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Paul Gilk
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Аннотация
The common understanding of «apocalypse» suggests End Times, Armageddon, and the end of the world. But the Greek word apokalypsis means none of these things. What it does mean is uncovering, disclosing, and revelatory. That «apocalypse» is so widely misunderstood as predestined disaster isn't due to natural evolution in meaning. To penetrate the misuse of apokalypsis is to discover mythic misrepresentation. That is, «apocalypse» doesn't generate End Times but–just the opposite–End Times compels apokalypsis. The actual threat of End Times–explicitly so with weapons of mass destruction and Anthropocene climate change–forces thoughtful people into a search for fundamental causes: Where do these destructive energies originate? Why are we so reluctant to recognize the obvious consequences and resistant to embrace available remedies? Why do we persist in denial and indifference? In these essays, Paul Gilk explores the underlying cultural and religious conventions (both «conservative» and «liberal») that constitute our resistance and refusal. To disclose and uncover those conventions, to dissolve our oblivion, is to awaken to apokalypsis and to realize the depth of our captivity within prevailing mythology, both religious and civilizational. If End Times is the disease, apokalypsis is the cure.
Аннотация
In volume one of Henry Buckberry's stories (Get Poor Now, Avoid the Rush), we followed Henry from his early childhood in central North Dakota to the dark, dangerous woods of northern Wisconsin. Get Poor Now concluded in September of 1933, with Henry about to survey the devastation of a forest fire that almost burned up his log shack. A Windfall Homestead takes us into the next two decades of Henry's productive, energetic life, as he logs and hunts, clears land for farming, marries, has children, builds a new barn and house from windfall lumber. Henry's life exemplifies the fate of an essentially preindustrial rural culture about to be overwhelmed by post-World War II technology with its comprehensive commercial «culture» extruded by fossil fuel affluence. Henry's was not so much the «greatest» generation as it was the last unself-conscious rural subsistence generation of European heritage. These stories, all told in Henry's voice, were taken down shortly before Henry's death in 2009 by Henry's son Charles Darwin Buckberry, also known as C. D. or Seedy Buckberry. Seedy claims these stories are accurate and true. Readers are advised to suspend their civilized disbelief.
Аннотация
Various thinkers have attempted to explain the Earth-altering (even ecocidal) features in modern life. Jacques Ellul, for instance, a French intellectual, became famous for his exposition of «technique.» But «technique» does not adequately address the institutional incubation out of which «technique» itself arises.
In these essays, Paul Gilk stands on the shoulders of two American scholars in particular. One is world historian Lewis Mumford, whose career spanned fifty years. The other is classics professor Norman O. Brown, who brought his erudition into a systematic study of Freud.
From these intellectuals especially, Gilk concludes that the accelerating ecocidal characteristics of «globalization» are inherent manifestations of perfectionist, utopian, predatory institutions endemic to civilization. Our great difficulty in arriving at or accepting this conclusion is that «civilization» contains no negatives. It is strictly a positive construct. We are therefore incapable of thinking critically about it.
A corrective is slowly emerging from Green intellectuals. Green politics, says Gilk, is not utopian but «eutopian.» It is not aimed at perfectionist immortality but rather at earthly wholeness.
Yet the ethical message of Green politics confronts a society saturated with utopian mythology. The question is to what extent and at what speed ecological and cultural breakdown will dissolve civilized, utopian certitudes and provide the requisite openings for the growth of Green, eutopian culture.
In these essays, Paul Gilk stands on the shoulders of two American scholars in particular. One is world historian Lewis Mumford, whose career spanned fifty years. The other is classics professor Norman O. Brown, who brought his erudition into a systematic study of Freud.
From these intellectuals especially, Gilk concludes that the accelerating ecocidal characteristics of «globalization» are inherent manifestations of perfectionist, utopian, predatory institutions endemic to civilization. Our great difficulty in arriving at or accepting this conclusion is that «civilization» contains no negatives. It is strictly a positive construct. We are therefore incapable of thinking critically about it.
A corrective is slowly emerging from Green intellectuals. Green politics, says Gilk, is not utopian but «eutopian.» It is not aimed at perfectionist immortality but rather at earthly wholeness.
Yet the ethical message of Green politics confronts a society saturated with utopian mythology. The question is to what extent and at what speed ecological and cultural breakdown will dissolve civilized, utopian certitudes and provide the requisite openings for the growth of Green, eutopian culture.
Аннотация
Growing up in the mostly wooded rural countryside of northern Wisconsin, in the decades immediately after the Second World War, meant immersion in cultural transformation. An economy of subsistence and self-provisioning was rapidly becoming industrialized and commercial. The culture of the local and small-scale was being overpowered by the metropolitan and large-scale. This experience provided the practical groundedness for exploring the decline and even the demise of small-scale farming, not just in northern Wisconsin, but as an example and illustration of how industrialization and globalization undermine local rural culture everywhere. Linked with an ecological critique that asserts the unsustainability of globalized industrialism, the exploration into the meaning of rural culture took on larger significance, especially when seen in relation to the collapse of all prior civilizations. In addition, the investigation into the origins of civilization revealed the predatory relationship civilization developed in regard to agriculture and rural life. The rampant globalization of civilization results in the destitution and impoverishment of agrarian culture.
The question then becomes whether civilization has finally achieved the technical mastery by which to protect and extend itself permanently or whether its complexity only assures a more catastrophic collapse or whether civilization may learn to be flexible enough to merge with an essentially noncivilized folk culture to create a new cultural sensibility that enhances the best of both worlds. This is the question the entire world is now facing. Weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and peak oil all combine the force a resolution to this dilemma.
The question then becomes whether civilization has finally achieved the technical mastery by which to protect and extend itself permanently or whether its complexity only assures a more catastrophic collapse or whether civilization may learn to be flexible enough to merge with an essentially noncivilized folk culture to create a new cultural sensibility that enhances the best of both worlds. This is the question the entire world is now facing. Weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and peak oil all combine the force a resolution to this dilemma.
Аннотация
In the twelfth century, an Italian monk named Joachim caught the attention of the Christian West by announcing the Three Ages of the World. Joachim arrived at his formulation by a meshing of the Christian Trinity with the Old and New Testaments, proclaiming–in sequence–the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son, and the Age of the Holy Spirit.
In the early modern period, however, archaeologists uncovered the remains of an agrarian village social stratum that predates the rise of civilization. The divinity of this period was the Mother Goddess, a divinity that civilized monotheism, with its strict Father God, steadily and severely repressed. Paul Gilk has modified Joachim's Three Ages revelation by placing this newly discovered Age of the Mother at the beginning of Joachim's sequence.
But it's obvious that Mother, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not psychologically coherent or linguistically consistent. The only way to make semantic sense of Joachim's enlarged formulation is to recognize the Age of the Holy Spirit as the Age of the Daughter, for if there's a Mother, a Father, and a Son, then the Holy Spirit implicitly and quietly reveals Herself as Daughter. With this understanding, it's possible to discern the prophetic power and transformative cultural significance of both the contemporary women's movement and the feminine-Earth sensibility of the growing ecological outrage.
Gilk goes on to assert that the radical servanthood and radical stewardship contained within Jesus' «kingdom of God» proclamation is, at least in part, an attempt to spiritually reconnect with the agrarian village culture of the Mother's Age; but it's also a lifting of that Age to a finer spirituality and toward an ethically Green political order.
The «kingdom of God» is Green, Gilk says, and its overarching divinity is the Daughter. The Age of the Daughter is Green and is struggling to be born.
In the early modern period, however, archaeologists uncovered the remains of an agrarian village social stratum that predates the rise of civilization. The divinity of this period was the Mother Goddess, a divinity that civilized monotheism, with its strict Father God, steadily and severely repressed. Paul Gilk has modified Joachim's Three Ages revelation by placing this newly discovered Age of the Mother at the beginning of Joachim's sequence.
But it's obvious that Mother, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not psychologically coherent or linguistically consistent. The only way to make semantic sense of Joachim's enlarged formulation is to recognize the Age of the Holy Spirit as the Age of the Daughter, for if there's a Mother, a Father, and a Son, then the Holy Spirit implicitly and quietly reveals Herself as Daughter. With this understanding, it's possible to discern the prophetic power and transformative cultural significance of both the contemporary women's movement and the feminine-Earth sensibility of the growing ecological outrage.
Gilk goes on to assert that the radical servanthood and radical stewardship contained within Jesus' «kingdom of God» proclamation is, at least in part, an attempt to spiritually reconnect with the agrarian village culture of the Mother's Age; but it's also a lifting of that Age to a finer spirituality and toward an ethically Green political order.
The «kingdom of God» is Green, Gilk says, and its overarching divinity is the Daughter. The Age of the Daughter is Green and is struggling to be born.
Аннотация
In the early 1970s, living in inner-city St. Louis, Paul Gilk asked his friends to explain why small farms were dying. The answers did not satisfy. Years of study followed.
Through the reading of history, Gilk began to grasp the origins of both horticulture and agriculture, their blossoming into Neolithic agrarian village culture, and the impoundment of the agrarian village by bandit «aristocrats» at the formation of what we now call civilization. Getting a grip on the relationship between agriculture and civilization was one thing; but, as a person strongly influenced by Gospel stories, Gilk also wanted to know what the connection might be between the «kingdom of God» proclamation in the canonical Gospels and the peasant world from which Jesus arose.
Aided in his thinking by the works of biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, Gilk began to realize that the «kingdom of God» was both a harkening back to the peace and freedom of precivilized agrarian village and a revolutionary anticipation of a postcivilized village-mindedness organized organically on the basis of radical servanthood and radical stewardship. We are, Gilk says, entering the dawn of this Green culture simultaneously with the deepening of civilized world disaster.
Through the reading of history, Gilk began to grasp the origins of both horticulture and agriculture, their blossoming into Neolithic agrarian village culture, and the impoundment of the agrarian village by bandit «aristocrats» at the formation of what we now call civilization. Getting a grip on the relationship between agriculture and civilization was one thing; but, as a person strongly influenced by Gospel stories, Gilk also wanted to know what the connection might be between the «kingdom of God» proclamation in the canonical Gospels and the peasant world from which Jesus arose.
Aided in his thinking by the works of biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, Gilk began to realize that the «kingdom of God» was both a harkening back to the peace and freedom of precivilized agrarian village and a revolutionary anticipation of a postcivilized village-mindedness organized organically on the basis of radical servanthood and radical stewardship. We are, Gilk says, entering the dawn of this Green culture simultaneously with the deepening of civilized world disaster.