Mysticism and Totalitarianism
Why The Current Moment Requires You to Step It Up, in Your Head
In my new book, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology I join Benjamin Morgan, a contemporary graduate of the Oxford English Limited theory scene in the later 1980s, in finding fresh politically urgent and beautifully cogent and resonant (and other “ant”) thoughts in contemplative and mystical writing. Ben’s book is called On Becoming God and I cannot recommend it highly enough. And soon Simon Critchley will be joining us with his book Mysticism. I’m seeing about assembling us to do a thing for you.
Oh boy I wish I had read Ben’s book before I wrote Hell. But this way around it feels like a vindication.
Yeah, Julian of Norwich and Thomas Merton show you what fascism is, and they also show you how to resist it. Theory driven thought almost gets you there, as Ben beautifully argues, but you need to go past/underneath it.
(In a really weird and funny way, if you were so inclined, you could almost see theory as an irruption of the Holy Spirit in the space of settler colonialism and its automated version, industrial capitalism. But that’s a huge extra argument I’m starting sketch out in Hell. But.)
The following is an excerpt from a dialogue I had this morning with my friend Brian Ruppert. Brian is a religion scholar who lives in Tokyo. We met in 1992 in Princeton and immediately joined one another in our weird, freaked out, impoverished precarity.
The current moment requires all of us to step up and meet it. In particular, those who have been in power: white men.
White men are also the people who can afford the easiest to go on meditation retreats. They may have thought they were escaping from the current conditions, they may well have been acquiescing to them or reproducing them!
But you know, the funny thing is, they were also learning a theory of fascism and a theory of how to resist it. Here we go:
Mysticism and totalitarianism
Tim Morton and Brian Ruppert
I have been lapsing into despair because people like me aka white men are fucking CAVING to the whole thing.
It's horrible to watch the law, and now the fourth estate of journalism, cave
Tim Snyder wrote a piece yesterday: don't let them win in your head
Brian: I think there is genuine fear but also, exactly as you say, caving as well. Tim Snyder AH, I have to read that.
TM Well of course fear
That's how ideology works
It's based on bits of true things
Right now I'm good. I woke up strong. I had an idea
Reading mystical contemplatives right now is GREAT
They articulate a theory of fascism
Thomas Merton does it deliberately
The ecstasy of group belonging through hate, something like that....was reading in bed ... and then ....
How to beat them
If you KNOW God, whoever that is, if you keep on joining and feeling Him, it's a level or two deeper than the fascist depth. See the trouble is fascism is deeper than normal; why it's so compelling.
A good progressive politics MUST contain this dimension (MLK) or it would lose its head
So it's like a retreat man
On a breath by breath moment by moment basis you are literally keeping the motherfuckers at bay in your soul
BR Breath by breath.
TM Even tiny lapses into spectating the thing and it goes wrong, for me
BR The spectating ruins us.
TM It's like Hannah Arendt is my meditation instructor and Thomas Merton is a political theorist. It's a kind of flip
The rubbernecking dude. It's disgusting
And i got in a real state spectating the horror yesterday afternoon
Like terrible ptsd anxiety, my brain felt poisoned
To KNOW that we are not just "this," that everything that happens to us is as it were scribbles on a 2D surface but we are 3D
It transfigures the world. I gave a lecture to the Tolkien Society yesterday (dream come true) on this
Tolkien is like a dream of this world, how it feels to imagine THIS one but without the nasty metaphysical filters ... is what I said
he keeps saying it's not an allegory, and that's because it's not got something underneath. It's pointing the other way, at US ...
BR I love the Inklings.
TM They are so DEEP ... the age of theory in which I came of age had spurned them but they are so advanced
… like Lewis is giving you how ordinary people feel when they discover Christianity
So it's an allegory
Tolkien is giving you how God feels about earth [Julian also: her vision of the hazelnut, where God says “This is all that ever was or is or could be, right here in your palm”]
The book is a sacred text as it were like those old English poems, The Seafarer...reading it gives you the feel of getting with God
The endless trudging, as an image of reading ... the endless descriptions of where they're walking, which for a fan become the best bits
The constant images of people reading text. Sometimes there's a payoff like when it glows and becomes silver and fireworks etc etc
Adorno: fireworks appear transcendental yet in the key of reimagining the sensual
So the lack of heaven in Tolkien is the most heavenly thing about it!!!
It's like Lennon, "imagine there's no heaven"
Immediately it puts you in heaven ...
The talk was called “Heavenly Tolkien” [that’s the subtitle; the title is “The Grey-Rain Curtain Turned All to Silver Glass”] ...
Preserving that shimmery, grey curtain and all the different details and races vs the one ring that turns everything to one single meaning of total nothing
The book makes you pour over it, all the appendixes etc etc...it's supposed to be how God so loves the world
Definitely fascism is Sauron
Tolkien is taking all that white mythology and making something MUCH better out of it
Fascism takes Christianity and warps it into "paganism"
He's doing the opposite
Bomb squad level man
Yeah man it's a really cool thing he did there. D&D as well, getting whiteness to love the world, it's a clever trick
Bannon refers to his fans as hobbits
Hobbit, bigot
But he can't have it. It's not that at all
It's about enslavement
Even small white people in eighteenth century garb (time of enslavement) will be slaves under him
but some of them dare to go on the journey ... which is a spiritual one. The key is Sam. Just the most humble guy. He's the reader...
See this is where we have to do the Thing (above)
Whenever I go there I start t freak myself out
I think a lot of privileged people who are inevitably still white and male and who therefore control the media became ashamed by the debate and that's how the fascist worms ate into their brain (Pink Floyd)
Seeing the other guy as weak, as THEIR white male...they blew it
They let it in
The whole thing just exposes one thing: white men are still in charge in toxic ways
So on a moment by moment basis as a white man I have to join my brothers end sisters and not let it in.
Everyone in Jamaica knows Biden is a good man who should be president. Everyone
BR Ya know, I met him.
At a picnic in 1988.
TM So getting close to God -- close to the littlest of these--the ones white peoples make suffer. It's a practice man. It's Thomas Merton meets MLK in Arendt space it's cool
BR I was working for the Dems in Iowa, and he came and I was a huge fan and supported him. He didn't exactly answer my question, but he was a real mensch, so I was bummed when he dropped out of the race. We got that machine, Dukakis, instead.
AND I'll tell you something that TRULY surprised me. I had a friend here in Japan, the tremendously paraplegic Mark Bookman, a scholar of Japanese religion, and he was from Delaware. He told me that JOE STAYED SIX HOURS with him during his surgery recovery (heart) at age 10 when JB was a Senator. Can you believe that?
TM Every moment I spend freaking out is literally a moment when a Black person aka my wife has to put a white person back together again. Fuck that man I know how to do this now ...
All this does is expose how whiteness goes deep and wide in our world and how it has to be OVER real soon...starting in my head
Why did Obama feel cool with him
This myth that Obama somehow humiliated him. It's some kind of horrible meme
"Obama was always disrespecting him, this is happening because he passed Biden over for Clinton etc"
"It's all the black man's fault"
"Everyone else is to blame"
The elves the dwarves the men. Never the actual enemy
"So let's spend the next few ripping the flesh off our nearest and deserted" SCREW YOU
The way this political thing is a spiritual thing is a race thing is actually beautiful
So basic Hinayana -- just get with the brown Palestinian Jesus guy, every second, dude
The Mahayana and Vajrayana stuff can come later let's build the foundation
Black media on this -- really different. Like really really different
They have to be spiritual ALL THE TIME. Or they get killed by the police.
This neighborhood is so calm man
It's 84% Black
Old ladies in wheelchairs in the road. Kids playing. Cars driving 10 or 15 miles under the limit
***
TM All I'm trying to do LOL is say that a lot of white men have to realize real fast that the virus is in their head and that they had a fantasy (of a strong white male leader) removed last week, and losing a fantasy is more dangerous than losing a reality, and I'm upping my game here because I just can't have my Jamaican wife rescuing me from despair every few hours, just because the virus ate into my brain, resisting the fascisization is a moment to moment breath by breath retreat practice where you have to go a level deeper than the cerebellar ways the fascism hooks your soul, hence the mysticism. And I get censored for it! Who would have thought this would be controversial LOL...as I know from Ecology without Nature, taking someone's toy away is much more dangerous than depriving them of something real.
Conversations between friends are the real Juice
i think this is what we thought twitter might look like a few years ago, until it started to destroy our hearts