Over the course of my 20s I grew increasingly troubled about the state of civilization, and the direction it seems to be going. I’m 30 now, the world seems to be spinning ever faster, and I’ve just had my first child. Changes keep coming rapid fire and it’s hard to keep up. But by standing back and peering at all of it from a distance the patterns become a bit clearer.
This Substack represents an attempt to tease out the threads of what I believe by getting it down on (digital) paper. I’ve read a lot and mulled over things fairly constantly over the last several years, but it’s all jumbled and I find it hard to articulate in conversation.
Sidenote — if you’re interested in seeing what I’m reading at the moment or have read recently, I keep track of all that here.
I don’t think many of the concepts in here will be overly original. Most of what I want to say has been said before, and better, by thinkers that I greatly admire — Wendell Berry, Paul Kingsnorth, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, and the like. But ultimately I hope that the people I love will read these essays and therefore take the ideas in them seriously. And if somehow I frame things in a way that resonates with others and maybe makes a mind or two think differently I’ll be thrilled.
I’ve been greatly inspired by Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain Project, which alerted me to the existence of the poet Robinson Jeffers, who I’ve come back to time and time again over the last several years. Writing in the 1920s and 30s, Jeffers was already keenly aware of the direction society was heading. There are depths of wisdom in his work, which coalesced into a philosophy he called inhumanism. He described it as:
A shifting of emphasis and significance from man to notman; the rejection of human solipsism and a recognition of the transhuman magnificence… This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimistic… It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy… it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.
As you might guess, I’ve drawn the title of this collection from a poem of Jeffers written in 1940, one that I read often when darkness seems to be gathering a little too much for my liking. Like a deep breath it focuses my attention on the concrete, what I can control, reminds me that neither I nor mankind itself is the center of all things, and that thinking too long on abstractions (ie global issues) can make you insane.
Unhappy about some far off things
That are not my affair, wandering
Along the coast and up the lean ridges,
I saw in the evening
The stars go over the lonely ocean,
And a black-maned wild boar
Plowing with his snout on Mal Paso Mountain.The old monster snuffled,
"Here are sweet roots,
Fat grubs, slick beetles and sprouted acorns.
The best nation in Europe has fallen,
And that is Finland,
But the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
The old black-bristled boar,
Tearing the sod on Mal Paso Mountain."The world's in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends;
Better lie up in the mountain here
Four or five centuries,
While the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
Said the old father of wild pigs,
Plowing the fallow on Mal Paso Mountain."Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers. I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies,"
Said the gamey black-maned boar
Tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.— Robinson Jeffers, The Stars Go Over the Lonely Ocean (1940)
