Starting as an occasional figure- at least, unless/until I decide to migrate this feature to another possibly more suitable platform (no, probably not going to start a Substack, unless there’s some strange surge of my readers demanding it)- I’d like to offer my relatively unfiltered thoughts as expressed in my personal daily register of thoughts, ideas, and assorted cognitive ephemera (including my daily to-do lists, which I will not burden you with). The following was inspired by, among other things, reading a recent article by Alan Jacobs, but is really but a beginning iteration in some theoretical and methodological approaches I hope to pursue at greater length and depth in the coming months and years, God willing. I hope my thoughts are useful, and welcome critique- keep in mind this as close to flow-of-consciousness writing I’m liable to release into the wild!

Medieval and early modern worlds as expressed in their multiplicitous traces provide, not resources—a word we ought to generally avoid I think given the connotations hoisted upon it in industrial capitalist discourse—as starting points, spaces to inhabit, relational matrices with which to interact, to draw upon, to take from and to give, as windows out of our own anthropocenal techno-dystopias. The natural sciences and in particular I think natural history and related disciplines provide a similar outlet, as do more obviously arts and philosophies; and there is no hard and fast division in all of these. Medieval and early modern religious art, to pluck a single example (and interpreting ‘art’ here in a maximally capacious way), should orient us towards different relationships with materiality and the body and their relations with others (including, or most particularly, the Divine Other); such a re-orientation is not, or need not be, discontinuous with the insights and contexualizations that the sciences offer, but can serve as a means towards a productive and healthy consilience of not just knowledge in the scholarly sense but of an integrated and lived consilient knowledge. Indeed it is somewhat ironic that even as modern science has permitted us to better intellectually (and, if we make the jump, imaginatively and spiritually) situate ourselves in relation to a vast, complex, and dynamic cosmos of materialities and processes and relations and histories of which we are integral parts, never in the history of our species has our day-to-day phenomenological interface with ‘nature’ been more reduced and distant, never have we known so little of the world around us in terms of experience and phenomenological participation and imagination.

The way forward is not to jettison our scientific appraisal of the world or to refuse further knowledge and appreciation, but rather if anything to, at a minimum, make that knowledge more broadly accessible and shared, and to find ways to integrate it into a renewed daily contact with and experience within the natural world itself, as we build out ways of life that enable such and which cultivate genuine ecological flourishing for other organisms as well. There is no reversing, no returning to a real or imagined past; but neither are we automatically locked into the paths laid out by technology and life worlds and patterns as they currently exist. If it does nothing else the study of history, of history across many scales and regions and chronological units, demonstrates that configurations of technology and culture, that experiences and embedding in the world, are not necessary or universal or automatic upon the mere existence of certain techniques or technologies or patterns of life. There is no obvious and inexorable superiority to one form of rule or to one technical regime, but rather such things must at some level emerge out of choice and adaptation, even if at a certain register or scale of use they obtain a hegemonic and self-directing character. Yet even this last is not absolute, and like all else is subject to change.

While I do think that radical and disruptive measures are needed, particularly as the global ecological and climatic ‘crisis’ (perhaps not the best word for something that is deep, structural, and relative to our lives and frames of reference at least slow-moving) only grows more pronounced and unavoidable with every passing year, it is the case that cultural and social and all the other metrics of change in fact move rather glacially, and any sustained movements towards a new and better culture of technics and ways of life must interject at ten thousand diverse points of contact, and must be understood as cumulative and processional, without promise of any clearly legible end point or conclusive moment. Even small victories in such an understanding can prove—though of course nothing is inevitable, until, perhaps, it is—in the long run of great significance, and not simply objects of physiological hope and perhaps self-delusion.