“[You are a lover of freedom and a bold rebel against usurping authority. ] But the right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness. Wherefore I beseech you not to say that liberty is license. “
–Mr. Lyon, dissenting pastor speaking to the rebellious Felix, in Felix Holt, the Radical, by George Eliot.
A culture … is by nature a healing system….A culture faces and interprets pain, deviance and death. It endows them with meaning; it illuminates how they are part of the whole and thereby makes them tolerable. We do not become trapped in them because the culture continually leads out of pain and death and back into life.
–Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking (1975) quoted by Bruce Levine in Counterpunch, 10/8/26 Ibid
[M]ost people are…to different degrees, in the Machine but not of it. Perhaps we look like good citizens on the outside. But…we can begin to dissociate ourselves from the Machine while creating alternatives to it.”
–Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
Recently, in a London Review of Books review I read that Anthony Burgess, best known for his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, hails from Manchester, England. Though he left home in order to follow his profession, throughout his life he has emphasized his identification with his Manchester origins, with its heavily Catholic, Irish and working-class “Mancunian” identity. I take it these roots mean much to him. It was this leaving of his loved place, along with the fact that I share ancestral roots in that city (and thus I would not be where I am had not my great-great-grandparents made a similar exodus) that interested me.
That he was apparently attached to his place of origin implies to me that, however sad the fact, “to make something of oneself,” one’s roots in a place must be abandoned; the greener pastures lie forward, not behind. And anyway, how many of us anymore grow up in an environment that feeds, and does not offend, the soul with its everlasting hunger for beauty, truth, and meaning? This assumption, like so many that undergird the modern zeitgeist – i.e., temporality in relationships, the past as something to be liberated from, God as non-existent – has for so long been taken for granted; it’s not only not simple to escape, it’s absurd to even suggest it. Due to his ability as a writer, one forgets, reading Paul Kingsnorth, how ridiculous it is to challenge liberal lifeways as he does, not in the interest of nostalgia or MAGA (obviously) but in defense of humanity. If few people these days are “hitting the streets” to protest, despite the overwhelming reasons to do so, the numbers that are willing to “shrink” our ever technologically expanding lifeways are much, much smaller. Supposing Kingsnorth acts from love, as I feel he does, what strange kind of love is this?
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Even though few of us have the uncommon talent of an Anthony Burgess that would make fulfillment of that potential – and thus moving to the metropolis – obligatory, we are ill-equipped to counter the assumption that gives staying the suggestion of unfitness, of commonness, even cowardice. Modern imaginations fed on a soul-starvation diet of pharmaceuticals, step-counting, online influencers and ugly buildings, has so stripped down our humanity that to be “average” or “common” seems a kind of punishment instead of the shared human lot! Thus it may be time to replace the American Dream with one that restores meaning to staying, an embrace of our commonness that is both fully radical and also, as Kingsnorth teaches – reactionary. Staying in place is both a strike action and a striking out in the direction of “a higher rule,” in knowing a higher rule exists, but only by means of the spiritual power of imagination.
In case it needs to be said, I’m not disputing all kinds of leaving home, only the “settlerist” (as distinct from Wendell Berry’s “settling” in place) mentality that’s as firmly built into our liberal world as the faith in technological progress that keeps “the Machine” advancing. Its power can be dislodged only with difficulty. Intellectually, I can counter it by keeping myself aware of the hidden dark truth of capitalist reality, the loss of the necessary conditions for a healthy culture and of even knowing what those are.
But what is even more essential for “cultural refusal,” and staying in place, is a truth not of the intellect but the soul, the deep self. The consciousness of the truth of pain and unhappiness that is mine, and of understanding the pain, though it is mine, in a larger than personal way, is a direct and powerful challenge to the “technological force manifesting around us.” D.H. Lawrence said it long ago: “I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections/And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly that I am ill…”
Properly regarded, rather than distracted from or medicated, the pain I’m talking about is the pain of the self abandoned in pitiless, liberation-fixated modernity. It is my own personal evidence that to be at home in one’s place – escaping the clutches of the settlerist mindset – will demand something far more potent than fear of epidemics in crowded urban places, trendy localism or perfectionist utopianism. It will take more, even, than being inspired by visionaries like Paul Kingsnorth or Lewis Mumford. It will take a way that can affirm my singular human being, unhappiness and all, as having meaning – the meaning that is healing.
Using Kingsnorth’s words, “to live a life unconformed to the dictates of the Machine and to uphold the values of a true human life” will take a refusal of the only terms upon which modern life is offered. What I add to this is: refusal will not be taken on except by those who respect the existential pain that comes with having lived, from birth, conformed“to the dictates of the Machine.” Though Burgess clearly was looking at the advancing Machine – his explanation for that enigmatic title being “an organic entity, full of juice and sweetness and agreeable odor, being turned into a mechanism -” A Clockwork Orange’s dystopian vision confirmed, but pointed no way out from, the pain of the modern mind.
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In titling the essay that appeared on October 8 in Counterpunch (Getting Rid of the Pain Before Answering Its Questions: Psychiatry’s Damage to Self and Culture), Bruce Levine borrowed words from Lewis Hyde’s 1975 essay: “If you get rid of pain before you have answered its questions, you get rid of the self along with it.” Levine risks the regard of his own profession to ally himself on the side of the truth of the pain in the soul, the root source of healing. Reading his anti-pharmaceuticals, anti-quick-fix essay, my heart soared as if it had been truly seen.
As far as that sense of being seen – so rare in a social world disconnected from in-common roots in community, place and culture – many of us rely, like our former Cafe customer, Steve– big, good-natured, retired policeman – on a kind of ‘being seen’ that does not challenge the defenses around the bottomline pain. Steve would vocally lament the loss of his mother as the only person he could depend on to listen to him. Though I knew the loss he spoke of, and comforting as Mom’s listening was, it was not being seen pain and all. Being truly seen comes with strings attached; it asks for honestly revealing one’s pain. That’s theoretically what we pay the psychotherapist for, and probably it’s why the majority of people who could seek psychotherapeutic help, avoid it.
Why I’m bothering to mention this, is because in depending upon being seen by a fellow imperfect human, even if one’s lucky enough to find a really good practitioner, one could still miss taking the personal imaginative leap that makes one’s humanity, not only one’s personal egoic will, worth defending. Without that dimension in which one’s personal purpose is identified with the healing, unifying purpose (of God), one may still be perilously vulnerable to accepting, if not mistaking, a machine’s listening for a human one (Alexa, anyone?) Without accessing the power in one’s imaginative soul, one is vulnerable to experiencing the magical power of the screen in one’s hand as if it were the human imagination’s wondrous aliveness and immediacy. That aliveness – enchantment – though belonging to universal experience in early childhood, for most of us, by adulthood, is barely remembered. That is, only as seen by God, or by one’s own direct encounter with one’s alive soul in creativity, and in consenting to its purpose over one’s own, can one have the sense of knowing what must be defended against the Machine. Truly, we must become as trusting in imagination’s view as little children!
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I must have read Lewis Hyde’s brilliant essay back when it came out, in the late 70’s, which is why its ideas, as I re-read it recently, are so familiar to me. Their familiarity could also be due to their amplifications in the teachings of mythopoetic men’s movement leader, Robert Bly. Influential to both Orin and myself, the movement centered, like Hyde’s article, on spiritual recovery. The collection of poetry Bly co-edited, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, is one I refer to often
Through commitment to my writing, I have relied upon my own inward direction-finder – my creative soul – for answering the questions confronting me in the obstinate truth of my pain. I have attempted in this way to know the worth and purposefulness of myself. Thus far, this path has not helped me feel seen by most human others; in fact, the opposite, my soul a mere speck on their radar. Thus, when I say I felt seen reading Levine’s article, evoking Lewis, I speak of a cause for celebration, one that affirms me with my spiritual, against-the-machine nature intact. No friend I have could speak to me such gospel-like loving words.
And they are challenging words. Even as I feel tremendously affirmed by them, in the peculiar way a genuinely loving message works, a door opens for some of my strength-undermining mental habits. For in suffering the pain, neither medicating against it nor substituting with the addictions that act like spirit food but are not – much room is left in my liberally conditioned mind for self-doubt to slip back in. For what we’re given as culture – materialist, consumerist – cannot function as a healing system. It can make no meaning from pain and death. Instead, it functions as it can only do without those higher aims; as an addictive system. This system demands one leave the creative spirit at the door and be an addict to itself. In fact, actual addictive substances, as ruinous as addictions can be, can at least be abstained from. They can be refused.
By contrast, the materialist civilization in which money and technology reign, with addiction its very basis for cohesion, cannot be simply abstained from, at least by many (most) of us. Orin and I, dissenters though we were, leaned always more toward staying in the world. Our move back to the Mohawk Valley and then to Utica was the path we chose because, after my 3 years in the Yale Divinity School environment of high social consciousness, it seemed absurd to think one could escape “back to the land.” Eventually, the establishment of our hip little coffee shop in Utica provided us the standing place in which we could be in and not of the project of empire. In the Cafe’s autonomous space, I was both safely at home and within the society that cannot see me.
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The loss of our Cafe in March 2024 felt like I’d lost the living proof for our beliefs; it was evidence of the new culture being birthed out of the old. I have had great difficulty regaining the strength I felt from those beliefs. But something is happening. A new life is beginning in the non-profit arts space we started almost 20 years ago, The Other Side, as an outgrowth of our Cafe. A growing circle of young people who “grew up” in our Cafe during the 22 years it existed are apparently drawn to “sticking around,” if not to full reactionary commitment to Kingsnorth’s “4 p’s:” place, people, past and prayer. At this moment we are a burgeoning scene for creative projects that seem to be sprouting up all at once.
In the world in which these young are young, the Machine is already setting the terms. How is one to escape the straitjacket of the adapted modern mind and the narcotic of technology? Do Orin’s and my strangely conservative choices, born out of that pain-instigated process that restores the alive imagination’s poetic, mythic, larger authority – even though any difference we may make is infinitesimal – now make sense?
If at times alive imaginations go toward the merely strange and weird, if relearning their ways makes one’s behaviors appear naïve, stupid, in need of correction – still, only via imagination can the Machine be escaped.
And if the way to imagination is by means of one’s pain? For young people – or not only them, but for all of us – pain is not a carrot! From the liberal perspective, which is the only one we have, pain is foreign, and definitely optional. One is not drawn to it. It is unwanted. But the pain, it turns out, is not an obstacle; it is a door opener. It bears a message of limits, of the limits of one’s personal control. As old Mr. Lyon tells young radical Felix Holt in George Eliot’s novel, the transfer of obedience from one’s personal will to the will which is “norm or rule for all men,” though it “may sometimes be an erroneous direction of search, yet is the search good and necessary to the ultimate finding.”
With father authority now suspect in liberal reality, no wise and kindly Mr. Lyon will remind us of these transcendent truths meant to guide the preservation of humanity in respect for nature’s bounds. But we can become wise and we can be kind, though the work of love now be simply providing for our young a safe place for their dreaming selves, and space for their healing.
