The Gaslightenment: a Multi-pronged Attack on Reason
Sometimes it feels like a zombie movie; sometimes it feels like a plague of contagious dementia; sometimes it feels like Genghis Khan has hypnotized the entire city (the only good line from Alec Baldwin’s The Shadow. But we all know the feeling, this sense that our neighbours have taken leave of both their empathy and their faculties.
We are dealing with a set of interlocking social crises that some collectively call “the Gaslightenment.” We are becoming a paranoid, unreasoning, authoritarian society especially in the peripheral states of the Anglosphere. This turn of events has myriad causes and multiple origins. It is a perfect storm of converging authoritarian and anti-thought projects and organizations.
Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with those forces that concern me the most, the collapse of internal party democracy in the West’s political parties, Genderwang’s capture of our major institutions, reaction formation in response to the climate event, etc. In the coming months I am going to try to cast light a little more broadly on a wider diversity of factors that have led us here, from endocrine disruptors, to 1980s changes to firefighting practices to today’s essay on the loss of the parable.
I was in church the other day, a different kind of church than the liberal churches I had attended (I attended the Unitarian Church when I was a child and the Anglican Church in my thirties). It was a conservative, scripture-focused church in the medium-sized farming community in which I am currently residing. Consequently, people in the church were far more inclined to speak about the immediate relevance and applicability of Biblical lessons and episodes in recounting and reasoning about their daily lives.
Two conversations stood out: one was a discussion of the parable of the wheat and the tares, another of the wealth of the Kingdom of Judah in goats. In both cases, the conversation turned to the practicalities of agriculture. The actual methods and activities associated with herding, milking and slaughtering goats, the challenges of maintaining a wheat field in the face of invasive species and weeds were crucial to our conversations about scripture.
These conversations would not have been possible in the Anglican church I attended on Bathurst Street in Toronto or at the Unitarian church on Oak Street in Vancouver because most congregants did not possess agricultural knowledge or practical and obvious knowledge of the natural world. One of the reasons I want to suggest that there is so much strangeness, so much error, so much de-literalization of scripture—not just from progressive churches but most conservative ones too—has to do with the changes in our economies and patterns of settlement over the past century and a half, leading to what I term “the death of parable.”
The Decline of Natural and Agricultural Knowledge
Aesop’s Fables existed long before the birth of Christ and similar texts, illustrating abstract concepts and relationships, teaching simple and complex moral lessons existed not just in the incipient West but in all significant literate cultures. The natural world and the wild animals therein, agriculture and its domesticated animals and plants were a naturally universal language for metaphor and relational thinking. That is because such a huge portion of the population worked in agriculture or pastoralism and lived near natural ecosystems with abundant wildlife.
This was true not just of slaves, peasants and yeomen but of elites, who even if they maintained a lavish urban residence, typically drew their wealth from the agricultural land they owned and administered. So prevalent was work on the land that knowledge of local plants and animals, domesticated and wild, was effectively universal. In propounding the gospel, parables were crucially important because they employed the only available universally decipherable metaphors.
A century ago, 80% of Canadians lived in rural communities; today, only 20% do. Furthermore, the proportion of rural and remote community residents involved in agriculture and bush work has also dramatically declined even relative to the declining relative rural population. A similar demographic story has unfolded all over the world, albeit at different rates.
I think this has a lot to do with why George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1948) will be last major parable until our societies undergo a massive economic, demographic and geographic realignment. Because the rhetorical and pedagogical efficacy of a parable depend on knowledge of agriculture and nature that most people no longer possess at a deep, practical level of knowledge.
While the death of parable has harmed our societies across the board, as we have become alienated from our foundational texts, traditions and metaphorical vocabularies, the effects have been especially adverse for Christian societies, because their most important text is more reliant on parable than other traditions’ canonical texts. Consequently, our ability to use metaphors, make comparisons and engage in complex reasoning, especially moral reasoning, is stunted because the natural world is no longer functioning as an interpretive index connecting culture, text and thought.
This has additional knock-on effects, especially in a society like Canada which, as observed by one of Canada’s greatest twentieth-century novelists, Robertson Davies, much of our literary canon is awash in Biblical references its authors expected their audience to be intimately familiar with.
Exegesis Without Animals and 1980s Anti-gay Social Science
In 1988, my father took me to Kenya on a packaged safari tour. I fell in love with East Africa then and have been back three times since. I vividly remember our first day out on the Masai Mara savanna. Our jeep driver, Sammy, spotted elephants in the distance and we drove towards them as fast as we could. As we approached, it became clear that both were young male bull elephants having very enthusiastic, aggressive sex with each other, with the largest erections I ever have seen or expect I will see in my life.
Despite being an avid naturalist, hiker, photorealist wildlife artist and voracious reader of all kinds of science, my father’s reaction was not that different than that of the other under-fifty men in the vehicle. He looked stunned, shocked, unable to categorize or comment on the situation. But this was not true of the three older men in the vehicle. The “Logan Boys,” seventy-something brothers from Texas and Ray Brandyberry all began chuckling and broke into full-blown laughter when the older Logan Boy remarked, “Why I believe those would be the San-Francisca elephants!”
My father, who was not a man for pets, despite his great tolerance of my gerbil-owning period, had spent years carefully stalking and photographing reclusive and rare wild animals, grizzly bears, doll sheep and the like. But he had no sustained experience of animals living at close quarters with one another as a person living in an agrarian society would.
This generational shift, as witnessed in the safari jeep, was beginning to wreck havoc on Christian thought back home in North America as suburban megachurches and televangelists began propounding a Christianity that could not pass muster at a 4H Club.
The significance and urgency of the modern gay rights movement, which had begun in the 1960s was massively amplified by the AIDS crisis. Until the AIDS crisis, the decision by most men who slept with other men to keep that information about themselves private was a personal choice; it was also a political one, and one hotly contested among gay men. But once this openness became an important aspect of prophylaxis during a lethal global epidemic, “coming out” ceased to be a mere ritual act to recast one’s personal identity. It became an important part of a coordinated effort to stop the spread of AIDS through social prophylaxis.
There were other new reasons to come out that AIDS created, like inheritance, death benefits, hospital and hospice visiting rights. The list goes on.
And this resulted in the sense, on the part of those outside the emerging “gay community,” that it was not just AIDS that was an epidemic, homosexuality itself was. It seemed, superficially, like a contagion. Homophobic jokes, anti-gay rhetoric and gay-bashing also seemed to be reaching epidemic scale, as gay-bashings followed Andrew Dice Clay’s and Eddie Murphy’s edgy homophobic stand-up routines around Ronald Reagan’s America.
As with abortion, previously uninterested or even neutral evangelical Christians shouldered past the West’s Roman Catholics in articulating a strongly condemnatory new discourse regarding homosexuality. But this new Christian social conservatism, even though not leavened by parable, suffered the same problems Biblical exegesis was now facing due to urbanization.
For centuries, Catholic polemics against homosexuality had argued that same-sex action was bestial because animals engaged in it often and guiltlessly. How could anyone with long-term experience tending animals in groups not know this? The Catholic argument had always been that human should not engage in homosexuality because we are fundamentally different from animals, that the immaterial soul that God places in our bodies at quickening, not conception, gives us the unique power to overcome our bestial urges for gay sex.
But this newfound ignorance of the natural order allowed a new kind of anti-gay propaganda, which stated that homosexuality was “unnatural,” that it came from Lucifer, not the natural order, because this was not something animals did. Only humans did it.
Farms, Fields and Field Trips
Some people argue that the loss of the natural, created world as the basis of metaphor, comparison, analogy, etc. can be addressed through comparisons to new universals, common technologies like cars and mobile telephones, common literary and cinematic experiences like Harry Potter and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
But the problem is that these are not working systems. They are mere flights of fancy. Their rules of cause and effect, their patterns of outcome are even more disconnected from the natural world than we are because these things are the result of untethering our thought from physical reality, and more importantly, from the rules of cause and effect that underpin them and the systems of relationships they generate and are seated in.
If we want our children to understand Animal Farm, there is no short cut. They must watch pigs, chickens, horses, etc. interacting and going about their day. If we want them to understand that parable of the labourers in the vineyard, we should take them to the Hainle winery in Peachland, where the frosts came too soon and the grapes were frozen, resulting in the first modern crop of ice wine. They can hear about how, until 1978, such wine was deemed unsaleable and the panic the vineyard owner in the New Testament must have experienced as the day wore on and more workers had to be called at an ever-increasing hourly wage. You see: parables are not just a means of illustration but of reinforcement; the parable of the wheat and the tares is not just understandable; everyone would have a story of weeding, of the discernment it took them to distinguish a new weed from a new sprout.
There is no substitute for farms and fields and wild nature as the foundation of our metaphorical vocabulary, as one of the pillars, along with empathy, on which abstract reasoning rests. The dream of reinhabiting the land, reintegrating domestic animals and food crops into our daily lives is not a romantic fancy of the deep green movement. It is the only way we are going to clear our heads to face what we are facing as a species.
