Democratic Forest Trusts (PDF)in Watson, Alan; Dean, Liese; Sproull, Janet, comps. 2006. Science and stewardship to protect and sustain wilderness values: Eighth World Wilderness Congress Symposium; 2005 September 30-October 6; Anchorage, AK.Democratic trusts with leadership elected by citizen-members promise to solve many of the problems afflicting both traditional government and corporate ownership of forestlands. This article explores these issues in some depth.Complexity and the Dream of Human Control of Eco-Systems (PDF)in Watson, Alan; Dean, Liese; Sproull, Janet, comps. 2006. Science and stewardship to protect and sustain wilderness values: Eighth World Wilderness Congress Symposium; 2005 September 30-October 6; Anchorage, AK.The title captures it. I then explore the kinds of institutions compatible with both nature and the modern world that are implied from this analysis.Rethinking the Obvious: Modernity and Living Respectfully With Nature (PDF)The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, Winter, 1997.Modernity is usually considered a wrong turn in terms of respect for and sustaining the environment. I argue the reality is more complex, for modernity has freed us from personal dependence on agriculture, ended the economic value of children, radically reduced the likelihood of large scale wat, and shifted much production to intellectual rather than material capital. This partially decouples society from nature, which gives us important opportunities as well as problems.Towards an Ecocentric Political Economy (PDF)The Trumpeter, Fall, 1996.This paper begins my effort at showing how liberal modernity can be harmonized with an ecocentric perspective on our relationship with the natural world. It is a corrective to much “free market environmental” literature that sacrifices Nature to money as well as to anti-liberal attacks by well-meaning but economically naïve environmentalists.Unexpected Harmonies: Self-Organization in Liberal Modernity and Ecology (PDF)The Trumpeter, Journal of Ecosophy, 10:1, Winter 1993This is my initial paper exploring how what I term ‘evolutionary liberal’ thought can be an important means by which society and nature can be brought into greater harmony. The other Trumpeter papers build on it.Deep Ecology and Liberalism: The Greener Implications of Evolutionary Liberalism (PDF)Review of Politics, Fall, 1996.Liberal thought and deep ecology are usually regarded as mutually exclusive. But the “evolutionary” tradition offers a way to integrate the two through commonalties in the work of David Hume, Michael Polanyi, Arne Naess, and Aldo Leopold, providing a stronger foundation for liberalism while strengthening the case for an ecocentric ethic.(Related subjects: Ecology)Saving Western Towns: A Jeffersonian Green Proposal (PDF)in Writers on the Range, Karl Hess and John Baden, eds., University Press of Colorado, 1998.Developmental pressures in the rural and small town West involve three groups: long term residents, new arrivals, and environmentalists. Today their interests often conflict. This conflict is in part the outcome of institutions which prevent harmonizing competing interests. The concept of developmental trusts, both for rural regions and for small communities offers a means whereby these interests can be harmonized for the benefit of all concerned.(Related subjects: Politics)Social Ecology, Deep Ecology, and Liberalism (PDF)Critical Review, 6: 2-3, 1992.Murray Bookchin is considered a leading radical environmental theorist. However, his analysis is incapable of leading humankind towards a more respectful and sustainable relationship with the natural world. Criticisms of Bookchin from both the deep ecology and evolutionary liberal perspective complement one another, pointing the way towards a better understanding of how modernity relates to the environment.The paper as a whole offers an early discussion of issues that are more clearly addressed in later papers, particularly Deep Ecology and Liberalism (1996) and the three Trumpeter articles in 1997, 1996, and 1993. However, there are other ideas in the article which have not been developed more thoroughly elsewhere.
Pagan cultures have always made use of two sources of knowledge about the world, which Karen Armstrong defined in her book The Battle for God as mythos and logos. Modern societies, including most modern religion, limits itself to one, logos. We need both.
Logos is knowledge arrived at through evidence and reason as we
usually think of it. It gives us knowledge about things, but not
whether they have interior dimensions of meaning and awareness. You
cannot measure consciousness.
Mythos addresses the meaning in the world, the value that exists
there intrinsically. When it is abandoned, the world slides towards
meaninglessness. Being myself schooled in logos, that is, modern ways
of knowing, it took me many years even after I became Pagan, to realize
its limitations as well as its strengths.
Pagans will do themselves well to help revitalize the missing dimension
of knowledge about the world. It may seem that myths are primitive
because they are related as stories. But stories are how we express
meanings that are interior to people and things. The best stories
always point to much more than they say, which is why they fascinate
long after their first reading. Poetry also describes more than the
literal meaning of its words, and many myths are not only stories, they
are poetry.
What makes a poem or story mythic?
As part of my project to bring Robert Bringhurst’s writing to the attention of Pagans, I will give two brief quotations from his essay “The Meaning of Mythology” in his book Everywhere Being is Dancing.
… a myth is not exactly a work of literature: it is
instead a kind of story which a literary work can only partially embody
or contain. A myth is a theorem about the nature of reality, expressed
not in algebraic symbols or inanimate abstractions but in animate
narrative form. (63)
and
Myths are stories that investigate the nature of the world
from the standpoints f the world, whereas novels, for example, more
often look at questions of proprietary interest to human beings alone.
(67)
I think we will only really be able to help offset modernity’s slide
into nihilism when we have come to understand and honor mythic ways of
knowning as well as those our own time has come to master.
posted September 8, 2009 at 5:03 pm
I agree wholeheartedly w you concerning the need for poetry in Paganism. I recently blogged about this point, but from the perspective of a poet vs. a Pagan.
posted September 8, 2009 at 9:22 pm
We realise that modernism rejects Mythos. We also realise that due to it’s literalist interpretation of the bible, christianity rejects Mythos. You have recently ably proved that both modernism and christianity also reject evidence based logic. So, if both secular modernism and the central faith of western democracy BOTH reject Mythos AND Logos, what the heck is left??
Maybe I should say what the Hell? Because it seems to me that the only thing left is Hell. The Hell of the isolated Ego, rejecting divinity within itself and within the world, all in the name of belief, twisted, tortured, alone.
Yuck.
Now, I think I’m going to go stick my head in a bucket of wet sand.
posted September 8, 2009 at 11:04 pm
I can deeply appreciate the lack of mythos… for it was from such stories of sacred reality that I first became a Pagan. Thank you for the link to the book: I will definitely look into this fascinating dichotomy!
posted September 9, 2009 at 12:11 am
Cassaundra-
VERY perceptive question – and it is why my Paganism is the only reason I have any guarded hope for the future.
That said. liberalism is the only form of modernity that has a fundamental moral commitment. (I’ve been working on my liberalism post, as promised, and it’s making progress, but it’s slow.)
Liberalism offsets modernity’s worship of power and will – including modern religions like Fundamentalism – by arguing the moral universe is different. and encompasses people. Starting with Locke, over the centuries different liberals have taken different tactics to make their case. Their intuition is valid, but I think their Christian and materialist roots ultimately undermine them. In my view, the only way to keep the ethical focus on people is to expand it to encompass the rest of life.
And THAT is a Pagan insight – though not just a Pagan insight. Some Buddhists have it and some Pagans do not.
So I am an unabashed liberal, and happy to be so. But I’m a weird kind of liberal.
Thanks again for a very searching query – I hope my answer suggests one way of making sense of it – and I hope my promised liberal post will at least show the outlines of a solution.
Otherwise, so far as I know, we are screwed because Christianity of the Fundamentalist sort is in my view as nihilist as illiberal modernity.
And thank you also to Hecate and Raleigh. I am truly blessed with great readers and commentors on this blog. I am a very left-brain sort by training – and it is only as I have begun to understand mythos that I have learned why poetry has come progressively to mean more to me.
posted September 9, 2009 at 12:50 am
I’ve often felt that Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth should be required reading for every high-school student.
But, as that great guru, Rosanne Barr once said (in another context), “Yeah–like that’s gonna happen.”
posted September 9, 2009 at 8:47 am
Do you think modernity’s secularism has also helped to be responsible for the absence of mythos and prevalence of logos, and the desacrlization of the world?
posted September 9, 2009 at 11:13 am
Mythos is still out there, in some form or another, and makes itself known by its effects. Ted Kennedy was a liberal but the things he fought for were clearly informed by an idea of what was worthy, what we are morally required as a nation to do. In his case that informing came from Catholic social justice doctrine. Separation of church and state requires us to keep mythos private when we compose public logos, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
posted September 9, 2009 at 12:35 pm
This is all good scholarship, but Mythos and Logos are not, in my opinion, (and the practice of my Tradition) the only receptacles for knowledge and/or wisdom.
One of the disciplines taught in my tradition is “the Way of the Scholar”. In that discipline, the practice is to view the sources of knowledge to be; “The Enchantments” which includes all of written, memorized, pictured, imaged, or otherwise stored knowledge, (thus containing both Mythos and Logos.), “The Universe”, which is reality as revealed to us by our senses, and “Vision”, which is our non-verbal understanding of things, what our lives have taught us.
In the practice of the Scholar’s way, we are taught to try to keep a deep relationship with all three forms of knowledge, and to keep the three in balance with each other. We accept that the scientific method is an excellent way of dealing with Mythos and Logos, a fair way of dealing with the Universe, and not very good at dealing with Vision.
We also believe that words are a pretty sloppy way of containing and transmitting knowledge.
Just another view of this discussion, from another way of understanding.
Thermal
posted September 9, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Has there ever been a time when Society had a balanced focus on both Mythos and Logos?
posted September 9, 2009 at 5:15 pm
to Cheryl Hill: We will never really _know_ the answer to your question, but it is pretty clear that whatever balance might exist, today society is really overimpressed with logos.