Gustave Dore, The Angel of Peace indicating to Dante where to ascend
Digging and Healing: The Work of Reconnection and Restoration
An auto-bibliographical essay directing readers to my various works in the cause of healing the wounded world.
This is a challenging read from Paul Kingsnorth, The West needs to grow up.
I would encourage people to look beyond the provocative title and engage with the substantive points at issue.
The work of the age of inversion is not to fight puny online battles, or to look for victory in some imagined political settlement or brilliant new ideology. Our wounds are much deeper than that. Our stories are cracked at their foundations, and as a consequence we are afloat in a fantastical world of our own making: grasping at freedom, entirely enslaved.
The antidote to this is to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair. We are going to have to learn to be adults again; to get our feet back on the ground, to rebuild families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment, of limits and longing. We are, in short, going to have to grow up. This is long, hard work: intergenerational work. It is myth work. We don’t really want to begin, and we don’t really know how to. Does any child want to grow up? But there is nothing else for it; no other path is going to get us home.”
I will say that I am in broad agreement with the principal tenets of the argument Kingsnorth presents in this article. I should be, since I’ve been “digging to heal” along these lines the past quarter of a century. I have become accustomed to more practical persons, those impatient for ‘action’ under the tyranny of the clock, dismissing my work as ‘idle intellectualizing,’ as one friendly soul put it. Ten, fifteen years and more on, said practical persons are no further on when it comes to system-change. True, they have made ‘necessity,’ ‘crisis,’ and ‘emergency’ available for government intervention and regulation, but this is far-short of the system-change envisaged. The problem with activists and ideologues who are rootless and fruitless is that their fierce urgency of now invited appropriation, diversion, and perversion. An empty universalism defaults always to authoritarianism. Short-cuts short-circuit an organic process, arrest and reverse development, take monstrous form. To the activists who persist in dismissing ideas and intellectualising I say : ‘Don’t act, think!’ The modern age has lost the sense that the active and the contemplative modes both have a legitimate place in a civilised order.
Kingsnorth quotes one of my favourite historical figures and writers Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers: “The old world … is running up like parchment in the fire.” Winstanley wrote of the world "turned upside down." That world needs to be turned the right way. Which implies that there is a right way, beyond the relativism of self-created values. Kingsnorth says that we are living in a “culture of inversion.” The old elites have lost confidence in the institutions they are charged with governing, turning the forms they inherited on their heads rather than upholding them, even erasing them entirely – institutions are empty when those governing them no longer believe in their purpose. But it is institutions that make society work. The world is charged with the task of institution-building. Instead of constructive work, however, there is a settling of scores with the past in a destructive orgy. Institutional paralysis, cowardice, and collapse will follow.
“Patriotism, Christianity, cultural conservatism, sexual modesty, even a mild nostalgia for a vanished rural England or a love of once-canonical novels: all are more or less verboten, and the attitude towards them is rapidly hardening.”
I read that my favourite novelist Thomas Hardy has been removed from the GCSE syllabus.
For Kingsnorth, the culture of inversion arises not because new things are loved, but because old things are despised. And old people too.
We are the opposite of what we once were. We reject our ancestors and our history. We are now something entirely new — even if, as of this moment, we have no idea what.
"All these hunters who are shrieking now oh do they speak for us?
And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?
Why are the armies marching still that were coming home to me?"
(Leonard Cohen, Stories of the Street).
The poet and storyteller Robert Bly described contemporary culture as the “sibling society”, a society which no longer knows how to produce adults.
“People don’t bother to grow up, and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults. The rule is: Where repression was before, fantasy will now be … Adults regress toward adolescence; and adolescents — seeing that — have no desire to become adults. Few are able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane — tradition, religion, devotion.” (Robert Bly)
In my own work I write that the modern age has horizontalized the vertical. That may sound liberatory, the problem is that this declaration of human independence results in the creation of as many standards as there are human beings, each their own god choosing their own good, upon which there can be no compromise. Truth will go the same way. For a century or more, people have accepted the reduction of ethics to the status of irreducible subjective opinion, mere value judgements. Too late they see the threat to science and truth for the same reason. There is no shared objective reality, no facts, only interpretations - it's all power, perspectives, and projections. You cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too; once it is gone, it is gone, and all that remains is a conventionalism and constructivism. (I'm simplifying for brevity).
In The Ecology of Good I write:
“Where once we sought this transcendence in terms of God and Heaven, we now seek to create Heaven on Earth through men who, through technological power, have become as gods. We have horizontalized the vertical. Where once we pointed upwards to Heaven for transcendence, now we seek perfection on Earth, seeing our technological capacities as a perfection of means capable of delivering such an ideal. The fatal mistake is to have failed to see that the eternal perfection we are seeking as an endless project undertaken on a planet of finite resources.”
In addition to the physical dangers there is the moral and psychological damage, drawing down the transcendent into the realm of immanence. In Being at One, I argue that the modern world is characterised by the technological appropriation of the vertical conception of God as transcendent entity and its horizontalisation on the material plane. Imperfect, flawed, and erring human beings thus see themselves as perfect and unerring gods in possession of the knowledge and power to realize the Infinite within a world of finite resources.
You cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too: once it is gone, it is gone, leaving nothing left but self-created values/gods, none of which offer other god-like creators good enough reasons to persuade, motivate, and obligate. That leads to a world of mutual indifference and self-cancellation. Kingsnorth refers to the war that has been declared ‘on all aspects of “the Indo-European, Islamic, Hebraic impulse-control system,” whose genuine faults had become associated with all and any impulse-control, hierarchy, order or structure.’ As Lewis Mumford argued back in the 1940s, freedom has come to be identified with liberation from constraint and inhibition: all those moral and rational restraints which were designed to control impulses and guide behaviour beyond immediacy were upended and discarded. This cannot but invite adults into an infantilism. In Values for Survival, Mumford notes that the virtues had become an ancient language that the moderns no longer understood. The result has been a soft attitude breeding soft habits. The identification of freedom with instant gratification leads people into bad habits and behaviours which are inimical to their health and happiness and ultimately their freedom. Instilling the culture of discipline that produces strength and health is much the greater challenge but is the right thing to do. People who seek to normalize the non-standards of a personal relativism is described by Kingsnorth as a ‘corrupted cultural Levelling,’ producing a culture of inversion, in which rebellion against all and any forms was seen as the only inherent good. This was to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Social norms have always had a hard side, but usually they existed for a good reason. The trick is to mitigate the harshness without incentivising and rewarding harmful behaviours. Giving in to instant gratification makes people weak, unhappy, and unfree enchaining them to immediacy.
Kingsnorth refers to the ‘desert’ ‘created by late 20th-century American capitalism, which had decimated communities and households, stripped the meaning from the lives of young generations and replaced it with shopping.’ We can be more precise than ‘late 20th-century’ here and refer to economic neo-liberalism. We should also refer to its cultural counterpart, identified with the Cultural Left, which is also stripping meaning from lives and communities, working as a universal acid.
Robert Bly believed that the fundamental problems of our time were more than political and economic, they were mythic: ‘They manifested at the level of deep story, on which all cultures are built. The modern West, without knowing it, had taken an axe to the root of its own mythic structures.’
Bly describes the “generalised ingratitude” that people immersed in the culture of inversion show towards their cultural inheritance:
“Our society has been damaged not only by acquisitive capitalism, but also by an idiotic distrust of all ideas, religions and literature handed down to us by elders and ancestors. Many siblings are convinced that they have received nothing of value from anyone. The older truth is that every man and woman is indebted to all other persons, living or dead, and is indebted as well to animals, plants and the gods.”
I am reminded of Dostoyevsky, who said that the Devil would never give thanks.
Bly went on to argue that Western culture was now doing to itself what it had long done to others: colonisation. The methods that Western colonial administrators had used to destroy and supplant other cultures were now being turned against us — rewriting history, replacing language, upending cultural norms, banning or demonising religions, dismantling elder systems and undermining cultural norms and traditions. My first degree is in history. I learned that history is a matter of change and continuity. And I learned the difference between change as an organic process in which broad masses of people participate, ‘own,’ and change as something forced and engineered, something the few do to the many. There is no defence of fixed traditions and no freezing of norms in this analysis, no assertion of false fixities in defence of asymmetrical power relations. Instead, there is an awareness of how precious cultural and historical resources are, and how traditions are enabling rather than constraining. The past, present, and future lie on a continuum, each flow into and through the other. The human species is a familial species, affirming the pact between past, present, and future generations. All this is lost when organic change is supplanted by the inorganic, the deliberately engineered and manufactured. ‘Language has always changed,’ comes the rebuttal. Yes, but how?
In our perpetual sibling society — sick with consumerism, eye-glazed with screen burn, confused, rudderless, godless — we have forgotten how to behave like adults, or what adults even look like. The result is that we squabble like children, fighting over toys in the mud.
“The inner dome of heaven has fallen,” wrote Bly. “To say we have no centre that we love is the same thing as saying that we have colonised ourselves. What we need to study, then, is how a colonised culture heals itself.”
The antidote to this is to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair. We are going to have to learn to be adults again; to get our feet back on the ground, to rebuild families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment, of limits and longing. We are, in short, going to have to grow up. This is long, hard work: intergenerational work. It is myth work.
I have never shied from declaring that the principal task of the age is one of metaphysical reconstruction. The liveliest minds of the age think that science had put an end to metaphysics. They are wrong. We are living in an age of bad, false, wretched metaphysics.
Simply put, either there are transcendent standards of truth or justice or there are not. If there are not, then we are mired in an endless power/resistance, with no rational way of arbitrating between competing claims, only power. We choose our sides according to preference, interest, and ideology. But there are no rational grounds for that choice. It is a return to Thrasymachus’ 'justice is the interest of the strongest.' That power/resistance is merely a Hobbesian/Foucaultian world that leads nowhere, merely a self-cancellation. I don't care if people take their stand on science or religion here, or on both, as I do. What matters is that we continue to affirm the idea of truth and not conflate it with social construction and mediation (which does of course take place, any 'transcendent' truth is only known through its unfolding in reality, and that reality is always in some way social and constructed. I see it as a sub-creation. Mediation must take place. Transcendent standards are only ever known, experientially, in time and place. I don't have a term for what it is I am describing; it is something between and beyond disclosure and imposition/projection, recognizing the role of human agency within the ceaselessly creative universe. The issue is one of transcendentalism vs conventionalism. Either there are transcendent standards or there are not. If there are not, all that there is and all that there ever can be is power/resistance - an endless cycle of submission to power or assertion to power, relative to 'society.' That is the end of the left in that it entails the end of universal human values in an unwinnable game of irreducible game. Dress it up in all the fancy names of deconstruction you like, but it is a reduction to the sophism of Thrasymachus: 'justice is the interests of the strongest.' That won't necessarily be you - to whom and what will you then appeal when on the receiving end of an injustice? Who or what will care if there are no grounds?
In a debate over environmental solutions I once dared mention cultivating the moral and intellectual virtues in a habitus in which the virtues could come to be known, acquired, internalised, and exercised. I was cursorily dismissed with the words ‘sure, that’s about as likely as the whole world going vegan.’ That curt response made it clear to me that many who talk big about ‘system change’ are inclined to reduce a multi-layered complexity to the flatlands of technocratic thinking. If we are about civilisation building, then character-formation, modes of conduct, small-scale practical reasoning, communities of practice matter. In the absence of an overarching and authoritative moral framework buttressed by and in turn buttressing an ethico-social infrastructure, all that there is is a crude behaviourism, the engineering of future society rather than its emergence as a process of organic growth, a constant ‘nudging’ towards entry into the Megamachine.
In my work I have also made use of Benjamin Barber's concept of "infantilism" (Barber, "Consumed" 2007). The problem today is that we live in what Benjamin Barber calls a culture of ‘infantilism,’ one governed by image and sound-bite at a distance from reality. (Barber Consumed 2007), an ethos that ‘generates a set of habits, preferences, and attitudes that encourage and legitimate childishness.’ Barber notes the connection with capitalism, arguing that infantilism ‘serves capitalist consumerism directly by nurturing a culture of impetuous consumption necessary to selling puerile goods in a developed world that has few genuine needs’ (2007: 81). ‘Infantilization aims at inducing puerility in adults,’ he writes, giving a clear indication of the extent to which this infantilism would, in short time, come to consume the political and cultural opposition to capitalism, capitalism creating an opposition that is shaped in its own self-aggrandizing image. Instead of a citizen democracy committed to building and sustaining a public community, we come to be confronted by a consumer democracy. There are three archetypal dualisms which capture the ethos of infantilism, argues Barber: easy over hard, simple over complex, fast over slow. Such infantilism defines the libertarian freedom which dominates the age – a conception which identifies freedom with individual private choice of the good, in subordination to the immediacy of sensuous desire. Barber proceeds to make the case for what I have, in my own work, designated as ‘rational freedom.’ He distinguishes between the ‘anarchic spirit of liberation’ expressed by children and ‘adult autonomy.’ ‘The absence of such anarchic liberty need not be … adult servitude or what the philosophers call heteronomy (being morally ruled by others), but can be moral autonomy—the use of freedom to choose the purposeful and the good. This is the kind of disciplined liberty Kant and Rousseau associate with free moral willing. Unlike childish license, adult moral autonomy is neither anarchic nor authoritarian but both purposive and common… It was this foundation that Rousseau suggested created the conditions for democratic self-rule.’ (Barber 2007). It’s called growing up.
I go hard, complex, and slow and resist temptations to offer neat formulae. Human beings are not simple. Short-cuts will short-circuit any organic and enduring process of change. My sense is that people are crying out for public community but have lost the sense of how to build and sustain such a thing. We have been living through the long disembedding, what William Morris called “the great sundering” over a century. We have been separated not merely from the physical commons but also from the political and ethical commons, so much so that we struggle to expand our being outwards in relation to something greater than we are, something that completes us.
Instead of a habitus in which the virtues can be known, acquired, and exercised, we have a media and education system that is a new free space established and supported at a distance from reality and responsibility, a space which nurtures childish autonomy and anarchy, a space in which irresponsible ideas can be propagated, disseminated, and reproduced, a new margin at a remove from the world, inhabited by perpetual adolescents engaged in permanent revolution against capitalism, the patriarchy and whatever else is the monster of the month. The irony is that it is the resources generated by capitalism that pays for it all and sustains it all.
The authorities are not merely unwilling to resist, they are incapable, having been rendered spineless and powerless by their own culpability in the privatisation of life. The economic libertarians have raised a generation in their image, individuals for whom particular, private, goods – their own - trump the collective good. An emasculated and overwhelmed police force has given up the ghost. Authority has been neutralised, thus rendering ‘ordinary’ people prey to any number of technocratic parasite groups and free riders. Ask who has the power and the money to deliver on these high ambitions of emancipation and salvation. There are many auditioning for the role. It is a world in which activists outnumber citizens to a factor of a thousand, constantly making claims upon and drawing cheques on the public realm whilst doing precisely nothing to constitute and sustain publicity themselves. And they drown each other out in the noise. All that is left is power and resources and their capture, organisation, and deployment.
The dissolution of the overarching, authoritative moral framework (Nietzsche’s “death of God”) is hugely important in that it makes it impossible to establish and sustain the habitus and infrastructure which is capable of supporting and nurturing shared values and virtues. An overarching moral framework and a moral infrastructure sustaining virtuous communities of practice and character are integral to freedom as a collective endeavour of happiness/flourishing beyond the vagaries of subjective choice.
In a liberalism that has ceased to be a comprehensive doctrine, shedding its metaphysical assumptions and origins to become a purely political doctrine, there is no substantive good, only individuals choosing their own view of the good. Without an overarching notion of the good ordering and guiding individual choices, there is no need to pay attention to the virtues and their cultivation within communities of practice and character; individuals are free from such moral constraints. In a democracy, however, the character of the individuals composing the demos and the quality of the choices these individuals make is of crucial importance. Madison put this point in terms of republicanism rather than democracy when he argued that if there is no virtue among a population, then ‘no theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.’
In fine, there is a need to constitute communities of practice and character in order to cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues, something which presupposes the existence of a substantive conception of the good that can be known and which serves to order practical affairs and social arrangements. Here, the notion of the good as being a matter of personal subjective choice clashes directly with the tradition of cultivating the intellectual and the moral virtues. In shedding the overarching authoritative moral framework, we have lost also the moral infrastructure as the happy habitus for identifying, cultivating, and practising the moral and intellectual virtues. In these conditions, democracy is led more by the nose than by the nous, being an aggregate of unordered and uneducated subjective choices. Cue laments from those seeking collective purpose in politics that ‘not enough people know enough.’ The brute, blunt rationalism which those seeking to advance collective causes in politics is a demonstration of impotence and failure, arising from the bifurcations adumbrated above. The loss of moral referents (Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’), the loss of an overarching authoritative framework, and the loss of the habitus and infrastructure for cultivating virtues and values results in a systematic social and moral incapacity vis collective purpose and the common good. Liberals have been hoisted on their own petard and still, at this late hour, cannot see it, resorting to blunt rationalism, constant education and information, protest and ‘rebellion,’ scientism and naturalism, and pretensions of a ‘non-political’ and ‘amoral’ authority to bridge the gaps. It hasn’t been done, for the reason that it can’t be done. As Madison writes in Judicial Powers of the National Government: ‘To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.’
I have hundreds of essays developing these points on my Being and Place site.
In ‘Beyond the Endless Cycle of Power / Resistance’ I write on the need for transcendent standards of truth and justice, the idea of a shared objective reality, the unity of scientific and moral knowledge / truth:
‘Without that standard there is no point to any 'accordance.' The 'principles we as a society hold' are merely relative to that society – self-made standards attempting to establish their own grounds. It cannot be done, not by reason (western or any other kind) – only by the force of some in the absence of the genuine public of a ‘we.’ The issue is one of transcendentalism vs conventionalism. Either there are transcendent standards or there are not. If there are not, all that there is and all that there ever can be is power/resistance - an endless cycle of submission to power or assertion to power, relative to 'society.' That is the end of the left in that it entails the end of universal human values in an unwinnable game of irreducible game. Dress it up in all the fancy names of deconstruction you like, but it is a reduction to the sophism of Thrasymachus: 'justice is the interests of the strongest.' That won't necessarily be you - to whom and what will you then appeal when on the receiving end of an injustice? who or what will care if there are no grounds?’
In ‘There are No Facts, Only Interpretations’ I engage with Nietzsche:
‘Simply put, either there are transcendent standards of truth or justice or there are not. If there are not, then we are mired in an endless power/resistance, with no rational way of arbitrating between competing claims, only power. We choose our sides according to preference, interest, and ideology. But there are no rational grounds for that choice. It is a return to Thrasymachus’ 'justice is the interest of the strongest.' That power/resistance is merely a Hobbesian/Foucaultian world that leads nowhere, merely a self-cancellation. I don't care if people take their stand on science or religion here, or on both, as I do. What matters is that we continue to affirm the idea of truth and not conflate it with social construction and mediation (which does of course take place, any 'transcendent' truth is only known through its unfolding in reality, and that reality is always in some way social and constructed. I see it as a sub-creation. Mediation must take place. Transcendent standards are only ever known, experientially, in time and place. I don't have a term for what it is I am describing; it is something between and beyond disclosure and imposure, recognizing the role of human agency within the ceaselessly creative universe.’
Nietzsche is good at exposing the moral emptiness of terms, concepts, and theories in the metaphysical void. But he's a dead-end. So long as the void remains in place, human beings will carry on attempting to fill it with their self-created gods/values/truths. It was in coming to realize this a decade or more ago that my work took the oddish turn it did. I'm still working on it my view of rational freedom. But the fact remains that, down this route, first morality falls, then science. People like Max Weber accepted the fall of the former, arguing for an existential ethic of responsibility, but could never accept the latter. Whilst Weber's position was incoherent, it has been the position of modernity. And it is now unravelling. We are now seeing the challenge being mounted to science that was pressed against morality a century ago. It's an unsound mode of thought and has damaging political and social implications. I try to turn that tide, and have been swimming against it my entire life. I don't want to live in an anarchy of the powerful.
The work of digging and healing that Kingsnorth calls for is the work I’ve been undertaking for the past quarter of a century, a work of metaphysical reconstruction that seeks to trace the interconnections of all things from source to end. It is work that comes without buttons to push and levers to pull, and which is therefore ignored by those under the sway of scientism and the technocratic mentality. My work goes beyond the easy, beyond the tangible, and addresses the complex web of human doings and interactions, a world of dialogue between myriad yeses and noes.
I shall sum the main themes of my work as best I can and encourage those who agree with this article and who are searching for answers to investigate further and deeper. I provide a link below to some selected works on this theme - beware that the work of reconnection and restoration doesn't come equipped with buttons and levers to push and pull - life, human beings, and the realm of practical reason is much more complicated than that:
the need to overcome the fact and value dualism and respect the legitimate claims of both in their own spheres; the existence of both scientific and moral truth/knowledge; the need to cultivate the inner motives and the inner motive force to avoid abstraction and outsourcing; the need to combine the exteriority and interiority of things; the need for dialectic and disclosure to tease out truth as against passively stating the truth - dialogue over dictatorship; the formation of character as against the mere information of empty heads – the truth cannot simply be passively given but must be actively sought, willed, understood, assimilated, and lived; the value of truth-seeking, and acknowledging its source; teaching the moral and intellectual virtues - we cannot live "after virtue"; the need to proceed from first principles and firm foundations; nature via nurture; the necessity of virtue; the virtues as qualities for successful living; happiness as flourishing in a public context; establishing the happy habitus in which the virtues can be known, learned, acquired, and exercised; the importance of character-construction; establishing the character-forming culture and discipline of family, work, community, place, worship, and polity; consensual devotion to common ends; character-formation and social formation as integrating personal and social responsiveness and responsibility; co-responsibility; character and the common good; the cultivation of virtues within forms of the common life; fostering creative human agency; the logic of collective action: resolving the paradoxes of individual freedom and collective unfreedom; overcoming alienating dualisms and separations; materialist dialectics - the world as fluid and in movement, resisting ideological ossification and fixity; the moral sense of place; literary ecology: finding meaning through metaphor; the ethics of enchantment; the interconnection of economics, ethics, and ecology; sovereignty, subsidiarity, and democratic will; democratic control and the globalisation of economic relations: the importance of social proximity, small-scale practical reasoning, responsibility, ‘ownership’ of actions, problems and solutions, the love of place; recovering the economics of the good; sustainable living; real growth and qualitative development; the qualitative dimension of wealth; the new economics of prosperity beyond the delusions of quantitative measures; the new path to prosperity: learning to collaborate and share; socially useful production; the cooperative commonwealth - it matters with whom we cooperate and to what ends; the critique of political economy – identifying specific social forms, relations, and dynamics behind general terms of ‘the economy’; scepticism towards those who would translate power-infused, value-laden forms into politically neutral technical terms; the economics of purpose; the Republic in an age of moral and social ecology; Ecopolis as a recovery of the ancient conception of the political as the regimen for the human good; self-regulation and the virtuous eco-community; metaphysical recovery and reconstruction; giving practical force and democratic content to the terms of political and ethical discourse; ecological virtue; the need for behavioural and societal change to proceed hand-in-hand; a society of doers and of volunteers as against conscripts; the case for constituting a voluntary rational self-restraint as against the imposition of an involuntary external restraint; the commitment to a participatory social order in which individuals act well by virtue of dispositions rather than obedience to external directives; climate politics as the reconstitution of public life, not its destruction; republicanism against Anti-Political Extremism: a critique of the authoritarian, elitist, and coercive implications of the politics of non-politics; The case for a civic environmentalism and a moral ecology; a ‘rational’ environmentalism which steers beyond the twin reefs of scientism, culturalism, and naturalism – reason with its moral component in place; Individual Choice, Moral Responsibility and Collective Action - Changing Ourselves and Changing the World; communing together; beyond enlightened self-interest; the Field of Practical Reason; the need to foster moral capacity alongside technological capacity; political change as the key to addressing climate change; the need to foster the political will and motivation; the need to bridge the fields of theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world) and practical reason (ethics and politics) - our knowledge and know-how only give us the ability to act, they do not make us want to act, they lack the appetitive quality of true virtue and cannot do the job alone; the need to connect scientific knowledge and technological know-how with ethics and politics within the motivational economy of human beings: integrating ability, capacity, will, artifice, motivations; building the political will and legitimacy for collective (climate) action; the politics of love and of friendship against technocracy and authoritarian imposition; the importance of civics; civic engagement; establishing a genuine public community as against environmental philosopher kings and rescue squads; against eco-authoritarianism; politics for the restoration of ecological hope; the unity of social formation and character formation (the unity of personal and social responsibility); taking practical reason seriously; making facts existentially meaningful; fostering the springs of action; inspiring environmental action; eco-praxis; making eco-citizens; the global civil society movement which is civic and social and not abstractly global, which is merely another empty and oppressive universal; networking and communing; existential truth; an incarnate transcendence; literary ecology: ecological restoration as a restorying; fostering the inner motives and virtues for collective (environmental) action; giving rational freedom appetitive resonance and force; fostering transformative motivations within communities of practice and communities of character; communalism and democratic confederalism; for the healing: the need to bridge divides and build commonalities; reasons, emotions, and motivations; the ecology of hope; looking after the human (moral, social, political) environment; the need to pay attention to the health and quality of the human environment as well as the natural environment; good government and representative government; rational freedom, public happiness and virtue; against sophism in ethics and politics; pleonexia and public life: against the moneyed nihilism corrupting public life; reconstituting public life; free choice and state authority: authority, autonomy, and authenticity as against the twin reefs of authoritarianism and libertarianism; for genuine common force as against the external collective force generated by subjective choice; repersonalisation, responsibility, and establishing society on the principle of self-assumed obligation; rehabilitating the ethical life; virtuous communities fostering habits of the heart; the quest for community, meaning, and belonging; restoring the moral compass; liberty and license as generating a collective unfreedom; for civility, public life, and reason; a positive and lasting peace in the presence of justice; restoring trust and connection in a new social order; liberty as licence destroys freedom; truth matters and is a work of reason; the moral law; social action and internationalism; love and the just society; the survival of the most loving; resolidifying and resolidarisation.
That’s the best I can summarize the twenty million words plus I have written in a quarter of a century.
To indicate just how much digging and healing I’ve been doing over the years, I shall give a selection of some of my key works on this theme. I can do no more than sprint and sketch here. I'm not at my best in the shadows and shallows, you will find me only in the depths. This link goes deeper into my Work of Reconnection and Restoration, offering abstracts and tables of contents.
Select Bibliography
Bibliography and Word Count
Materials gathered here can be found on my Academia, Humanities Commons, and ResearchGate pages and on my Being and Place site. The fact that I range across disciplines interweaving as I go makes it difficult to organise these texts under headings. It’s all here: Rational Freedom; metaphysics and metaphysical reconstruction; ethics; the ontology of the good; the moral ecology; moral architectonics; social ecology; environmental critique; literary ecology; poetry; communitarianism; visions, virtues, and values; spirituality; institutional economics; political economy and its critique; aesthetics; social restitution and metabolic restoration.
Affirming Freedom and Democracy and Resisting the Authoritarian Temptation: The Allure of Eco-Authoritarianism under the Sign of Climate Necessity (2022) 228 pages 82,008 words
The Critique of Environmentalism as Naturalism and Scientism Critique (2022) 245 pages 87,641 words
Dante's Ecology of the Heart: The Topos of the Heart in the Work of Dante Alighieri (2021) 46 15,105
The Politics of Hope against the Ecology of Fear (2021) 442 168,708
For Transcendent Standards and a Substantive Ethic of the Good (2020) 313 126,748
The Return of Materialist Dialectics: Review of The Return of Nature by John Bellamy Foster (2020) 142 55,895
The Ecology of Good (2020) 435 162,890
Rational Freedom, Transcendent Standards, and the Quest for the Good Life (2020) 261 pages, 77,500 words
The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality: Morality and Modernity (2020) 701 248,302
Being and Place: The Dialectics of Catastrophe and Hope: Restoration and Restorying (2019) 415 145,730
The Ecological Comedy: The Case for an Existential Literary Ecology (2019) 264 86, 198
The Economics of Flourishing (2019) 221 75, 549
An Introduction to the Thought of István Mészáros (2018) 197 65,006
Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx (2018) 618 211, 678
Ethics, Essence and Immanence: Marx's Normative Essentialism (2018) 460 160,478
A Home and a Resting Place Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience (2018) 484 171,487
Tolkien and the Fellowship of all Living Things: The Politics of Proximity, Person, and Place (2017) 374 128,671
Being at One: Making a Home in the Earth's Commonwealth of Virtue (2016) 915 301,671
Cultivating the Morality of the Senses (2016) 141 52,790
Ecological Humanism (2016) 114 40,616
The Fabric of the Purposive Universe (2016) 144 52,868
Lewis Mumford, Civic Environmentalism and Ecological Regionalism (2014) 112 34,996
Aquinas, Morality and Modernity. The Search for the Natural Moral Law and the Common Good (2013) 532 174,756
Dante: The Living Hope (2013) 462 124,817
Immanence, Transcendence, and Essence: The Dialectics of Progress (2013) 373 121,828
Being and Knowing: A Thomist Reading of Immanuel Kant (2013) 307 100,738
Dante’s Enamoured Mind (2013) 462 124,817
Politics, Planetary Engineering, and Environmentalism: The Politics of Gaia (2012) 371 130,328
Of Gods and Gaia: Men as Gods Gambling with Gaia (2012) 954 342,097
Lewis Mumford and the Architectonics of Ecological Civilisation (2012) 465 150,817
Kant's Natural Teleology and Moral Praxis (2012) 86 29,192
In Search of Ecopolis: The Political and Philosophical Principles of Social Ecology (2011) 322 112,465
The Coming Ecological Revolution: The Principles and Politics of a Social and Moral Ecology (2011) 653 225,432
From Green Principles to Politics (2011) 189 64,868
Philosophising through the Eye of the Mind: Philosophy as Ethos and Praxis (2010) 411 153,758
Reason as the Realisation of Nature: An Excursus on Philosophy, Natural Law and Ecology (2010) 186 64,741
Kant: The Ethics of Rational Nature (2007) 188 64,804
Spinoza and the Rule of Reason (2007) 102 39,596
The Ecological Communism of William Morris (2006) 117 38,688
Lewis Mumford and the Search for the Harmonious City: The Architectonics of an Ecological Regionalism (2004) 187 65,826
The City of Reason (2004) 1350 459,259
Rousseau: Autonomy, Authenticity and Authority (2003) 245 90,307
Critical Studies in Rational Freedom (2001) 405 150,416
Marx, Reason and Freedom: Communism, Rational Freedom and Socialised Humanity (2001) 1205 383,707
Materialist Dialectics : Praxis and the Society-Nature Interchange (1997) 1324 421,913