Wyrd Against The Modern World: The Opposite Moment Begins / Ramon Elani
Acausal heathen poet and author Ramon Elani joins me to discuss his new book Wyrd Against the Modern World, published through Night Forest Press. This audio interview is actually a reading of a written interview I conducted with him, originally published at the Gods&Radicals Press supporter-only blog Another World.
From the article introduction:
The implications of global climate change have loomed large in my mind and heart for years, and I’m sure many of you reading this can relate. The existential questions this inevitably brings up have been some of the central, binding subjects of my work. I’ve worked to address the roots of this complex catastrophe through various angles, attempting, in my own small way, to highlight the nature of this earth-encompassing shift in our planet’s biospheric composition, and explore what this means through a number of different lenses.
Human beings are social, cultural, emotional, spiritual creatures, and I doubt we are alone in this. The inevitable despair that emerges as we recognize that this titanic shift threatens the survival of future generations of human and more-than-human life in the decades to come can be debilitating, even more so when we take into account that much of what we fear is going to happen is already happening right now. Numerous scientists have observed climatic events occurring that were initially predicted to happen decades from now.
The future, as it were, has quickened to meet us.
Context is crucial. We need it to process and prepare, on some level, for what’s happening. Certainly in a material sense, but even more so psychologically and spiritually. Just as much as keeping a close eye on climate and ecological trends is important, we need something more, something deeper, to reckon with this. For me, this is where the work of Ramon Elani comes in.
Born from centuries of techno-industrial capitalist “development,” climate change is the natural, inevitable child of Progress. The linear conception of time, a product of the deep spiritual rot plaguing all cultures tied to its logic, enthralls its subjects into believing the inevitable crises that may arise on this path of Progress will be worked out, eventually. Somehow, it’s all going to work out.
Well, that’s true, but not in the ways we moderns may assume or desire. And to know this, to accept this, is not something that can be arrived at by believing in the virtues of Progress, which undergird every contemporary environmental policy platform and non-binding intergovernmental agreement meant to provide some path forward through this ever-deepening catastrophe.
It is in the view of Ramon Elani, elaborated on extensively in his book Wyrd Against the Modern World and in this interview, that the “contemporary so-called environmental movement, which advocates for ‘wise use’ of resources,” still exists within a paradigm in which “[t]he world still exists to serve mankind.” And herein lies a crucial truth about modernity and Progress: it centers humanity, or more specifically the techno-industrial system’s continued existence, above all else, in spite of the horrors it has produced and continues to produce. It demands more, and gives nothing in return.
As I pointed to earlier, knowing where we are heading can lead to despair, and despair is isolating. Without the proper framing, one could arrive at some rather horrifying conclusions, including misanthropy. Another is some form or variation of fascism, which appears to be on the rise in numerous societies around the world—not primarily or directly because of climate disruption, but from the same spiritual illness that has produced climate catastrophe and wide-scale ecological destruction. We must understand these are not solutions. If what is happening is happening, nothing these ideologies promise can change this. To believe so is pure delusion, and only exacerbate the misery and horrors of living in such a troubled time as ours.
Understanding these things does not provide comfort, and they shouldn’t. The hubris inherent in modern life is meeting something far larger than itself. We moderns are being humbled before forces far greater than us and by our assumptions of how things should be.
Bio:
Ramon Elani holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Connecticut. He lives on a small homestead with his wife and children among the hills and forests of New England. A former muay tai fighter and professor of literature and philosophy, Ramon has published on a wide variety of topics at the intersection of ecology and spirituality. He writes The Tiger’s Leap blog.
Episode Notes:
Purchase a copy of Wyrd Against the Modern World from Night Forest Press
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: What really has stuck with me in reading your book up to this point is how you interrogate our modern understanding of time—the concept of "profane" time, as in the way modernity structures our collective perception of time as a linear process, versus "sacred" time, which is cyclical and much more aligned with the natural cycles of the earth, of life and of death. What makes linear time profane, and what do you mean by that? And how does this understanding of time contrast with sacred time, as you have described it?
RAMON ELANI: So in terms of linear time being profane, I think I would actually go a step further and suggest that the very concept of linearity itself is profane; that is to say, irreverent, an attitude that denies or opposes the sacred. For our purposes, it is important to recognize both 'profane' and 'sacred' as fundamental ways of being in the world, or existential positions toward history and the world. This pose, or 'being toward,' determines a vast array of our assumptions and conceptions of the world. In other words, if, as Mircea Eliade defines it, the sacred and the profane are ultimately ways of interpreting what we see and experience, the profane is what appears to us, while the sacred is that which is other to what appears to us.
The sacred remains, of course, in some sense what it appears to be; but it is also defined by the awareness that it is fundamentally other. The sacred tree, for instance, is by no means not a tree and it certainly appears to us as such. But in its presence we are also made aware of a sudden connection to the cosmos that is not merely captured in what we immediately perceive. Moments of sacredness are thus both real and unreal, natural and supernatural. When we are confronted with the sacred we have an unmistakable recognition of having entered a different space, a different sense of time. And that time, of course, is contemporaneous with the gods, with the totality of the cosmos in its endless destruction and recreation.
Now, in the final analysis, what the dichotomy of profane and sacred really shows us is that the sacred world, the world that stands apart from the one with which we are most familiar, is actually the 'real,' or that which is real in an enduring sense. And the profane world, which we conventionally call the 'real,' is actually the illusory, the contingent. This is the meaning of cyclical or sacred time and linear or profane time. If I paid attention to what physicists wrote, or could understand it, I'm sure I would be able to show that there is some version of consensus among them in this regard. Linear time is illusory, it is false, it is the same thing as looking at a rock and dismissing it as merely so much inert matter.
I'll add anecdotally that it turns out that "time" is linguistically related to "tide." Time, properly understood, is never an arrow. It is only ever the endless ebbing and flowing. Time is only ever return. The Vedas knew this, the Daoist sages knew this, the Eddas knew this, Nietzsche famously knew this. In fact I would say that in the sense that all religions are oriented toward the sacred, they are all explicitly engaged in a refutation of linear time.
FARNSWORTH: In line with this framing around profane time and sacred time, how does human-caused climate change enter into this for you? As you have written, climate change is a force that "represents a restoration of cosmic balance." [pg. 19] Through the modern, techno-industrial lens, climate change is often presented as being a complex "problem" that we can engineer our way out of, which, as I've often explained, is the very thinking that got us into this vast crisis to begin with.
Again, framing this around the sacred and profane, linear and cyclical, what does climate catastrophe force humanity to recognize?
ELANI: Well ultimately, for me, the best way to conceptualize climate change is via Carl Jung's notion of the shadow. It is the totality of the forces repressed by the modern, rational, mechanistic consciousness. For Jung, the less these forces are integrated into our conscious life, the darker and more powerful they become. Now, we can say that this is a primary distinction between the modern and the traditional, or in Jung's term, the archaic, mindset. Disaster and catastrophe is a distinct problem for we moderns precisely because of the pernicious ideology of linear time and progress. We are uniquely programmed to see disaster as not only tragic, but also as a violation or betrayal of our deepest ideological concept.
In the historical narrative of modernity, the world moves away inevitably from darkness, ignorance, and suffering toward happiness, wisdom, and light. Needless to say, this narrative was propagated by a particular society of people, namely secular European, and for the rest of the world, this narrative was much less compelling from the outset. And obviously we cannot ignore the contemporaneous emergence of science, industrialization, capitalism, and colonialism. Given these historical circumstances we might understand how the idea that things would always keep improving took hold with such fervor among the Europeans of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. So as these narratives captured the imagination of the modern Europeans, and later were exported, usually by the gun and the sword, around the world, the notion of a more cyclical sense of time, one defined by periodic devastation and regrowth, became pushed further and further into the nether regions of the psyche, where, following Jung's sense of the shadow, they became twisted and malevolent.
We may also see this dynamic play out in climate change in a number of ways. If the traditional or archaic mentality acknowledges the need for reciprocity in relation to gods and spirits, in terms of sacrifices and offerings, the modern attitude, denying the agency of the natural world, previously understood as gods and spirits, sees the world as the exclusive dominion of humanity. This perspective persists even in the contemporary so-called environmental movement, which advocates for "wise use" of resources. The world still exists to serve mankind, but it is in our interest to consume resources in a "renewable" fashion.
It's something of a truism that non-European societies would have followed the exact same path, had they developed industrial technology first, and this point is well-taken, but we must also acknowledge that such practices would have violated the entirety of the cosmological outlook for many communities, and still do in those communities in which this perspective persists. Thus climate change occurs to us as the culmination of 500 years worth of sacrilege, of denying the fact that time is cyclical, that destruction and collapse is an unavoidable part of human life and societies, of denying that the world is itself an agent, demanding reciprocity.
Returning to Jung's shadow, climate change is instinctive and irrational, it cannot be comprehended and dealt with in technical terms. For Jung the shadow, the totality of the repressed aspects of consciousness, emerges in dreams and neurosis. We can perceive this clearly in the abundance of films, TV shows, and novels, the stories of apocalypse and catastrophe that our culture produces. Not only can we not avoid the real world consequences of repressing the shadow, we also cannot escape its influence within the psyche.
Just as we were always going to have to pay the price for hundreds of years of industrial growth in terms of the devastating impact of climate change, Jung's shadow is always going to rise up and overwhelm the fragile conscious ego. What is repressed will never remain submerged forever. There is only one path to follow for Jung: the confrontation of the ego with the shadow. This dynamic is, of course, understood in other terms as the hero's journey, the descent into the underworld, baptismal ritual, and so on. In sacred terms we have said that climate change represents hierophany, the sudden revelation of the divine, but in Jungian terms we may say that climate change represents enantiodromia, the condition in which forces become their opposite. Jung defines enantiodromia thus:
"Old Heraclitus, who was indeed a very great sage, discovered the most marvellous of all psychological laws: the regulative function of opposites. He called it enantiodromia, a running contrariwise, by which he meant that sooner or later everything runs into its opposite."
Enantiodromia can also be understood as the force that resolves opposites by maintaining equilibrium. For 500 years we have lived in a fantasy of control, we have shaped the earth to our will and believed that there was no limit to this process. The next historical age will be the one in which all of this is undone. Climate change will restore the balance. As Jung acknowledges, the descent into the shadow realm is terrifying and dangerous. Needless to say, this return to equilibrium by the force we call climate change will also be a time of great terror.
FARNSWORTH: The title of this book is Wyrd Against the Modern World, of course. What is the wyrd, and how does this complex, multi-faceted spiritual concept, which is often visualized as a web or as a vast ocean, fit into your larger argument against the modern world?
ELANI: Right, so I'm using the concept of wyrd in two complimentary ways. In the first sense, wyrd implies fate or predetermination. Unsurprisingly the philological record suggests that wyrd as a concept and a word in Anglo Saxon and Norse culture was heavily influenced by the Christians. Thus a potentially alien understanding of an omnipotent and omniscient Creator who had designed things to unfold in a particular manner becomes embedded in the idea, where it may not have been in its original sense.
As we know, for ancient Germanic people, there are three entities who weave the pattern of the universe, one which contains the fates of the gods as well as humanity and the world itself. The word wyrd itself is a cognate of one of these cosmic weavers. So we might say that the idea of predestination was not totally absent in pre-Christian understandings of the word, but it certainly took on a much heavier meaning later on.
On the one hand, then, I'm deploying wyrd as fate, against the modern world in the sense that climate change and the devastation it will bring cannot be avoided. Industrialism and modernity was always going to lead to global catastrophe and there is nothing we can do to avert its course. We've got 500 years worth of consequences coming at us and the idea of mitigating or avoiding the horrors it will bring is just silly, if forgivable granted the scope of the disasters that are coming. Climate change is our fate, our destiny and it cannot and should not be avoided.
Incidentally I will add that as nobody knows precisely what the future holds, I suppose it may still be that the maniacal Elon Musks of the world will somehow design some sort of inconceivable machine that will suddenly change everything. One hears, of course, of such fantasies as "the singularity." Suffice it to say, that if such a thing comes to pass and a miraculous technology allows us to put off the return to equilibrium brought about by the coming storms, we will have not done ourselves or the world any favors. The price for such a thing will be unimaginable, in ways that we almost certainly will not be able to predict. To extend the life of this culture will mean the extension of the abject suffering and meaninglessness of billions, and assuredly, the displacement and extinction of countless more species. An artificial reprieve would be no blessing at all.
The second sense in which I use the concept of wyrd is as a cosmological worldview in its own right. Wyrd does not merely suggest the existence of an irresistible and irrevocable path for the unfolding of history, it also, in a related sense, suggests the unfathomable vastness of a web of creation. As a woven tapestry accounting for everything in the cosmos in its relation to everything else, wyrd evokes the dao: a totality that is perceived in the rustling of every leaf, in every drop of rain falling into a still pond, in every action or occurrence, in a wholly animated and vibrant world. This holistic vision, of course, is also a radical challenge to modernity, defined as it is by atomization and fragmentation. Where we have been conditioned to accept mechanistic roles, all too often determined by capitalism, wyrd posits, for me, a form of radical integration. Everything has its place, everything has its value, determined not by the marketplace or by this or that political institution, but by its participation in the glory of the cosmos, the glory of God.
This meaning is also present in my use of Jung's understanding of the ‘acausal.’ With the incredibly limited, modest means of perception available to us, we cannot possibly hope to comprehend the nature of interconnection in the world. When I say ‘we’ here, of course, I refer exclusively to the moderns. Traditional people, I believe, had a much greater understanding of this web or 'oceanic sentiment,' to double back, both because they were constantly oriented toward the sacred and the cyclical, and because they accepted that they were not in control of their lives or the world at large.
One of the most fundamental tenets of Daoist thought is that the more that is done, even with the very best intentions, oriented toward the most noble goal, the worse the outcome is. There are few things I believe more fully. The less we do, in any possible sense, the better. In other words, a quietistic attitude, one that accepts all that is and occurs, without seeking to disrupt the flow of time and history is that which is in harmony with the nature of wyrd. What will come is what must come. Modernity, I would argue, insists upon the opposite: humanity, by aid of superior organization and technics, is capable of determining the course of the universe.
FARNSWORTH: What I get out of what you've written so far is that a "great humbling" is upon us. We moderns have lived in a way that is a great violation of the sacred bonds and cycles of the earth, which are actually cosmic in scale. There is a great deal of hubris in assuming we are "progressing" when everything seems to be coming to a head, ecologically speaking.
In trying to properly assess the problem, one might take on a rather misanthropic position, believing that the earth is seeking some kind of vengeance on humanity. Is this view also the product of the very hubris that assumes we can “fix” climate change through our cleverness and ingenuity?
ELANI: Yes, I do absolutely think that misanthropy is not at all the point. One would have a hard time identifying a writer more hostile toward humanity than Robinson Jeffers and yet his argument against misanthropy is the most powerful that I've read. In the poem "Original Sin" he writes:
“As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man. But we are what we are, and we might remember not to hate any person, for all are vicious; And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved."
Obviously, to me, Jeffers understood the wyrding path as well as any. I do not say that we can or should prevent human suffering, but to rejoice in it is preposterous. There is a kind of petulance involved in the position that the earth would simply be better off without us. As though, if we can't have things our way, then we'd rather not be here at all. In a way, the people who feel this way have still made the error in assuming that they know what is best for the world, rather than accepting as it is.
Now, of course, it may be that humanity will not survive what is coming in the next decades and centuries. And if this is the case then so be it. But in the end, all of the thinkers who have inspired me have this in common: that they passionately insist upon the joys of life and the miracle that we witness everyday in this world, regardless of the calamities that befall us. We are made of the same stuff as the stars themselves and the light of the cosmos shines bright in us as in all things. The ways of the modern world have dimmed this light within us but they cannot extinguish it utterly.
As things reach their pinnacle, the opposite moment begins. As the modern world falls into its greatest catastrophe, the timeless world rises up again. And I do believe we are seeing some version of this occurring even now. As we head closer and closer to the brink, more and more people are beginning to recognize what has brought us to this point.
In the end, more than anything else, I pity the misanthropes. To me, anyone who has stood upon a hill and seen the mist gather in the valley below, who has experienced the joy of sex, who has gazed deep into the terrifying abyss of the ocean, who has embraced their child, who has smelled the forest after a heavy rain, who has listened to the music of Bach, who has felt strong in their body, should know beyond the shadow of any doubt that they are with the divine spirit.
FARNSWORTH: Thank you for what you expressed, I couldn't agree more with that. It seems to me that misanthropy, which may seem a reasonable position for those confronting the hard reality of ecological fragmentation and anthropogenic climate disruption, is actually just as human-centric a position as it is having faith in the techno-industrial project providing solutions to these crises. It's still rooted in that profane, linear conception of time, even if that conception leads one to the conclusion that humanity is an evolutionary dead end, some kind of cosmic mistake.
But, in addressing this point, I'd like to ask about how these ideas you elaborate on in your book and previous work can be misinterpreted as a far right or fascist position. Since the rise of Donald Trump and his cohorts (such as Steve Bannon and Steven Miller, to name a few) in 2015 into 2016 with his election as president in the United States, there has been an upwelling of proto-fascist, or straight up fascist, sentiments that now have become the norm in US political discourse. The Republican Party has, at least in my view, adopted these extreme positions by fully embracing an even more deeply racist, misogynistic, and frankly genocidal ideology that promises to "Make America Great Again." This sort of ideology is by no means new, and has existed in some form or another since the founding of this nation, and can be tracked in numerous nation-states across the globe throughout the 20th into the 21st century as well.
I know you address the far right position in the beginning of your book, in which you did a great job clarifying your position on this subject. Also, we have had several conversations about this subject since we first spoke over a year ago, in which you have expressed your disgust for fascism and the far right appropriation of the ideas and concepts you work with. But, to give you an example of what I mean, I'd like to quote from an article published at New Statesman by Benjamin Teitelbaum, titled The rise of the traditionalists: how a mystical doctrine is reshaping the right:
"[Steve] Bannon is often characterised as a “nationalist” and a “populist”, but few realise that he is also affiliated with a much more obscure movement – one stranger and more radical than right-wing populism, and one whose cause is greater than that of a single election, greater, in fact, than politics.
"This fringe spiritual movement bears an inconspicuous name: traditionalism. Bannon is not alone in his interest – traditionalist sympathisers on the right with significant political influence are also to be found in Russia and Brazil. And, as I would learn during the year and a half I spent following and speaking to these figures while researching my book War for Eternity, they are attempting to coordinate their actions.
"Adherents to this arcane school have made homes for themselves in nationalist-populist movements – although rank-and-file nationalists would likely be alienated by their eccentric ideas. But as I discovered, the incendiary, populist agenda with which traditionalists are associated – border walls, contempt for elites, isolationism, the targeting of racial and sexual minorities – are secondary, preparatory work for an altogether grander project.
"At its core, traditionalism rejects modernity and its ideals: faith in the ability of human ingenuity to advance living standards and justice; an emphasis on the management of the economy; the coveting of individual liberty; the existence of universal truths equally valid for, and thereby equalising of, all. Repudiating the Enlightenment, traditionalists instead celebrate what they regard as timeless values. They honour precedence rather than progress, emphasise the spiritual over the material, and advocate surrender to the fundamental disparities – as opposed to equality – between humans and human destinies."
What is your view of the far right's use of these concepts, and in particular, what do you make of Teitelbaum's claim that these nationalist-populists, through the traditionalist framework, reject modernity and its ideals?
ELANI: Okay, so in the first place, from the little I know of Bannon and his ilk, it seems that they are mostly invested in the reinvigoration of a worldwide, capitalist form of ultra-nationalism. Now I don't pay attention to what Bannon or any of these other characters say or do, but I would be shocked if they said anything critical whatsoever about capitalism or industrialism. Traditionalism is absolutely based on rejecting modernity and the teachings of the Enlightenment, and yet there is nothing more fundamentally modern than capitalism, industrialism, and nationalism, the center pieces of Bannon's politics.
As a matter of fact Guenon explicitly condemned all forms of nationalism as being fundamentally opposed to traditionalism. This in and of itself seems sufficient to show how little Bannon has in common with traditionalism, given his emphasis on nationalism. But it goes further. Throughout his writing, Guenon indicts capitalism as a primary symptom of the modern world's materialism and a source of profound oppression and misery. Many of the other traditionalists also held beliefs that seem fundamentally incompatible with the contemporary far right. Ananda Coomaraswamy, Guenon's friend and colleague, one of the central traditionalist thinkers, was an outspoken anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist. These do not seem like words that can be accurately attributed to Steve Bannon.
Guenon and the other traditionalists, many of whom have been formative thinkers for me, fundamentally define their position by arguing that all spiritual belief systems draw from the same source. This is a deeply inclusive attitude. The traditionalists were very clear on the legacy of the modern world, a legacy of colonialism, economic exploitation, environmental degradation, and spiritual impoverishment. In an open letter to Steve Bannon published by Guenon's primary English translator, the author points out that Bannon must not have read Guenon very carefully if at all, given that the latter's primary message was one of mercy and love. It seems quite clear that despite manipulative use of nostalgic rhetoric, Bannon is no more willing to part with his xenophobic nationalism and free market capitalism than Hitler was with his mechanized industrialism.
In the second place, it is well known that fascism, having no intellectual content of its own, borrows from wherever it can. If some sections of the far right are finding resonance using this kind of rhetoric, we should not be surprised. The myths of the Enlightenment are collapsing all around us. It is absolutely right that people would start to find the message of the traditionalists compelling at this moment in time, and it makes perfect sense that populist demagogues would use this language to pursue their agenda. There is a good reason that these ideas are reentering circulation now, although it's a shame that they are being paired with other ideas, with which they have no commonality.
As little as I engage with the words and ideas of politicians, it seems clear to me that the politician is nothing but someone who markets and brands ideas, tries to get people to buy things they don't want by associating them with things they do want. Obama certainly did this with the idea of change and hope, if Bannon and Trump do this with the idea of some vaguely hinted at critique of modernity then so what? Regardless of the rhetoric they employ, they will all continue to exploit the poor and vulnerable, kill foreign civilians for oil, perpetuate structural racism, and devastate the ecosystem.
Frankly, this whole line of argumentation is becoming extremely tiresome. If Bannon and people like him have read Guenon or other writers that I work with, then they clearly haven't read them very carefully. Furthermore, this insidious idea that reading certain books has the power to transform a previously benign individual into a racist fascist is outrageous and insulting. That's really all I have to say about this.
I will add that I am not a leftist or an anarchist, and that I do not have much affection for either of those worldviews, as I see both as operating within the delusion of progress. It has become fashionable for these people to say that anyone who is not with them is against them. Saying it does not make it so. I will continue to insist that one can be simultaneously critical of the modern world in all its manifestations: capitalism, racism, fascism, industrialism, secularism, colonialism, nationalism, genocide, and so on and so forth.
FARNSWORTH: Thank you, Ramon, for answering that question. I merely highlighted that quote to address an increasingly common thing I’ve been seeing in numerous articles that have been published over the years. I appreciate the clarity you provide to this, even if it’s frustrating to have to reiterate these points over and over. I personally am very concerned about the rise of a far right reactionary politics in this time we are in. As you write about so eloquently in your book, the horrors of climate change are upon us. Rising hyper-nationalism, particularly within the context of a settler colonial state such as the one we reside in, is one of the more pressing concerns I have. As this society continues to fracture, insidious thought-forms that have long lived in the minds of those deeply invested in this grotesque culture will make themselves increasingly more known, leading to the outright adoption of fascism to justify this late-capitalist, techno-industrial society’s continued existence. I believe the horrors of climate catastrophe will, and already are to some extent, amplify those reactionary politics in numerous societies around the globe.
ELANI: The only comment that I have to make here is that I would apply a certain amount of nuance to your use of the term "reactionary." As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing really "reactionary" about the Trumps, Bannons, and Bolsonaros of the world, to the extent that they all, as far as I know, gleefully promote so-called free market capitalism, dominant and repressive state institutions, aggressive exploitation of the land, and increasing harmful technological development. In other words, these people don't really want to "go back" to anything, they want to keep the current conditions for those who support them and simply withdraw any type of benefit or protection to those who do not. I mean really it's absurd to think that this new breed of fascists intend to do anything supportive or beneficial for white, working class men or anyone else outside of the ruling class. Ultimately, fascism and ultranationalism is a distinct and inherent feature of the modern world.
