Even if Climate Change Weren’t Real…We Should Still Support Renewable Energy

Climate change seems to become an edgier and edgier issue all the time. There seems to be an implacable rise in obscurantist pseudo-science and ideological hogwash trying to tell us either that rapid and destabilising climate change isn’t happening or that it isn’t the fault of human beings.

Well, I have little patience for such silliness, but even if these claims were correct, I am almost totally convinced that we should still be pursuing renewal energy development. There are many, many other good reasons to make the change other than global warming. Here are a few main ones that have occurred to me.

1. Peak Oil

Like it or not, fossil fuels are finite. We’re going to have to get more and more aggressive to find them, expending more and more technology and damaging the environment in new, cruel, and unusual ways. Cost will keep on mounting – can you say “diminishing return on investment?” Unless of course we just keep hiking up the prices (oh yeah, that’s what is happening).

And then, even after all that, they’ll still eventually be exhausted. Then what? Then we switch to renewal energy anyway.

So why not get ahead start and make the transition now? The sooner we get serious about solar, wind, and the rest, the quicker these options will be commercially viable in a major way and the sooner we can perfect the transition. The sooner we change, the sooner we get off the spiralling staircase of energy costs, and the sooner that “energy security” can be established for nations currently dependent on international fossil fuel supplies (no more stupid wars in the Middle East needed).

Clinging to a technology on the edge of obsolescence, especially out of laziness, fear, or simple lack of imagination, is bad science and bad business sense.

2. Environmental Degradation

Anybody remember a little disaster called Deepwater? Oil spills alone cause massive damage every year. Coal seam gas mining threatens to destroy drinking water supplies worldwide – and seriously folks, in the 21st century water is going the be the most precious resource of all, not oil or gas. Coal mining destroys massive swathes of land, and in the clutch of the Japanese crisis let’s not even talk about the horrors of nuclear power, which has erroneously been passed off as “clean and green” for some time now, but actually produces the most noxious and irreversible pollution of all (and requires more massively destructive mining, too).

Renewable power sources such as wind and solar, by contrast, stand to be far less destructive. They don’t need to consume more and more land and resources in order to keep producing energy. They don’t blow up or release vastly destructive toxins into the environment, the food chain, and our bodies. They’re not only better for the environment, it just makes so much more sense, economically.

3. Money

Speaking of economics, fossil fuel industries are some of the most heavily subsidised on the planet. The numbers on coal and oil just don’t stack up so well once the tax-payer’s dollar is removed from the fossil fuel barons’ pockets. That’s in part because they constantly have to move on to new territories and new reserves to keep producing even the same amount of power. Whereas solar and wind are far more economical and efficient – once you’ve got the solar or wind farm going, you’re in business, all you have to worry about is maintaining your equipment.

So there you go. There are other good reasons for getting serious about renewable energy than these of course, not least the threat of global warming itself. But even if you don’t take climate change seriously, I think the other three reasons I’ve offered above are sufficiently compelling that I’d like to think you’d be convinced of the benefits of abandoning oil, coal, gas, and nuclear power anyway.

Here’s one final reflection on these issues that seems really critical to me. We are not separate from our planet, but a part of it. Fossil fuels do not take this factor into consideration; their destructive consequences (global warming or not) are analogous to defecating in the water one drinks. Renewal energy, on the other hand, is able to reflect and even take advantage of the brutal reality that what goes around comes around.

The longer we try to pretend that this basic law of nature doesn’t apply to our actions, the worse the consequences will be when Mamma Earth calls to collect on the debt we’re racking up.

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Binding the Leak

“In the East the wind is blowing all the boats across the sea,
And their sails, they fill the morning, and their cries ring out to me.

Oh the more it changes, well, well the more it stays the same,
And the hand just rearranges all the players in the game.

Oh, I had a dream: It seemed I stood alone,
And the veil of the ages, it goes sinking from my eyes like a stone.

Man, man, your time is sand, your ways are leaves upon the sea. I am the eyes of Nostradamus, all your ways are known to me. And these are the signs I bring to you to show you when your time is nigh…” (Peter Bellamy, “Nostradamus”, available from the Museum of Witchcraft)

Ok, I never did something like this before and I don’t know in which way magick can influence real time events of such a grand scale. But being the sorcerer’s appentice I am, why not try it? I’m talking about fighting the Gulf oil spil with Galdor or Chaos or Ceremonial Magic. I never believed (except in my teenage years) that doing a magickal ritual is enough to change the fabric of one’s Wyrd completely (sometimes it does). Here we are about to work on our collective Wyrd. What can be influenced by magick is a question of one’s sphere of availability and probably one’s Hamingja or ‘luck’. To enchant for low-probability events which lie beyond the range of possible options perceived at any one time isn’t wrong in itself. But I think that ritual must always be complemented by action. To paint the Helm of Awe on your forehead and then going into a fight without training and skills in martial arts won’t save you from being beaten up, if your adversary is a trained martial artist. Or another example: If the sole act of sorcery would make you win, why do all the African teams in soccer loose against a better skilled team from Europe? (They are supported by many sorcerers reportedly.) But conscious action and working focused on your objectives combined with magick will increase the chance to force the hand of fate. If a ritual is successful or not isn’t the thing, because you can never conceive all the forces of Wyrd that are at work. The only point is that you will get more likely what you want with magick than without it. I think the ritual for binding up and sealing the hole in the ocean floor that is causing the Gulf Oil Leak and for healing the associated environmental damage in the Gulf of Mexico is also a working one does for oneself. Let me say it this way: Even if it has no effect at all or you don’t believe magick to be able to affect such things, it’s still a useful way to deal with one’s helplessness and to tansform one’s anger.

The mess caused by BP is a crime beyond imagination and it shows once again what huge damage the greed of a few irresponsible men without foresight and wisdom can cause to the fragile, beautiful, living ecosystem and to the Earth community. If there is an Anima Mundi, if there is an Earth Spirit, a Vast Active Living Intelligence System (Philip K. Dick), if nature is alive,  with a Soul or a Life-Force that representatives of the Lebensphilosophie assumed to be a vital, non-mechanistic principle distinct from biochemical reactions — then the events that take place deep in the Gulf of Mexico in this very moment you read this, are far more than just pollution. It’s only one of many signs that humanity as a whole has taken a wrong direction towards extinction and that our leaders have lost the ability to listen to the inner voice of wisdom and to see the interconnectedness of Wyrd. They have been elected to serve their folk, but instead they have become the puppets of powerful megacorporations and their short-sighted interests of fast profits and an ideology of economic growth that has been decoupled from its purpose and thus degenerated to an end in itself. All this might sound quiet left-wing and I’m surely not propagating socialism, but I’m sorry: the (neo-)liberal ideologies have failed. Let’s move to something more useful, where free markets are embedded in an economic system and a cultural paradigm that propagates more than just the senseless accumulation of commodities for its own sake. Fehu is a mighty power that must be put into service of a higher good. But all this won’t be new to most Heathens, Wiccans, Druids, Pagans, Chaos Magicians, Technoshamans, Thelemites, Seeresses, Seiðkónas, Mystics, and various other Prophets and Prophetesses of Chaos of the 21st century. It’s the easier and lazier path to become cynical about the conditions humanity finds itself in. Taking responsibility is much harder. But even the most numb and narrow-minded pleb will understand that his children and grandchildren will have no future, if we don’t change our behavioural patterns and ways of thinking.

For this reason maybe some of you would like to go out into your local countryside, alone or with a few friends, and do some magic to help to bind the leak Deepwater Horizon (what a name for such a shame!) has caused. I have been made aware of this link by Nadine Drizzeq who is the US head of the IOT (Chaos Germans here) and sells useful stuff at http://www.iotbooks.com/, including the indispensable Hex Magazine. Her great article for Elhaz Ablaze is about Magusitis, a mental illness amongst magicians most of us encounter in some way at a certain point. The ritual for binding the leak, containing a Chaos Magic and a Ceremonial Magic version, can be found below, whilst others might want to “sing the galdor for the bindrune, and to work intuitively to heal the earth in their own way” (Nadine Drizzeq). Call up the Mighty Forces of the Æsir and wield your Hammer against the thurses!

http://hyperritual.com/bindleak/

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Storytelling as the Weaving of the Self

We moderns have nothing whatsoever of our own; only by replenishing and cramming ourselves with the ages, customs, arts, philosophies, religions, discoveries of others do we become anything worthy of notice.
Friederich Nietzsche

Exit all legends, enter the laws of magick.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

“You got no love in your heart. When you got no dreaming, no story, you got nothing”, an Aborigine says to the hero in a movie called ‘Australia’ (the movie is crap, but I’m used to look for gold in shit). The aborigines have a very mysterious concept that they call dream time, this is the mythical & magical time, where the ancestors still live & sing and every thing has a ‘song’ attached to it: rocks, trees, bushes asf. – all have a ‘song’. And the initiated sorcerer of the Australian natives can communicate with these ‘things’ by singing their songs (a form of verbal magic, in Norse magic represented by Galdor). Here we are once again confronted with the holistic vision of a sacred landscape, where everything is interconnected & alive – a worldview that was also common to our European ancestors (or wherever your ancestors come from). This vision is contrary to the modern myths created by the visions of Descartes & Newton’s sleep‘ (William Blake). Both of them had literally visions. Descartes’ thinking has been influenced, for example, by his dreams & Newton has been an occultist, who has received his vision of the mechanistic ‘clockwork universe’ from an ‘Angel’ of the Enochian system of magick ‘invented’ by Dr. John Dee.

Their visions are the stories about the universe we are brought up with. (If you have really bad karma you have been brought up with Kristjan stories about the universe :-). They do not stem from dream time, but from the modern myth of linear time. (‘Our enemies are material. Our enemies are direction and fact. Our enemies are Because.’ GP-O)

Anyway, what really strikes me is the idea how much power a story has over our lives and that – since nobody owes the absolute truth, if such a mysterious thing exists at all – all religions, philosophies, myths, histories, fictions and movies are essentially stories, stories we tell ourselves or that are told to us. Of course, this is a postmodern attitude that I am extremely wary of as it includes the risk of fundamentalist relativism and an ‘epistemological hypochondria’ (Geertz), where ‘anything goes’ and thus real knowledge becomes impossible anymore. But everything has two faces and there are also great advantages, when one uses POMO thought in a critical & self-conscious fashion.

“Post-modern research … embodies a critique of the conventional logical positivist discourse derived from rationalist Enlightenment philosophy, which privileges the European, male, individual subject and the indisputable authority of scientific explanatory frameworks.” (Robert J. Wallis 2003: Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasies, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans, p. 2).

I think this critique is a necessary step, if one really wants to understand the local knowledge of a native people, like the Aboriginal tradition (or our Heathen tradition). This means, too, that to select carefully a few essential tenets of postmodern philosophy can bring about changes in attitudes, values, perceptions, and worldviews that help us to heal the wounds between ‘whites’ and the peoples we have hurt (see Henry’s article Culture, Genocide and Whingers). More generally speaking, such a ‘paradaigm shift’ on a grand scale can help us to heal the wounds between humanity and the Earth Spirit (Anima Mundi).

Further, the positive effects of postmodernism can be, if used wisely, that we deny to follow ‘universal rules’ (of life, art, philosophy, or anything else). And those who have the will and determination can choose pathways to individual fulfilment & self-empowerment based on the story (‘paradigm’) chosen or created by themselves, instead of following the universal appeal or supposed authority of a story they were told to believe (be it religious metaphysics or scientific materialism, or whatever your favourite mental prison is). If something feels internally authentic & right, it’s the way to go. For us Chaos Heathens / Pagans this attitude makes it possible to liberate us to return to the trú traditions of our ancestors in new, exciting, and creative ways, in ways that adapt and apply the ancient wisdom to the circumstances and the Need in the sense of :ᚾ: of our times.

However, to me storytelling is a form of magick and a form of knowledge. Imagine a tribe 10,000 years ago in a dark forest at night. You can hear the wolves howl, and you hear the strange sounds of other dangerous animals, above you the stars and a full moon. Only a little bonfire enlightens the night and you sit there in a circle with your comrades, the shaman of your tribe – a miraculous man with special powers, who is treated with awe by all men of the tribe – sits with you there and tells wyrd stories of cosmic, uncontrollable and daunting forces, of Fire and Ice generating the events that created the universe. He tells you about Ymir, the bipolar Giant, dismembered by the mighty Gods, Odhinn (Master of Ecstasy), Vili (Sacred Will) & (Hollowed Space), who made order (Futhark) out of the totality of existence (Ginnung) and shaped the first man & woman, Askr and Embla, out of trees (!), giving them the triple Gift (Gebo) of human shape (Lík), life-breath (Önd = Prana, Chi, Libido) and (divine) consciousness (Ódhr). His stories tell you about the adventurous journeys and brave deeds of heroes that are your direct ancestors, whom maybe your dead great-grandfather met personally, when he was a child. These journeys of those heroes turn into ordeals & initiations, where they gain insights into the mysteries and cycles of birth, life, death & rebirth. These stories are strange allegories that illumine your understanding of the world surrounding you. They give you heroic models of behaviour that help you to live in an honourable way. Our shaman from 10,000 years ago is a storyteller. He creates a sense of self, of who and where you are. He gives codes of meaning & an intelligence to your life that makes you aware of the interconnectedness that the Web (Wyrd) woven by the Three Norns originates. Magick is possible here – you are not alone, disconnected and alienated from the world!

But 10,000 years later these stories of old are not told to us anymore. They became myths in a negative sense, fantasies of stupid, uneducated, brutish barbarians. The modern stories describe such states of consciousness (as mentioned above) as being ‘primitive’, ‘infantile’ and ‘wishful thinking’. They are something that must be ‘overcome’ by logical & scientific thinking. The French ethnologist Lévy-Bruhl interprets such a healing and wholesome state of unitary consciousness in a negative sense as participation mystique and the Austrian psychoanalyst Freud called this ‘magical thinking’ (based on his idea of primary narcissism). ‘Magical thinking’ is the belief that a person can impact reality by wishing or willpower. Such a belief demonstrates a belief in the self as powerful and able to change external realities. To put it shortly, magical thinking is in many ways what I strive for! For many years now, I try to decondition myself from this vision of ‘flatland’ logic by psychedelic drugs, meditation and magick (more or less successfully until now :-). Though in the long run POMO thinking is not at all ‘magic-friendly’ and, though the whole POMO current has created in many areas a body of knowledge of rather dubious value, I still believe that on a philosophical level some POMO ideas are useful to regain ‘magical thinking’ in a positive, ‘enlightened’ way, namely by creating new stories. Don’t get me wrong, science is invaluable! But the scientific story – if not balanced by wisdom, if not shown where its authority ends, and if not shown where it failed (!) – has not much (interesting) to say about the most important questions of life: What is the purpose of life? What happens after death? What is wisdom? Or, if I may quote again my ‘Aboriginal friend’ (from Hollywood:-), his answer to science would be the same as to the white man: “You got no love in your heart. When you got no dreaming, no story, you got nothing”. This is not completely true, of course. Science has a story: it dreams of ‘eternal progress’ and a condition where all disease, probably even death, is cured. For those who haven’t been so optimistic, it has created nihilism. And what is the story of nihilism? It goes: “The story is pointless. It all makes no sense. End of story.” But we Need a story. A brighter story, a greater story, a hopeful story!

But what can a story do on an individual level? Isn’t a story just a story? Well, yes and no. For example, what is the ego? From a meditative point of view, my ego is just the stories I tell myself about myself. But some stories are charged with a very high emotive energy. So, before my ego would give up its ‘core’ stories, it would probably run mad & defend them from extinction like a religious fundamentalist would protect his belief in God, just because the ego consists of these stories. Probably that’s why it’s so hard to ‘Cross the Abyss’, as Crowley has put it. Probably that’s why most humans fear death! Probably that’s why it’s hard to change at all! Because, you know, ‘that’s just the way I am!’, so I won’t give up
this-or-that habit or such-and-such a way of thinking or repetitive emotional pattern, even if it’s bad for ‘me’. Because ‘that’s me’! You get the picture… The ego will all-ways convince you with its stories, why you shouldn’t change, why meditating is boring, or why you have the right to behave angry, feel depressed or be xenophobic. So, in a fundamental way, it’s of great importance what story dominates you, what story you tell yourself about yourself. This, probably, is the reason, why meditative systems of the East have only little use for ‘developing a strong personality’ etc. and focus very much on developing ‘egolessness’, developing equanimity towards life, pain & death and fostering devotion towards the God/dess or the guru, who represents the God/dess and, ideally, works as a ‘mirror’ for the apprentice. Our Northern Tradition fosters instead the development of a strong Hamingja (cp. Sweyn’s True Helm) and of courage towards life, pain and death (cp. Dave Lee’s Bright from the Well: Northern Tales in the Modern World).

On a more profane level just consider what psychotherapy basically does to people. It just gives them a story, a meta-narrative, that makes sense out of all the shit that went wrong and by explaining why this shit has led the individual to feel ‘so-and-so’ about himself. By giving sense to that which seems senseless, by explaining the pain and giving it a meaning, and by telling the person that s/he is not defined by its past and that s/he can now choose to do better. Basically, it creates a better story and thus a better ‘self’
the stories, of which the ego consits, are changed! (‘Change all memory. And change your ways to perceive.’ TOPY proverb) In a way, the therapist is a modern echo of the storyteller, as is, of course, the priest. But finally that’s not enough, because today, if you are a genuine member of the holiest of all holy orders, the COT (= Club Of Truth-seekers :-), the truth of someone else won’t suffice. The shamanic storyteller from 10,000 years ago is dead and gone. The only one who can ‘replace’ him today is not a politician, priest, psychotherapist or some self-proclaimed guru, but it is you. 

Remember You Are Made Of Star Dust

So creating your own story is a good starting point. The chaos magician Andrieh Vitimus suggests:

“The imagination is more powerful than merely the facts. An idea backed by emotional responses can be seductive enough to enslave many to its cause, whether the idea is a spirit, a piece of art, a cause, or a concept. The majority of people seem content to give away their imagination and creative power. Often, this manifests in letting other forces (advertising, religion, ideas, spirits, whatever) decide what they should do and what they can have and be. This is the power of imagination. It can free us or be our worst prison.” (Andrieh Vitimus 2009: Hands-On Chaos Magic , p. 365, my accentuation)

In days of yore Imagination was a natural part of daily life and regarded as valid as any other human faculty. Walliam Blake, whose Poetic Genius has created a unique poetry (see ‘The Proverbs of Hell’), embraced Imagination as ‘the Body of God’. Today our Imagination, our visualising asf., is ‘stolen’ by the story-sellers, who created the ‘Body of (Pavlov’s) Dog‘.  Advertising is a good example. It sells ‘imagination’. So you buy the ‘myth’ surrounding the package, not the content itself. You don’t buy a perfume, but the ‘imagination’ that it makes you more erotic, attractive, seductive asf. Today we have no genuine storyteller except, probably, the artist. For example, artists who sing about the way they experience truth, like this one: “Waking sleep, cocooned within a veil of fog, Sight no further than my hand, Tearing at this web spun through reality … Through the sacred dance I Awaken, Through faith in myself and my rhythm, Conscious for the first time…” (Ironwood – here’s a fantastic German review). But today such artists are rare. Because in these modern days even the artist has become a whore of capitalism and thus he turned from a genuine storyteller to a storyseller – a faker, a peacock, a good-for-nothing. Mehr Schein als Sein (‘More Appearance than Being’). And stories they sell, packaged in a ‘consumer-friendly’ form, devoid of meaning and any real depth. A true storyteller, shaman & madman, Jhonn Balance (now dead dead dead – may he be blessed by all horned animals!), has warned our culture by proclaiming that Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil! The German artist and shaman (of sorts), Joseph Beuys, has said once: Every human is an artist. I would like to add: …and a storyteller. At least s/he should be. POMO theory started out when it proclaimed that there is no ‘grand narrative’ anymore (that the ‘scientific myth’ of modernity of eternal progress & secularization has kind of come to an end that’s why post-modern). So, after Nietztsche proclaimed that ‘God is dead’, now the ‘grand narrative’ is dead, too. But I believe that we, as individuals and as a folk, need a narrative again, a story. And, in this globalized world, we need also a story for the earth community – a story that makes us aware of the interconnectedness of everything on this green-blue and fragile planet. Because when I poison the air over here in Europe, your air will be finally poised over there in Australia, too. So what could this story be about? Well, I’m not wise enough to answer this question, but we can silence our minds and listen to what the voice of our hearts has to say (what our ancestors called ‘High Rede’). And surely we can look with confidence to the wisdom of our ancestors and apply it. If the climate catastrophe shall be anticipated in time, science must be part of the solution, I believe. As the Permaculture slogan goes: ‘The problem is the solution.’ Mid-gard Middle-Earth must be guarded, and it can only be guarded by us humans.


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Green Heathenry

Heathens like to say that they love nature, but I’ve met more than a few heathens who lack what I would call an “environmental consciousness”.

That’s not some kind of moralising criticism, but it is an invitation to change. So I want to offer up a few little factoids I’ve run across in recent times to give heathens some perspective.

Did you know that the number of ocean “dead zones”, where no life will grow due to pollution, is constantly increasing? Did you know that here in Australia we are sooner or later going to have so much salt in the earth from bad farming practices that there will be no fertility left?

Did you know that here in the west we consume so much power and so many disposable items that although we aren’t the majority of the world population we consume the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of world resources? I know people get upset about world overpopulation but I think its world resource consumption that’s the real problem, and that fault lies by and large at the feet of the developed nations.

And I won’t even get into human-caused climate change – one of the most scientifically substantiated phenomena ever, but you wouldn’t think so from all the gas-bag denialist loonies out there.

Here in Australia we elected a new Government last year that was supposed to ban plastic bags (a terrible plague on our ecosystems); act strongly on the climate change issue; protect whales from illegal Japanese hunting; and intervene to end the culture of disposability and waste. Well they’ve turned out to be hypocrites and idiots. Back to the drawing board!

Let’s examine the basic problem underlying the mass extinction that our species is currently inflicting on all the others. If you read much heathen lore you quickly notice that a key theme is “what goes around comes around”. Wyrd is cyclic and all actions have consequences. You simply cannot get away from that. You simply cannot.

Not only that but in “ye olden days” heathens recognised that nature works in cycles as well – seasons, moons, days. What happens now sets the stage for what happens next; what happened before set the stage for what happens now. In the present moment we act more or less freely by taking the raw material of past events and moulding them toward something that might approximate our vision of the future.

Furthermore, you get the distinct sense from heathen lore that these folk knew the limits of their knowledge and respected the uncertainty beyond those limits. That might sound obvious, but it isn’t.

For example, with technology developing faster and faster under the watchful eye of the stock market (though the latter is rather miserable these days), we’ve generally not worried so much about long term consequences.

When such consequences do surface down the track – as with DDT, CFC use, the cigarette-induced health epidemic, climate change, etc – we find that those responsible do everything they can to muddy the issue and avoid their responsibilities.

I’m pretty sure these irresponsible characters would say in their defence “we didn’t know this would happen”. In other words they weren’t aware of the limits of their knowledge and had no respect for the horizon of mystery beyond. The price paid for these people’s blindness is in some cases horrific (lung cancer is, for example, an awful way to die). Ignorance is not actually much of an excuse.

I daresay you can see where this is headed. If we continue to mindlessly pollute; continue to pretend that disposable objects just disappear (rather than producing land fill); and continue to avoid thinking about the problem, then we are simply not behaving like heathens in the slightest.

If, on the other hand, we want to be true to our heathen convictions then acting individually and collectively to change our relationship to the natural world is vital.

My wife and I pay extra (but it isn’t that much more) to consume electrical energy entirely sourced from certified wind power; we compost our organic waste; we grow some of our own food; we recycle and reuse water; we buy carbon offsets for our car (again, surprisingly cheap); we have sought out the most environmentally friendly products for cleaning and the like; we’ve gone “back in the day” to rely heavily on old-school less destructive cleaning chemicals like Borax; we use energy efficient light bulbs; we ride our bikes as much as we can; we buy local organic produce as much as possible; at various points we’ve donated money or time to wilderness conservation groups; we write angry letters to stupid politicians; and of course we recycle as much as we can.

How hard is it to do any of this? Well we aren’t rolling in money exactly but we can still meet the slight extra expenses for green power and carbon offsetting the car. And we save a lot on cleaning products because all the old school ones – soda water, lemon juice, Borax – are damn cheap.

It really isn’t hard to reduce the impact you have on the environment – and consequently there aren’t any good excuses.

However I’m not here to be a doom merchant or lay guilt trips on anyone. I’m here to suggest that if you are a heathen then changing how you live to be more environmentally responsible is an opportunity to think and act like the “olden” heathens did, even if you are living very differently to them. That’s right folks, good old psychological reconstruction rears its head again.

You don’t have to “go back in time” to do all of this. Just make an effort to be aware of the cyclic nature of wyrd or consequence; just make an effort to educate yourself so that you are aware of the limits of your knowledge and act with the appropriate prudence that entails.

You can even use modern technology to help you achieve a more environmentally conscious – and therefore heathen – way of life. Hence the beauty of alternative energy sources, energy efficient dwelling design, etc, etc, etc.

Some folk think it’s already too late and we’ve already stuffed the planet. That’s probably true, but the more we act now the less severe the damage will be. And anyway, I’m arguing for the cultivation of an environmental consciousness because it’s true to heathen ideals, not just for the sake of instrumental consequences.

Really the only people getting in the way of all this are politicians in the pocket of polluting corporations who are too short-sighted to see that in the long run climate change and environmental destruction are going to be way more expensive (and not just in dollars, but in animal lives, human lives and ecosystems) than cleaning up their act now.

You might like to get involved in political or consumer action – I’m sure you can find plenty of suitable organisations to help you do this on the web. The world’s environmental woes present a great opportunity for modern heathens to recycle the old school heathen relationship to nature and consequence – so let’s not waste it!

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Of Iron and Ocean

After my recent anti-nidstang magic, aimed towards connecting with the local land spirits, some pretty amazing developments have occurred.

There is a stretch of beach near my home at the foot of a sea cliff. The rock is layers, smooth, black and red-brown. I’m no geologist but I think it is mostly layers of igneous, volcanic stone.

Piles of black angular boulders litter the beach here. At high tide they slip from view, only to stubbornly emerge as the sea gasps its last and recedes.

There are mysterious outcrops and places here, including a depression in part of the rock wall which looks like a door to another universe – and from which runs a huge thick vein of red rock that stretches into the ocean.

Last week while wandering among the rocks at low tide I stumbled over a rock formation that offers a perfect “throne”. Somehow the rocks are positioned perfectly for one to sit on in regal style. Even though I have seen these rocks many, many times, I had never before recognised the gestalt of their arrangement.

I sat on these rocks and it felt not unlike how I would imagine a mound sitting, albeit a very royal mound sitting. It felt as though I was being privileged with noticing this seat, as though it were hidden from view unless it wanted to be seen.

And as I sat there, just briefly in the corner of my eye, I saw a mysterious being for the briefest moment.

As a child I read a number of books about Aboriginal mythology, and one of the staples were tall, jet-black, angular land spirits, beings with flaring ears, pointed nails and sinister airs. Australia is no land of spandex-wearing faeries or cute little elves and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Now I can’t speak for someone else’s spiritual tradition, but what I saw in the corner of my eye as I sat in that throne was the spitting image of one of those spindly black land spirits. It was tall, and the surface of its body was like a sinkhole to light. It was watching me with a wary curiosity and its eyes glowed a deep red.

Unfortunately as I turned suddenly to get a better look it was gone. But I hoped this would not be our only meeting and I was not disappointed.

A few days later I returned to the rock throne. This time it was just past high tide, so the water almost lapped at my feet. I sat and I called, and made animal noises and shrieked as spontaneity dictated. Eventually I got a response.

Having handed over my actions to my unthinking reflex-mind I was soon exploring the rocks, as an inaudible voice guided me first to this nook, then that cranny. It was as though I was being educated about the secret life of the cliff and boulders, as though I was being shown the insider’s point of view on this place.

I spent quite a long time leaping and bounding, climbing and jumping, until I think I had a pretty good feel for the place. But no spirit. No spectral presence, not even when I sat once more on the throne.

I was starting to get frustrated because I really couldn’t see the point of all this stone ballet. Then I noticed something odd.

Sitting further out from the main boulder area is a single huge, flat-topped rock. This boulder was still water-bound by the tides.

Sitting on the boulder was what looked like the much rusted blade of a saw. Since I had just been about ready to leave, I debated with myself whether to examine this strange sight. But I knew that I had to. I hated the idea of leaving without having made some kind of connection with the being I saw amid the rocks and cliffs.

So out I went, narrowly avoiding getting very soaked. I clambered up onto the boulder and discovered that it was indeed a severely corroded saw blade. This saw had been swimming in the ocean for a very long time, from what I could see. The blade was so rusted that it virtually crumbled in my grasp. No more cutting for this one!

The waves started lashing much higher as I inspected the saw, and I had the strangest feeling that someone was laughing at me as I realised that I had to move quickly before this new watery assault had me soaked. Carefully and swiftly I clambered down the rock and back across the slippery surfaces to the main boulder area.

As soon as I was back to safety the waves resumed their steady seaward march – so it seemed anyway. I didn’t really understand the meaning of the saw, other than perhaps bait to lure me onto the rock where I could be the victim of a wet prank. Oh, and I cut myself lightly as I escaped the seas clutches. “Blood sacrifice” I thought to myself.

After some deliberation I dumped the saw. I figured it was so badly corroded that it was about ready to disintegrate – indeed, it was disintegrating – and that somehow it belonged among the boulders. With that I headed back across the rocky space and off home.

As I neared the edge of the boulder area I heard a noise behind me, I turned to see the strange being, this time in a small rock alcove behind a boulder – another obvious feature like the throne that I had somehow never before noticed. Then it was gone.

I ran over the rocks to where the spirit had stood. I picked among the boulders, finding more hollows and secrets, mystified. Now I knew that it was watching me, but still things seemed rather opaque.

Eventually, no more enlightened as to the being’s purpose, I turned again to leave. This time I stumbled over an iron bar, as long as my forearm, also corroded to the point of disintegration.

As I tested the bar’s heft my mind wandered to an article I recently read about how prehistoric humans made chimes out of resonant stones that would sing when struck. I decided to test some of the local boulders for their tuning.

The rusty bar was not much of a drum stick, being heavy and soft, but to my surprise the rocks sang clear and true! I amused myself for a few minutes recapitulating the prehistoric version of rock stardom before this discovery too seemed to reach the end of my attention span.

I couldn’t help but feel that I was missing something. Then the connection became clear – the rusted saw, the rusted bar, my blood and the veins of iron oxide that run through the rocky cliff face. The being I had seen was the spirit of the Iron here!

With that realisation it began to speak to me in my mind, its voice slow and heavy and clanking. It told me that once all had been hot and liquid and it had danced joyously.

But now for untold stretches of time it had been cold and rigid, bound to the cliff and the boulders that had once been like water. And slowly the sea ate away at the rock, stripping out the veins of iron ore and dissolving even their hard shapes.

The spirit lived a lonely life here, with few for company and an inexorable oceanic aggressor at its doorstep. I felt moved to ask it if it could travel somehow – perhaps it could ride the iron in my blood? Then it presented its own solution – a small-shaped piece of corroded iron that had been wedged between two rocks for what looked like a very long time. The spirit told me to take the iron so that its awareness could travel wherever I took this adopted piece of its form.

It also led me to a beautiful shell hidden among the rocks, a gift it said.

Now it was finally time to head home.

On my way it spoke to me a little. It told me that I am the first European-descended person to have noticed it or been able to engage with it. It told me that what made the difference was my connection to my own spiritual heritage.

It told me that most white people in Australia are completely addled and befuddled when it comes to their spiritual identity, that they don’t know themselves and therefore are unable to go beyond their own context to meet the land and people.

It indicated that my anti-nidstang ritual had specific importance in allowing me to interact with me, and that my ability to perform this ritual was one example of the kind of self-knowledge it feels is required.

Strong words from an Iron Spirit! And as always with such experiences to be taken with caution. But as I sit here with the spirit’s mobile iron “transmitter’ on my lap I cannot help but wonder where this will all lead. At the very least, I hope to learn from it and I hope to offer it the chance to explore the world beyond its harsh and wet home.

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Anti-Nidstang Extravaganza

A while back I was doing some magic involving runes, the Norns and the goddess Brigit.

One consequence of this was that the Norns suggested that I perform a kind of reverse nidstang in order to invite the local land spirits into more presence and comfort with the local human/built environment, and with me in particular.

The issue where I live is particularly loaded because we have seen a lot of very dubious development in the area which has been bad for the local environment (both physical and psychological). Indeed, our local council was dissolved not so long ago due to rampant corruption after allowing many, many unconscionable development projects to go ahead.

Near our home is a place called Sandon Point, a small marshland and then a long promontory out into the sea. The area has a very delicate ecosystem and is also an Aboriginal sacred site and (I think) burial ground.

After years of struggle between a large and unscrupulous corporation and the entire local community a terrible development was permitted over part of the area near the Point – and I must say the houses they have put up are truly ugly things. I mean really horrendous to the eye. If I were a local land spirit I would be very, very, very angry.

I’m told there a lot of spirits around the place and that the ghost of some kind of Aboriginal shaman person still haunts the area. In fact I think I may have once seen this being in my imaginal eye. With all that magic around the place I certainly wouldn’t want to live in one of those upmarket Legoland dwellings.

Thinking about my recent experience which what seemed to be an Aboriginal spirit, I decided now was the time to take the Norns’ advice and perform my anti-nidstang magic. And I decided that the Point was the place to do it.

I prepared my nidstang with some wood from our little garden, carving three runes (Ansuz, Nauthiz and Hagalaz) that were indicated to me by the Norns.

I rode out on my bike to the location late last night. It was an almost full moon which loaned an eerie atmosphere to the proceedings.

So once I was out on the rocks of the Point, the sea glowering on the dark horizon, I suddenly had the thought that correct etiquette would be to state my identity and purpose to the spirits here. This in fact I think a very conventional Aboriginal custom though I wasn’t thinking about it at the time.

So I talked about my ancestry, my ideals and values, my reasons for being there, and so forth. I felt beings drawn in all around me and for while it was like the air was holding its breath.

Then various voices somehow came into my awareness, testing me, asking me difficult questions, attempting to intimidate me. They were not happy and they did not like me particularly, thanks to the actions of others like me. It was a long conversation and I felt quite vulnerable because they quickly demonstrated the ability to control my movements – and threatened that they might make me drown myself.

But I am good at dealing with imaginal realities and we reached some kind of understanding. It helped that after a whole Woden checked in and took over for me. He was a lot better than I at relating to the local spirits and I think his great age and primal nature made a strange kind of sense to them.

I searched for the right place to place the nidstang and at that moment I found that the rocks, the sand and the water all seemed to swirl into the seeming of faces and figures. It was an incredible experience to find myself amid the rich chaos of the place, feeling myself to be watched and with the spirits both physically and imaginally.

Finally I found the right place to plant the nidstang, spoke the names of the runes over it, and bowed in respect to the land, the sea, the sky, the moon and the spectrum of their manifestations.

I stood, the rite completed. Suddenly from both sides of me great flocks of sea birds flew up into the air, singing and shouting, disappearing into the dark night. It was a beautiful moment. I rode home with a sense of curiosity as to what my actions might mean for the local wights, the local people, the whole of the local spirit of place.

Something the spirits at the Point asked me to do was to make contact with the local Aboriginal community and learn more about their ways of relating to the local environment. I am very hesitant to do this. I don’t particularly wish to seem like I am trying to steal from their already assaulted and marginalised culture.

I asked that some openings come my way for this to occur without me taking the first steps or having to force the issue. This way I can be comfortable that I am not overstepping the bounds. I do not know what will come of this.

I’m very pleased to have followed up and completed this bit of magic, and to have carried out the Norns’ advice, to have given something I dreamed and imagined the flesh of physical action. It was a beautiful, if somewhat frightening, experience, and one I am very glad to have had.

Perhaps now I need to call on Brigit and have her take me to the Norns again so that I can report back and get their advice on how to proceed.

It also occurs to me that this magic was a little like the Seat-and-mound seidh I wrote about a post or two ago. As usual I do things in an idiosyncratic way. I’m not comfortable with the idea of calling up someone else’s ancestors per se. But I live here in this environment and I think communing with it is rather necessary.

So perhaps more inspiration will come to me in this vein with time and my practical grasp of seidh might just get to widen a bit further. I wouldn’t mind coming to understand more about the nidstang thing either, and more about its reversal.

Incidentally, thank you Rod Landreth for your very thorough response on the seidh subject, yes I’d love to know more about your work if you want to email me, you hopefully have my email address from the Seidhr Study list posts I’ve made.

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Reclaiming Conservatism

This essay was written a few years ago and certainly shows its age in some
respects, though it seems all too timely still in others (at least IMHO)…

Introduction

Conservatism is an often used term. We can talk about conservative politics as adhering to a fairly strict set of norms, often roughly derived from Christian beliefs. We can talk about conservatism as conforming to the status quo of a society’s mores or power structures. We can talk about environmental conservation. We can talk about conservative economic policy. A person of conservative attitudes might be someone who ‘strictly’ follows a given code or body of religious ethics, be they Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Communist, etc.

It seems the term conservative can be applied to a lot of different things, and I think that this can sometimes obscure important social, political and spiritual issues. The purpose of this essay is to untangle some of the uses of the term and offer a redefinition.

Part of the problem is that different senses of the word are sometimes used as though they meant the same thing. A prime example can be found in the politics of mainstream conservative governments such as the Howard Liberal Government in Australia.

Howard’s Government maintains that it is conservative in a few senses. It says that it believes in ‘traditional family values’ – which seems to mean it believes in the unbroken nuclear family with bread-winning husband, householding wife and dutiful children. It appears to believe in Christianity as the conservative person’s religion of choice (at least insofar as Australia is rooted in Western society). It perceives its conservative mandate to include the view that ‘White Australia’ must be conserved against immigration and refugees.[1] It has little interest in citizens whose relationships are not based on Christian notions of exclusive marriage and definitely isn’t interested in non-heterosexual relationships. It appears to believe its conservative mandate requires strong law enforcement powers, and the prioritisation of corporate interests over broader social concerns and the environment.

Certainly in some sense these attitudes seem aimed at conserving a notion of 1950’s, Menzies era Australia, when Red paranoia, moralism, rigid gender roles, and the White Australia Policy ruled. But does it actually conserve these values (I take it that my reader would agree that at least some of the Menzies era values were pretty flawed)? I think that in some respects Howard misuses the notion of conservatism, specifically in the context of the economy, the environment, and in the area of the family.

Howard’s socio-economic policy has been to deregulate industry, dissolve trade protection laws, and bolster the voice of corporate interests. The general effect has been to relax restraint on the business world. This has seen the country’s social fabric suffer. So for example we now find that the telecommunications industry remains just as inefficient, but now also suffers destructive corruption (c.f. the One.Tel collapse), and ever-rising prices (despite the promise that deregulation would cause a price drop). Traditionally centralised services have been cut loose, as protection for the rights of employees are systematically assaulted.

In short, this kind of socio-economic policy is anything but conservative. Rather than reflecting an attitude of restraint and continuity, it relies on the dubious notion of self-regulation and on apparently uncontrollable market forces. It may seems slightly contradictory, but a somewhat Socialist-influenced economic policy might actually be a lot more stable and conservative (not to mention less destructive to a social fabric assaulted by ever more rampant consumerism and self-serving corporate interests).

The Howard Government’s policy on the environment is that it can get stuffed. It has generally refused to even keep the issue of the environment on the political agenda, let alone take or support steps to conserve the environment. Australia and the US are the only nations who have refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on Reduction of Greenhouse Emissions.

Conservatism, however, means prudence. It seems prudent, regardless of the debate for and against, that 
we make very significant steps to reduce our impact on the natural environment. This may mean a short-term restriction on industry, but industry is very adaptable, especially in this non-conservative economic climate. So the notion of environmental conservation, which seems to fall into a really genuine sense of conservatism as prudence and caution, has little support from Australia’s current, ‘conservative’ government.

Howard’s perspective on marriage, homosexuality and Christianity has been referenced to the conservative writer Edmund Burke. He simply believes that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Unfortunately, the social fabric in this country simply has changed. Christianity is a waning force; marriage is viewed with much more perspective, caution and even disregard; and folk are becoming more confident of expressing their sexuality rather than hiding away in shame and suffering. Not only that, but one could argue that the Menzies era never was that great anyway: it was built on an endless yet largely manufactured fear about faceless hordes from communist Asia; on the subjugation of women; on genocide against Indigenous Australians; on the punishment of any variation from a one-dimensional notion of the good.

Here is the crux of the problem: a lot of folks want to vote conservative in the spirit of prudence and caution. Yet this weds them to the irresponsible socio-economic and environmental policies of leaders such as Howard. It also weds them to the often hysterical and flighty paranoia which under Menzies’ reign was named ‘conservative’. Surely a genuine conservatism would not be so lacking in confidence, prudence, and caution in forming judgements.

The notion of conservatism peddled to voters in Australia and other countries (especially the US) is not really very conservative at all. It lacks a sense of solid grounding; it constantly needs to reiterate and insist on a single, abstract dimension of national identity. Conservatism seems to mean having a strong sense of stability. But as Nietzsche so adroitly pointed out, a culture which cannot tolerate any variation from the ‘norm’ must be very weak. It takes a very strong culture to permit variation and difference in opinion. If conservatism means taking the time to strengthen ourselves, surely that would mean encouraging a self-confident society that can span many different perspectives! Instead, Howard is committed to a very brittle backwardness – as exposed in the lack of much or perhaps even any return for our military and political subservience to the US.

As an aside, Nietzsche’s dictum reveals why dictatorships, though built on a notion of strength, can prove to be quite fragile: the tyrant is only one person, and even with modern mass communication, they can only exert so much uniformity. In their passing, all that has slept underground will quickly reassert itself. We are seeing this in a destructive aspect now with post-Saddam Iraq. A similar process can be seen in the radical upsurge of Christian and Islamic extremism in the former Soviet Union.

So if folk are seeking in the notion of conservatism a sense of prudence, stability, roots, and strength, then they’ve been hoodwinked by the notions of conservatism presented to them by ‘conservative’ interests and political parties. Another example? Hitler was a highly radical leader – his actions brought destruction and suffering, and were driven by a lack of confidence, roots, security, sense of self. Yet he appealed to successfully, and was supported by, those seeking the conservative promise of stability and prudence.

It seems that we have established that the word conservative has been used to refer to any number of different agendas. If this is granted, I would go further to suggest that some very radical (and imprudent, and hysterical, and unethical) acts have been given a conservative pretext by the current crop of political leaders.

So having considered the present situation, I would like to suggest some dimensions of what a ‘real’ conservatism would look like. In the process, I hope to reclaim the word for better purposes than those to which it has been set.

Conservatism as prudent foresight

We associate being conservative with being cautious or prudent. To be prudent is to seek many perspectives on a situation before making a decision on how to act. It is to reflect on the extent to which each perspective is true to itself. The more self-contradictory a perspective is, the less we can trust it.

By foresight I do not mean magical divination, but rather our ability to project towards possible futures. We may not be able to anticipate exactly how things will be, but we are able to imagine roughly how things could turn out.

My suggestion is that conservatism entails an attitude of prudent foresight. This means that we live with a certain wariness about the status quo – we recognise that things can change, or that things once thought positive can become negative over time.

Pseudo-conservatives would generally suggest that things should be kept the way they are, or even taken ‘back’ to some more or less mythical golden age of the past. However, our genuine sense of conservatism – as prudent foresight – would require that we be open to modifying our ways and values in order to adapt to the challenges of change. This does not mean that we are compelled to abandon the essence of our worldview or social structure – far from it! But it does mean that, for example, a person of conservative views would take the arguments of conservationists and environmentalists very seriously. Why? Prudent foresight, warily conducted, suggests that the consequences of ignoring the current environmental problems far outweigh the short-term difficulty caused by changing our current, polluting ways. Even if it turns out that things are not as dire as they seem (which I believe is an infinitesimal possibility), the green option is still more prudent. If we bury our heads in the sand and call that ‘conservative’, then we are being neither prudent nor realistic.

Some pseudo-conservatives claim that the jury is still out on issues such as global warming. They appear to be engaging in prudence by not jumping at what they think might be a false alarm.

Unfortunately, the scientists who say there aren’t major problems are funded by those bodies that perceive short term benefit in the status quo – petro-chemical corporations in particular. Meanwhile, it has become ever clearer that the earth’s forests are being decimated at increasing rates; that the seas are rising fast; that pollution levels are rocketing; that weather patterns are becoming more unstable. It seems absurd to suggest that our actions have not been at least a major contributor to these changes in the world’s environmental state. I understand that insurance companies are becoming highly vocal advocates for making our way of life more sustainable – they know that they are the ones who will be forced to pay out as global warming destabilises world weather patterns more and more.

So, no – it is not prudent to ignore the environmentalist call at this stage in the game. There is simply too much evidence indicating the seriousness of the situation. Surely it is conservative to change human industry and activity in order to protect our very survival! For those with any doubts as to this situation I would recommend Tim Flannery’s remarkable book, The Weather Makers.

To take a different angle, consider the current prison system in countries such as Australia or the US. Pseudo-conservative politicians habitually call for tougher sentences, meaner prisons, and less empathy for those that commit crimes. They dismiss any consideration of social context; they are not interested in the vicious socioeconomic cycles which sow the seeds for crime and most criminal behaviour.

The result is that prison recidivism rates immensely high in some Western countries – as many as four out of five people see out their prison terms and then commit more crimes (for which they are caught). This suggests that prison don’t actually reduce crime.

The conservatively prudent, far-sighted response would be to ask about the broader social patterns which produce crime, to ask why prisons fail so miserably to reform their inmates. If something isn’t working, it seems wise to ask why. Piling on more and harsher treatment of criminals doesn’t seem to be doing the trick.

These examples provide a fairly clear explanation of what I mean by prudent foresight. If we agree that prudent foresight is an aspect of conservatism, then we will also agree that what often passes itself off as conservatism is something else entirely.

Conservatism as sheltering mystery

For this section of the essay I must acknowledge the profound influence of Martin Heidegger’s later writings.

For most readers, the title of this section will seem a little odd. What could I mean by “sheltering mystery”? I will provide an example of this kind of conservatism at play.

My example is a practice performed by the ancient Greeks. They had a holiday each year where offerings would be made to placate all the divine beings that were as yet unknown to the Greeks, but which might be out there, somewhere. These beings might be from other cultures, or they might still be awaiting ‘discovery’. Rather than insist that they had the final word on the limits of the divine world, the Greeks were willing to actively face the uncertainty of their knowledge, the uncertainty of their experience of the world, and affirm it.

This ancient Greek practice reveals a deep respect for mystery, for the limits of human understanding. By declining the temptation of claiming knowledge over all things, the Greeks allowed themselves the possibility of being surprised by life. To shelter mystery is to allow space for it in one’s life, in one’s culture. It is to acknowledge the limitations and provisional character of one’s relationship to the world. Insofar as the horizon of all our experiences is the unknown, sheltering mystery means holding our place in the world in high respect. It means that we attempt to understand things on their own terms. It means that we do not attempt to force all experiences into one way of understanding life.

This is not to say that sheltering mystery requires a commitment to relativism. However, it does require that we take different ways of talking, seeing, and experiencing the world seriously. Who knows, perhaps by remaining open to mystery we might find ourselves drawn to new or different ways of experiencing the world ourselves?

Heidegger argues that no amount of measurement, analysis, dissection, or counting can capture the essential character of something – in this case, let us take the example of a flower. I can weigh it, break it down into component molecules, talk about its role in the reproduction of plant life, dissect it for scientific diagrams, or write a manual on the best way to grow it. And yet the essence of the flower cannot be captured through any of these methods. Indeed, Heidegger argued that the more you analyse, the more the thing’s essence slips away from view. This is the mystery of the flower’s essence.

Now suppose my wife gives me a flower. Here the mystery of the flower’s essence steps forth. Suppose I view a brilliantly evocative painting of a flower. Here again, the character of the flower stands revealed. These kinds of revelations are not total, absolute, or quantitative. They are always partial, incomplete. They always ride on the horizon of mystery.

Sheltering that mystery is the finite ‘thingly’ character of the artist’s canvas and paint. Sheltering that mystery is the look in my wife’s eye as she offers me the flower. These ways of experiencing the flower do not have the reassuring absoluteness of exacting measurements or chemical analysis; indeed, they are explicitly wedded to all that we don’t know about the flower. And yet these ways of experiencing the flower always precede any possible analysis or scientific understanding. Without these ways of experiencing, we would not be able to hold in our imagination something we call a flower, to which we might bring the weight of sophisticated interpretation and analysis.

So if this what I mean by sheltering mystery, how might it be conservative? I regard this attitude towards the world as conservative on two counts. Firstly, it always carries with it a sense of the mysterious horizon of our lived experience – a very prudent perspective to hold. Secondly, to shelter mystery is to conserve it, to protect it from being lost in the temptation to sacrifice everything to rational empiricism (which so easily becomes irrational technocracy). Implicit in the attitude of sheltering mystery is the decision to decline rigid adherence to any one way of interpreting one’s experience. “Back to the things themselves”, as Husserl famously remarked, is our watchword here.

Once we adopt this aspect of conservatism into our life, we are likely to acquire a healthy disrespect for the manipulative ‘spin’ with which many authority figures use to sanitise and neaten their rigid attitudes and simple-minded power plays. The call to offer shelter to mystery is an invitation to ask “has this logic been used in a meaningful way?”, rather than “is this logic valid?” It requires that we remain open to the presence, the character, the being of everything we encounter. It tends towards an experience of the world which, if articulated intellectually, might be called animism.

It is no accident that I used an example of ancient Greek religious practice. While religion tends to be more about human institutions than it is about divinity, it in turns gains its life from spirituality. Spirituality, the task of remaining open to (sheltering) the mystery in things, is a crucial aspect of my reclaimed conservatism. Whether we choose to equate the mysterious with the divine or not, myth can be a powerful vehicle for shaking loose our complacency and reintegrating us into an inherently mysterious universe. Mythologies that invite psychological, socio-historical, and magical interpretations are particularly suited to this purpose. Some examples would be the pre-Christian Germanic/Norse traditions; Buddhism; Sufism; or Indigenous Australian traditions.

I suspect that the pseudo-conservative insistence on dogmatic religious devotion (be it Christian, Muslim, or something else) may contain a sliver of forgotten concern for the need to shelter the mystery of things. By comparison, the primary ritual of Sufism is called the Zikr and is literally an ‘Act of Remembrance’ of the divinity of all things. It is not necessary to take myth literally in order for it to help us remember ourselves and our world; all that is needed is a willingness to offer shelter to mystery.

It is no accident that above I talked about this aspect of conservatism as being ‘at play’. Playfulness is often equated with folly. And yet, nothing sends a problem out of control like overbearing, grumpy seriousness. Nothing closes down possibilities or understanding like telling ourselves that ‘this is serious business’. Nietzsche called this attitude the ‘spirit of gravity’, and could not bear its stodginess. His antidote, ‘Gay Science’, is an attitude that is serious AND playful, hardworking AND imaginative. Would it not be exceedingly imprudent to close ourselves off to new possibilities for solving challenges and experiencing our lives? If we are serious about participating in the sheltering of mystery we will regard the ‘spirit of gravity’ as an unfortunate and rather bad habit – and little more.

Conservatism as empathic action

Pseudo-conservatives often express little empathy or concern for the wellbeing of those handed the short end of the socio-economic stick at birth. ‘You get what you deserve’ seems to be their attitude to life. This is not to say that to a greater or lesser extent each of us is not responsible for our own actions. But life is not a blank slate onto which we are free to impose our unfettered desires. All kinds of social, biological, familial, economic, religious, and other limits shape and define what an individual may choose to become.

Thus, the ‘just desserts’ attitude betrays a kind of egomania, a taking credit for achievements which the individual had massive help for by way of their family wealth, social standing, etc. According to social psychologists, people tend to claim credit for the positive things in their lives while blaming others for the bad things in their lives. One never hears a poor person agree with a rich person that one’s wealth is a reflection of one’s virtue.

If we can imagine stepping past these kinds of mind games we are free to seriously ask – where does being truly conservative position us with regard to compassion, empathy, and community?

While I accord postmodernism full marks for refusing to impose one way of seeing things onto a wide range of cultures, I nevertheless think there are some universal aspects of human experience. It may seem obvious, but food plays a pretty big role in every human being’s life. Similarly, I doubt that anyone can truly thrive without sharing some kind of love with other people. I don’t mean to trivialise the great differences that can exist between two cultures or even between two individuals from the same culture. But I do assert that empathy is possible across any boundary – given sufficient time and effort of course.

Empathy is when I experience your life from your perspective. Empathy is when I both understand and feel where you are coming from. In an age of clashing extremisms (e.g. US capitalism versus Extremist Islam), there seems little room for empathy. Since both of the camps in my above example are radicals who think themselves to be conservative, it would appear that empathy has no or little place in pseudo-conservatism.

And conservatism as I have tried to outline it? Would it be prudent, a sign of wit and wisdom, to attempt to understand the challenges and celebrations of other peoples’ lives? Would be it common sense to try and appreciate the manner in which different individuals, communities, cultures, nations, are separate and the manner in which they are related? If our foresight invited us to strengthen the webs of our social fabric, would that insulate us against future, unexpected dangers? The New Orleans disaster is a testament to how dreadful the consequences of not acting on this foresight can be – plenty of resources had been allocated to reinforcing the canal banks that flooded and destroyed the city, but a complacent attitude led to this money being rerouted to military and political purposes instead.

Empathy, be it towards our best friend or towards someone we never have and never will meet, seems to be part and parcel of prudent, sensible conservatism. And yet its justifications are not just utilitarian. If we are committed to the sheltering of mystery we recognise the ethical, spiritual, and psychological importance of being open to the ways that things speak for themselves. Empathy, understood as an attempt on my part to appreciate your experience as though it were my own, is not a mercenary activity.

If we are to be empathetic, how will that guide our actions? Presumably the most important lesson of empathy is that we should not assume that everyone else thinks the way that we do, or that everyone else has the same values as we do. If we want to understand why someone does something, we are free to ask them. Their reasons may or may not hold water in the grander scheme of things, but we at least owe them the right to be heard and related to.

Secondly, empathy implies a commitment to ethics, to personal honour. If I can appreciate your experience of the world and then do something to harm you then I have also harmed myself. Just as I expect to be treated, so must I treat. A good lesson to learn for the arrogant business executive and his or her harried administration underlings! Would I want another country to offer me refuge from political persecution? I’ve no right to expect such treatment if I will not offer it to others as well. Do I expect others to speak the truth and act according to their word? Then I had better be able to respond in kind. In the current climate, it would seem that almost no Australian politician is truly conservative, if we judge them by the standard of personal honour outlined here.

Finally, empathy impels us to offer support to those suffering more than we ourselves are. It impels us to seek to strengthen and deepen social bonds, to offer resources, our time, our imagination, and absolutely not just grudgingly dole out our cash. It requires us to own up to our own ‘spin’, the excuses we make to ourselves for living in ways harmful to ourselves and others. It requires us to take responsibility for ourselves and for others. To act in this manner conserves and promotes the health and happiness of individuals, communities, and cultures. There is nothing conservative in concocting dubious justifications for absurd and inexcusable xenophobia. Our rejection of others is also a rejection of ourselves, a rejection of the parts of ourselves we would like to imagine are ‘really’ the sole province of someone else. To wound another is to wound ourselves.

Pseudo-conservatives often talk about family or community values, and yet generally seem to have very little empathy or compassion for themselves or anyone else. How on earth can community be deepened without empathy?

Does empathy stop with humans? Should we extend as much regard as offered to humans to animals, plants, even inanimate objects? Am I a hypocrite to advocate humanism, spend much money and time working in the environment conservation movement, and then still eat meat? Here I find challenges to my own sense of self, which I cannot easily resolve. I can only conclude this section by inviting my reader to undertake the same challenge.

Conservatism as regenerating roots

Regenerating roots means a few things, but in essence it refers to the view that postmodern humanity is alienated from him/herself, from other living things, and from the world in general – and that we need to put a lot of energy into changing this!

If we are to conserve ourselves and the world we live in we must first have whole relationships with urselves and the world. If I am split within myself, if I experience other people or the world around me as alien or fractured, how can I possibly even have anything worth conserving?

History, it must be said, has burdened us with many contradictions. In Australia we celebrate the festival of Easter in Autumn. Easter is generally regarded as holy because Jesus Christ died and was resurrected at this time. And yet a little research tells us that the Easter festival in Germanic Europe well predated the coming of Christianity. It was a celebration of spring and rebirth. The word Easter is literally the modern version of the name of the Anglo-Saxon spring goddess Eostre, whose continental German equivalent was Ostara. Easter, good old Christian Easter, has never stopped being a heathen occasion.

There are so many contradictions in the history of our modern Australian Easter festival. Can a spring celebration make sense when transplanted to southern hemisphere autumn? Does the Christian overlay implicitly keep and set to work heathen motifs? How can we make sense of the too and fro of Germanic and Roman cultures that have left us with this bizarre cross-breed? And how can any of this make sense in post-colonial Australia – a place that Europeans came, partly in the name of Jesus, in order to destroy the Indigenous Australians, whose traditional ways of experiencing life have much more in common with pre-Christian Germanic spirituality than with the Christianity that the Germanic peoples have by and large adopted?[2]

Given the blood and suffering that the fractured history of even one annual festival reveals, it seems clear that we need to make some effort to understand where we have come from. It is tempting to idealise the history of one’s ancestors, to gloss over the bad and deify the good. In some cases someone else’s more exciting or exotic history is co-opted as one’s own – Germanic Europe did this with Roman Catholic culture, throwing in Greek, Arabic, and now perhaps even New Age elements as it suited.

Australian pseudo-conservatives can harp on about the mateship of the ANZAC days – yet this is only one narrative in our country’s rich history. What of the conscientious objectors? The women who kept society running? The children who lost parents? The soldiers who returned broken alcoholics, perhaps making their loved ones’ lives miserable? What of the immigrants whose ancestors fought against the ANZACS, or did not fight at all? What of the slavish obedience to mother Britain that led Australian soldiers into the Great War? The tapestry of our history is profoundly rich and is written in suffering as well as joy. There is no caution, no prudence, no reserve, no good taste in choosing to idealise one thread in the weave and ignore the rest.

Since my own spirituality is so deeply wedded to Germanic archetypes, divinities, spirits, etc., I feel deep sadness at the confused, simplistic, polyglot chaos of our historical sense. Thanks to the colonial enterprise, Christianised Europe has managed to introduce this kind of spiritual and cultural fragmentation to many other parts of the globe – along with, of course, exploitation and alcohol.

The regeneration of roots therefore has three major aspects. The first is for each of us to turn a genuinely curious and critical eye to our implied history, to engage and challenge the easy myths we permit to comfort us, and to ponder the ways in which we bear the mark of each layer and aspect of our heritage. Personally I found that one of my oldest spiritual and historical influences, Germanic heathen beliefs, held the most relevance for my life and character. Perhaps others of Germanic heritage will not have this experience, and that is fine. The same goes for all possible heritages and ancestries.

The second aspect of regenerating our roots is to take seriously the harm that both we and our ancestors do or have done to others, and where appropriate to make reparations. No person and no culture can move forward with their victims or themselves until the debt of blood on their conscience is cleared.

The third aspect of regenerating our roots is to imagine new layers that might be added to our histories. Forging new ways of being spiritual, of being creative, of having community, family, or love. It is likely that this task will be informed by what has come before, or perhaps from cultural influences not directly contained in our heritage. This is the heart of what I mean by regenerating our roots – remaking for the first time our relationships to time, culture, love, the natural world, ourselves. There are so many tools available to us in this challenge to conserve our heritage by reinvigorating it as living tradition. They include reading, writing, meditation, art and performance, psychotherapy, community service, even raising a family.

Ultimately the way we will best be able to conserve ourselves and our world is to constantly reweave the past into new and beautiful patterns of existence that recall their origins and invoke the future. Seen in this sense the term ‘conservative’ may seem a far cry from the pseudo-conservatism so often peddled in recent times, be the peddler John Howard, George Bush, or Osama Bin-Laden. So be it.

Disentangling conservatism and egotism

What is the greatest foe of conservatism as I define it? Egotism.

Egotism is my commitment to myself, to my rightness, to my indubitably, to my unquestionable goodness. It is rigid, brutal to anything or anyone who deviates from its values, and it is highly hypocritical. It is defensive, paranoid, and stupid.

No human being is free of the danger of egotism (I am no exception). Whether we flee to a rigid self concept in the face of death, anxiety, or deep-seated feelings of inferiority, the end result is the same. For some, egotism becomes a cage, a trap within which the person rots. For others it becomes a battering ram, a brittle war machine which shreds all before it until eventually it shatters on the rocks of mortality.

Pseudo-conservatism is used as a vehicle by both of these approaches to life. It enables a person to justify the unjustifiable. It allows irresponsible individuals and groups to shirk the consequences of their actions (at least in the short term). Ultimately, pseudo-conservatism is just the attitude that “I am right and you are wrong unless you absolutely agree with me”. In other words, it is a punitive and ugly manifestation of egotism, which in turn is probably the most wretched and botched element of human nature. Of course, I have more faith in my own opinions than I do in the opinions of those who disagree with me. However I need to be able to transcend my own ego enough to engage with difference. If someone cannot do this then they’ve just failed one of life’s central challenges.

Both egotism and pseudo-conservatism invite us to become lax in our selves, to become hypocrites, to hand responsibility for our lives over to passive fear or desperate rage. Any ideology which de-emphasises the power of human agency for both good and ill lends itself to profound abuse by those without scruples, those driven by ego madness.

One final point that requires emphasis is the interwoven relationship of spirituality and politics. It seems quite common for a person to have done a lot of deep personal, psychotherapeutic, and spiritual growth and change, and yet never have challenged their blinkered political perspectives. The reverse is also true: a person can have a deep appreciation of politics and ethics, yet have great difficultly developing within their own self. I don’t expect everyone to agree with my opinions, but I am always surprised at the ways in which someone can be so committed to growth and insight in one part of their life and yet be unconscious of difficulties they carry in another part of their life. Perhaps this essay demonstrates why I find spiritual, ethical and political concerns to be inseparable.

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