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John Michael Greer on "progress"

Politics
#1

Continuing the discussion from Vintage JMGreer essay - this week - on:

No. What I thought - but this was five years ago, and of course I may have been off-beam in my reading of him - was that he used the word progress in a systematically ambiguous way.

How does one read Greer without becoming demoralised?

Posted by Twirlip on October 29, 2015, 7:32 pm, in reply to “>Sudden< six-foot-plus sea-level rise, anyone? -”

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Mentioned in today’s Archdruid Report post, with handy links:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-patience-of-sea.html

I read a dozen or so of his blog articles (and the many hundreds of comments attached thereto), a couple of years ago, but I stopped. I think the reason I stopped reading him was that he seemed to treat any mention of “progress” as if this necessarily meant continuing to consume finite resources in an impossible, never-ending quest to make everything bigger and better - in a material, technical sense. But surely some of us, even if not all of us, often or even usually mean the word “progress” in a moral sense. Moreover, we do also do not blandly or blindly assume that moral progress is some sort of inevitable historical development, with our particular civilisation (unlike any other in history) going on forever. Surely we recognise that progress occurs, if it occurs at all, only as a result of a struggle. Does Greer ever say anything about this? I read this article (and the October 7 one, containing much discussion the comments section about Naomi Klein’s latest book), but I continue to get the impression that he seems to float serenely in some realm detached from most of the political questions that should concern any thinking person. Everything he writes seems to come across as one massive sneer, a sneer at almost all ordinary human concerns, inasmuch as they try to express themselves in social change. (Except, I vaguely imagine, for the massive change of everybody starting to live in small rural communities, acquiring skills in sustainable technology, and practising various Bardic arts. All well out of my reach, I’m afraid. But perhaps not what he means at all.) He positively seems to welcome collapse, just because (admittedly on rational, scientific grounds) he believes it to be inevitable. On its supposed (and very plausible) inevitability, I cannot argue with him. (At least not until I have read The Long Descent .) But why the serenely welcoming, inhuman, mocking tone? What happened to “Do not go gentle into that good night / Old age should burn and rave at close of day / Rage, rage against the dying of the light”? Surely I’m being unfair, but where in his writings should I go to be corrected?

Re: T, KEEP READING! Not only The Archdruid Report, but The Well of Galabes blog as well, plus all his

Posted by Twirlip on October 30, 2015, 12:13 pm, in reply to “T, KEEP READING! Not only The Archdruid Report, but The Well of Galabes blog as well, plus all his”

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However, I’m afraid you’re going to have to go through the dark night of relinquishing the great modern Western myth of PROGRESS, before you can get emotionally easy with JM’s work. That myth is now dead, and needs to be discarded pronto.

I know! Blasphemy, innit!

Well, yes.

I’m not ignoring the rest of what you wrote, by the way (just because I snipped it). I do respect the man, of course. (I did make a fairly serious effort to get to grips with his blog, and I own a couple of his books.)

But I don’t think you have really addressed my point about his apparent insistence on interpreting the word “progress” only in a single way. And his dismissal of vast swathes of, well, “progressive” opinion still seems to me to be breathtakingly arrogant. I do admit that the man has something to be arrogant about; and (to reiterate) I’m not presuming to say he’s wrong in his positive beliefs, only in what he so magisterially dismisses as merely delusional.

Sure, there is what might reasonably be called a “religion of progress”, in the sort of sense he seems to mean, and I’m not dismissing anything he says about that. I expect he’s pretty much completely right about it. But in dismissing all talk of “progress”, in any sense whatsoever, how can he not be doing anything other than dismissing the entire project of the Left as if it were a delusion? Or, is he not so cavalierly dismissive of it as he appears to be, and if not, then where does he actually say so?

I don’t have an archive of any reply from you to that post, although I did keep your reply to the one before.

#2

I suggest that your impression of JMG “sneering” is mistaken, T. I’ve been following his output for years, and I never had any sense of that. He is - as he says himself - both Aspergic and a Burkean conservative by nature. Those are two sources of his tone of voice. He also gets a little wearied by seeing clearly things which are self-evidently obvious to him (and to me), but then getting swamped by hordes of troo-bleevers who are refusing, actively, to admit that same obvious simply because, like tantrummy children, they don’t like what they see.

As for moral progress: yes, I agree with that idea, though I see it as a very slow, literally evolutionary process, which will take many lifetimes for hom sap to achieve. But it’s the egregore of scientismic ‘progress’ - what Dmitry Orlov characterises as the Technosphere, and which I further characterise as a fundamentally malevolent egregore of our time - which John dismisses as self-evidently non-achievable, and also fundamentally wrong-headed. John - a veteran student and active practitioner of ceremonial magic AND shamanic magic in the Druidic form - is much more wedded to the idea of constant cyclic processes circling through time, rather than linear processes which never return to their roots. With that life experience - he’s nearing 60 now - it’s obvious that he will have little time for the notion of star-trekky PROGRESSFOREVER!!! Quite rightly, I reckon. It’s THE major delusion of the dominant world religion - sic! - of our time: scientism.

Cheers T! :slight_smile:

#3

Scientism is perhaps my biggest bugbear, so I had better resist the temptation to start ranting about it, or I might never stop! A more focused rant on the connection between scientism and liberalism might well be a good idea, but I’m not up to it yet.

As for egregores: I have a book on that subject - Mark Stavish, Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny (Inner Traditions 2018) - but I haven’t read it yet, so I have no idea if it is any good. It’s probably far above my head; but the subject seems important.

#4

Egregore is a simple concept in essence. When a particular idea/image/concept is circulating in a population, and getting thought about and dwelt on regularly - as a daily practice, so to speak - it forms a complex, an entity if you prefer, in the noo-sphere which - as they do! - influences the behaviour of individual believers in directions to make so the ideas which it embodies. We - the little human farties in a state of entranced belief - build-out the ideas into concrete physical reality (so called! :slight_smile: ).

Lot of egregores about, especially now in this interlude of gross human population overshoot, together with the massive communications blitz happening in our time, that spreads the egreogores’ ideas very rapidly to willing troo-bleevers, and increases their potency thereby.