fact, that's not quite the case as this text shows (though, to be fair, even the narrator of the tale is disconcerted by the inhuman nature of individuals dissolved in a mass).

8. Communal showers and toilets: again, no thanks. It looks like it could be fun in Carry on Camping, but surely no one really wants to have a cold shower with strangers, or shit in a field.

9. Communal dining areas: and on the menu - let us remind ourselves - porridge and milk, with liquid butter, fresh lettuce, and apples. I would quite literally prefer to starve to death than have to comply with this invalid's diet. 

10. Not only is Nethrupp a totalitarian society, it's a theocracy - ruled over by a Lord Summerisle figure with a red-beard, a bit like Lawrence's own. All in all, it's very disappointing. Lawrence repeatedly claims to value men and women, but surely then he should acknowledge that they are not plants, or birds, or fish. Or even butterflies. That their beauty and unique potential as a species lies in the very complexity that he would strip them of.     

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, ['Autobiographical Fragment'], Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 49-68.

Hiroshi Muto, 'A New Edition of D. H. Lawrence's [Autobiographical Fragment (A Dream of Life)], Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, ed. Susan Reid, Vol. 5, Number 1 (2018), pp. 11-57. All lines quoted above are from this new and corrected version of the text. 

Hiroshi Muto, 'D. H. Lawrence's Forgotten Dream: The Significance of "A Dream of Life" in His Late Works', The English Society of Japan (July 1990): click here to read online courtesy of the National Diet Library, Japan.

In this essay Professor Muto shows how 'A Dream of Life' closely relates not only to The Escaped Cock, but also to Lawrence's Etruscan writings and Lady Chatterley's Lover, providing a unique insight into these works. Thus I agree with him that it deserves serious critical attention within the world of Lawrence studies.

Fresh Air Contra Central Heating

I remember being introduced from an early age to something my mother called fresh air and which she seemed to hold in the highest possible regard, as if, for her, a cold draught signified the veritable presence of the Holy Spirit. She would fling open the bedroom windows and the back door - whatever the weather, whatever the temperature - as if fulfilling a daily religious duty. 

In this way, I learnt to equate being healthy and being righteous with exposure to a cool breeze blowing down the back of my neck and quickly grew to hate warm, stuffy rooms with windows closed and the radiators turned up high.  

Later, this obsession with ventilation was reinforced by a neo-primitive form of pagan vitalism. Like Lawrence, I resented all those things - such as central heating and double glazing - that intervened between me and what I thought of as life; the naked forces of the latter being something that had to be experienced directly in order to be authentic. 

This meant, for example, that when a large hole appeared in the roof of the house in which I was living in Leeds, I saw it as an opportunity to admire the stars in the night sky and allow in a little more fresh air, rather than as something in need of urgent repair. Eventually, the bathroom ceiling fell through and I remember sitting in a tub amused as snowflakes fell upon the soap suds.             

But this, of course, was a long time ago and I've since tempered my ascetic idealism and learned to accept many of the conveniences provided by the modern world. It turns out that having frozen fingers doesn't make you a better writer after all and the demand for fresh air can itself become a stale obsession.  

Indeed, even Lawrence discovered during his final days spent living in the South of France that there's something to be said for indoor plumbing after all. For as his biographer David Ellis reminds us, Lawrence was obliged due to ill health to make a number of compromises:

"Central heating was a major concession on his part. Only a few years before, he had been sarcastic about those who turned up the radiator [...] For them, he had felt, there was no vivid relationship with the living universe; they had allowed technology to intervene between themselves and physical reality, numbing and atrophying their senses."       

The son of a miner, Lawrence loved the magical glow of a coal fire; but not the suffocating false heat provided by pipes.

Not, that is, until failing health eroded such long held principles and prejudices, just as mild-mannered middle-age destroyed such in my case (although, in my heart, I still maintain a degree of kontempt for those who happily conform to an easy life founded upon those words beginning with the letter C ... Comfort ... Convenience ... and yes, even Christmas). 

See: David Ellis, Death and the Author, (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 6. 

Object-Oriented Ontology and the Joy of Washing Up (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Einai gar kei entautha theous

One of the reasons that D. H. Lawrence continues to fascinate is because his work is an attempt to construct a queer form of philosophical realism that is very much object-oriented. Even when, as a novelist, he writes of human subjects, he clearly cares more about their impersonal and, indeed, inhuman elements and how they interact within an ontological network made up of all kinds of other things; be they dead or alive, actual or virtual. For Lawrence, art is primarily an attempt to help us understand how all things – including ourselves – exist within this dynamic network of relations.

Human being, we might say, has its belonging in this network and although Lawrence often suggests that the most important of all relations is that between man and woman, there is of course no such hierarchy in reality. All things may not be equal, but they are all equally things and all relations are established, developed and dissolved on a flat ontological playing field. For a man to be rich in world requires more than the love of a good woman. He has to have also a quick relationship to "snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper" [SoTH 183].

Thus it is that so many of Lawrence’s characters only really blossom when they enter into strange and startling new relationships with nonhuman objects; objects which, for Lawrence, even if composed of inert matter as opposed to living tissue, nevertheless exist "in some subtle and complicated tension of vibration which makes them sensitive to external influence and causes them to have an influence on other external objects" [SCAL 77].

This is true irrespective of actual physical contact, although Lawrence encourages his readers to establish joyful small contacts with objects, even offering a philosophical justification for doing the washing up:

"If I wash the dishes I learn a quick, light touch of china and earthenware, the feel of it, the weight and roll and poise of it, the peculiar hotness, the quickness or slowness of its surface. I am at the middle of an infinite complexity of motions and adjustments and quick, apprehensive contacts ... the primal consciousness is alert in me ... which is a pure satisfaction." [RDP 151]

When Lawrence advocates climbing down Pisgah, this is an important aspect of what he means; discovering the sacred in daily life. It's not a new idea, obviously. Even Heraclitus standing before his kitchen stove was keen to impress upon visitors that the gods were present everywhere and in all activities. But it remains an important idea that counters all forms of ascetic idealism that advocate separation from the world of things and devotion to a spiritual life of prayer and meditation.   

Critics have often accused Lawrence of contemptuously dismissing modern life as inauthentic. However, in order to make this charge stick they have to glide over passages such as the above which demonstrate that he was eager to relate his ontological vision to everyday existence and those things that lie closest to hand (such as a bowl of soapy water). 

For Lawrence, no chore was too humble that it didn't warrant being done well and he happily absorbed himself in cooking, cleaning, chopping wood, and milking the cow, whilst his wife lay in bed smoking cigarettes. Indeed, far from washing the dishes, Frieda was prone to breaking them over Lawrence's head - though I suppose this too is a way of demonstrating that matter actually exists and that violence can also give pleasure ...      

Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985). 

In the first version of ‘Morality and the Novel’, Lawrence offers a different – no less surprising – list of things with which it is crucial to have relations. This includes "children, creatures, cities, skies, trees, flowers, mud, microbes, motor-cars, guns, [and] sewers". See Appendix III of the above text, p. 242.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allen Poe' (Final Version, 1923), in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

Why I Don't Much Care for the London Marathon

Logo of the 2016 London Marathon (with official corporate sponsor) 

A friend, Annette, sends me a text from the London Marathon. "How wonderful", she says, "to see 40,000 people - all shapes and sizes, all creeds and colours - running in perfect harmony and raising money for good causes." 

She's German. And a vegan. So her idealism and admiration for körperkultur doesn't surprise me. But I was a bit disappointed that she should know me so badly, after so many years, that she thought I'd share her enthusiasm for this ersatz sporting event. Because I don't.

In fact, I find its mix of fun-running, charity, narcissistic athleticism, media hype, and commercial sponsorship all wrapped up in Lycra and covered in sweat, deeply offensive. It's an example of what Lawrence terms sport in the head and, like him, I loathe those individuals who parade the self-conscious mechanism of their bodies whilst reeking with smugness and self-regard.       

Baudrillard is no fan either of idiots endlessly pounding the pavements. He rightly characterizes jogging, for example, as a type of ascetic idealism born of consumerism and the Californian cult of the self; a form of socially approved masturbation, the pleasure of which has nothing to do ultimately with either sport or sex.

I can't imagine what Pheidippides - who ran with real joy and purpose and not simply to comply with an obligatory performance principle - would have made of what passes for heroism today ...